Next

Tonight I'm meeting with my new sponsor for the very first time at a meeting out in Golden Valley or Apple Valley or Cottage Grove, or Apple Grove Gardenville, or maybe none of those, I'll have to look it up when I get home. Either way I'm excited to take this next step in my recovery. I had a sponsor for a while when I first got out but we never communicated and I liked that but I wasn't getting anywhere spiritually or emotionally. I finally took the plunge and asked an old timer I'd had my eye on for a while. Tonight I will go to a meeting with him and afterward I will get to tell him the story of me and what I want out of this recovery.

I got a little sick of seeing and hearing happy people in the meetings I had been attending. Then, last Saturday night, somebody spoke on the twelfth step, and something in my brain said that I wanted what he was talking about: happiness. He said he found his only through working the twelve steps with his sponsor. I'd actually heard that before. Not just a few times, but hundreds if not thousands. I had heard it but maybe I wasn't listening. Maybe I didn't want to take that more difficult road to achieve my spiritual awakening because I still don't like the idea of the God concept.

This next phase is going to have a lot of talk about a God. But in reality, all I have to do is believe that a power greater than myself can restore my sanity. Now that sounds manageable, in fact every time I walk into a meeting and walk out feeling better, that group has become that power.

There is no God, I honestly don't know how people can believe in such nonsense, but they do. See what I did there? I seem to want to focus on things I have no control over. Hmmm, I wonder if I've heard that from a counselor in treatment recently. It's so much easier to deal with other peoples problems than my own, and I doubt I am alone in that way of thinking. I still have a lot wrong with me and I haven't been working on any of it since I left treatment in prison four months ago. My only aftercare plan and reccomendation was to attend meetings as required by ISR agents. That's it. Three meetings per week with no fellowship allowed before or after was what they wanted me to do.

So four months later, I've decided to be a little proactive in my own recovery. I need to work these steps, and I need to be active in the recovery world or sure as shit, I shit you not, I will slowly lapse back into my old ways and thinking which always leads to the same thing: that first delicious, cold, foamy beer. And that will be the end of me, this blog, and my life as it could be. Fuck that. I'm gonna do some work.