I have found that surviving from one day to the next is not enough for me...at least any more. Yes, when I first sobered up, day to day survival was the goal, it gave me something reasonable to shoot for: Staying sober a day at a time. That was doable and ultimately I was able to string a number of days together and Wa-Laa....I was on the verge of having a new way of life.
That is when I began to discover having "a life" again was going to take more then just not drinking or taking drugs. I started to change my behavior, finding out how my character defects were going to keep me living the old way unless I changed them. I also had to clean up the wreckage I created in my past. Particularly important was setting things right with people I had hurt. This included people I really didn't want to talk to...some because they had hurt me as well and I thought I was owed an apology. But I set that aside and did what was right for me to move on: I took responsibility for my actions and apologized. Interestingly everyone I've done that with so far (Including the X) accepted my apology with kindness and grace. Deep down I now realized that nobody wanted to see me die...and believe me, a lot of people really though I going to die.
Having made amends, cleaned up the wreckage, admitted and accepted my alcoholism and my powerlessness over this disease, I was really faced with the biggest change required for the kind of life I was looking for and required to live again. I had to make amends with God and turn my life over to him. I have often described myself and my attitude towards God back then as a "God Hater" and I really was. I was angry, I had a death wish, I felt alienated from Him and everyone and was angry with them too. So I was anti-God in attitude, action and frankly deep in my heart as well. But in all honesty I can't say I was ever an atheist or even an Agnostic. I just don't see that anywhere in my past...
Eventually I realized that I was not God, that my attempts to control my life and the lives of others was really creating a great deal of my problems...NOT making them go away. That and my selfish, self-oriented lifestyle of thinking only of my needs, even at the expense of others was leading me down an a very dark and dangerous road. I needed God yet I didn't know it.
At first I was able to except that I could not handle it any more. I wrote a post quite some time ago called Darkness Before The Dawn that describes the night I tried to kill myself. That post illustrates how utterly hopeless I felt. Another post that also does a good job of documenting how I felt back then is Requiem Of Failure: My Old Me. These two posts show very clearly what self reliance did for me in the end: It brought me hopelessness, despair, self-hatred and a deep longing and obsession to die at my own hand. As stated in the "Darkness Post", afterI realized what had happened to me I was ready to surrender. What I was surrendering was my own will, who I was surrendering to, even though I did not realize it at the time was GOD.
My life has undergone an incredible transformation because I no longer live FOR ME. I live FOR HIM and honestly it has made all the difference...
