Any recent reader of this blog knows I have been posting a lot of "handy" little posts concerning the background, "nuts & bolts" stuff that have made my recovery better and promote growth. There are just a multitude of areas where I need to do some work and for each individual, those areas could very well be different. In fact they are different for a lot of us...
I know when I lay that all out here in writing like this it can make it sound like a real drag but you know what? It wasn't...sure, things could be hard but you have to understand my life before all of this was indescribably BAD...I tried to kill myself and nearly succeeded if that is any indication of how lousy things really were for me. And my life was still not very good even after I sobered up and committed myself to change...one day at a time. It quickly became obvious that this was going to take some time...
So just being alive, not feeling sick all the time and doing some interesting stuff could and often DID seem like an absolute gift from God and I was really grateful to have it. I still wasn't really living in reality in those early days but I did what I could. I wasn't quite happy to be alive but I wasn't always longing for death like the old days either. Things were SLOWLY beginning to look up up for me...
But there always seemed like for each accomplishment I had there was an even bigger mountain to climb the next time around. That is when it could get very discouraging. It is also about the time that having good friends in recovery really began to pay off because they helped me through those rough patches where everything seemed so impossible.
It was also the time in my life when I first seriously started to consider God. That there was one and he hadn't forsaken me. I was leery of anyone who had a "religious air" about them and kept my distance but in my heart I started to really believe there was a God and that he wanted to help me....
Little did I know that for several years I would linger in that "sketchy" spiritual state, believing just enough to have faith to pull me through but not wanting to really Commit myself to anything I couldn't really understand. During that time frame I did a lot of the nuts & bolts work I have been posting about the last couple of days.
I made amends to people I hurt, I made a comprehensive list of my faults, character defects, resentments and anger, etc and shared them with a person I trusted. In some recovery circles we look at this as "housecleaning" and the concept was very similar.
My life really was starting to improve, I declared bankruptcy finally and my finances were getting sorted out. Things were looking up, I felt much better about myself. All this led up to the early winter of 2010-2011 when unknown to me some HUGE happenings were in store for me...
(Painting by Claude Monet)
