April 16

“Life is a sum of all your choices.” Albert Camus

This is the place I keep coming back to, the decision place. My life cannot simply just happen, things do not just automatically occur. There are always choices to be made, paths to be followed, and actions to be taken. In this endeavour, I am somewhat handicapped by my addiction, this disease of choice, which has placed within me a path which takes priority unless I consciously choose otherwise. So it goes, each day a struggle, an ongoing battle against an enemy that lives within me, in my thoughts and deeds. I tried explaining this to someone close to me, and the best example I could come up was to compare it to having a constant craving for chocolate. If this was me, then there are days when it is easier, when I can be at home, at work, or elsewhere and not come across any chocolate, and thus fight back the craving. Other days I might come across it only a few times, and find the strength to resist the temptation. Yet other days are like Valentine’s Day, Halloween or Christmas where chocolate is everywhere I turn, and the fight is very present and real to stay away. Yet most of this war is fought within my thoughts, unbeknownst to those around me. There are little outward signs of my struggle that constantly rages within. I guess maybe that is the reason that I continue to go through periods where I get lay and stop making the right choices. Combatting my disease is at times exhausting and I just want to take a break and get away. But I can never get away, the only thing that happens when I decided to relax my program is that my addiction is given more freedom to influence my life. So it is back to work, to pick up my sword and continue to work against this illness, to fight, fight, fight for my life.

Affirmation

I choose to be in recovery today. I choose to make the sane choices, to move away from those that feed my addiction. I choose to be free!

March 1

”Ego has a voracious appetite, the more you feed it, the hungrier it gets.” Nathaniel Bronner Jr.

Hmm, I can relate a little to appetite, my addiction certainly has one. And it was an appetite that tended to have no end, a bottomless pit that was never satisfied. And based on the number of years I was in it, I would certainly agree that it got hungrier and hungrier over time. What I needed to consume to satisfy the craving had to get bigger, riskier, or simply more. My recovery had to look at ways to starve my addiction, to take away all the food and attention I was giving to it. Some of that work was fairly easy, but it only took me so far in helping to push away my cravings. Eventually I realized that my addiction was covering up a deeper need. And that need was my spirituality that had been covered, ignore, and displaced for too many years. The best way for me to defeat my addiction was to find the ways to nourish my soul. This is where focusing on my outer circle became crucial. Making new habits, focusing on all the healthy ways to take care of myself is what worked to diminish my dependence on my addiction.

Affirmation The choices I make can feed my recovery, or feed my addiction. I will pray for the guidance of the God of my understanding to make the right decisions.

September 16

”One of the true tests of leadership is the ability to recognize a problem before it becomes an emergency.” Arnold Glasow

I can certainly see how the idea of this quote also applies to my recovery, especially in how I deal with stress. My method of the past was to bury it, hide from it, stuff it under the rug or run away. Anything and everything to avoid dealing with it. And the problem was that it simply backed up and backed up until there was no room left to hide or run from it and it washed over me in a deluge. All the little things became so huge that it was an emergency. So stress management is a crucial part of my healing process. Being able to deal with situations as they happen, or shortly thereafter, allows me to live without accumulating all the baggage that I used to carry around with me. This increased awareness of how I am feeling, how I am stressing, allows me to confront problems before they grow into emergencies. My addict thrived on stress. So if I tackle nothing else each day but dealing with life events that occur around me, I am more able to keep my craving and pull to my addiction at bay. Living a simpler life and being present throughout the day are great treasures that also protect my serenity and sobriety.

Affirmation Stress happens - it’s a normal part of being human. Running or hiding does not deal with it though, so today I will work through the events that occur, facing forward.

August 27

”In diving to the bottom of pleasure we bring up more gravel than pearls.” Honore de Balzac

I lost track of the countless hours I spent looking for that perfect moment, a picture, video, angle, position, whatever it was that was the holy grail that was going to give me exactly what I needed. The saddest part is that I rarely, if ever, even found what I was being driven to seek out in the first place. And did I ever throw a lot of sand and gravel aside in my hunting. My sexual appetite, most especially the mental part, was a bottomless pit that was always craving something that I just couldn’t quite grasp. So I continued to throw endless amounts of stuff into it in the hopes that something would satiate it, but all that tended to do was make it even more hungry. Recovery has been a diet of sorts. And it’s a good diet in the sense that it makes me focus not so much on all the bad things I shouldn’t be feeding myself with, as it is on reintegrating all the good, healthy ones that I have neglected to use. This has really helped me to stop seeking those “perfect” highs that didn’t exist and allowed me to gain true pleasure from the real world and real experiences. The pearls I sought were always close at hand, I just couldn’t recognize them for what they were.

Affirmation May I find the true pleasures in the world around me, in nature, beauty, song, music, laughter, hope and joy.