May 25

INTEGRITY MONTH: DAY 25: “With integrity, you have nothing to fear, since you have nothing to hide. With integrity, you will do the right thing, so you will have no guilt.” –  Zig Ziglar

I have always had a moral compass. For much of my life, it was buried under trauma, anger, shame, etc., so I could pretend not to know when I was doing things that were not right. I can honestly say, though, that I always knew, even when I denied knowing the difference between right and wrong. I always just told myself it did not matter and that I did not give a f—k about it anyway. I met a man when I was about 90 days into this thing who told me that saying I did not care was the biggest lie I would ever tell; that alcoholics and addicts cared so much it was killing them, every day, all the time; that we care to death about everything! Wow! This resonated with me then and still does. I have passed this along for many years to many people. I do not know what ever became of that man. He was my friend for a few weeks and made a big impact on my life. Like so many of my “Eskimos” around here, the most important messages were delivered in short time and then the person was gone. I am really grateful for that man, because I have understood, ever since that day, how much I lie to myself when I say I don’t care. I sometimes have felt like a lost little kid, maybe 2-3 years old, in a great big place with tons of people, but no one is looking for me. This kind of desperate searching for a connection to something that feels right when the world is shifting and I have lost my footing is when I am most likely to lie to myself and do things that are inauthentic or lacking integrity. It has become important for me to know that my insecurities are an illusion; therefore, I do not need to do anything in response to that way of thinking or feeling. If I can sit with my insecurity and old ideas and defense mechanisms and the stories I tell about these things, I can see them for the lies that they are. Then I have faced the demons of fear and let myself walk through the scary place and know that the monster is something I just made up! Oh! This way of walking in the world is beautiful! I want to share it with everyone, because we are all just a bunch of lost kids and our fear is that no one is paying attention. Truth is, they probably aren’t, and we will still feel lost even if they are paying attention. Our disconnect from each other is the problem, and we get to reconnect to self, to some kind of loving Power, and to each other when we do these things. It is so important to connect. When we can begin to relate to each other, based on telling the truth of how it was for us and how we felt, it creates a connection that is healing and can restore us, not only to sanity, but to a sense of belonging we have searched for all along. My sense of belonging came for the very first time when I met this thing, you people, and began to walk this road of recovery. In the BB, it is called the “road of Happy Destiny.” I love that…it is happy and it feels like destiny to have come to this place to find everything I looked for in the bottle and magical elixirs that broke me. It is a good road, the right road, and the only one I ever want to walk upon.