July 14

PATIENCE MONTH: DAY 14: “I realized that the deepest spiritual lessons are not learned by His letting us have our way in the end, but by His making us wait, bearing with us in love and patience until we are able to honestly to pray what He taught His disciples to pray: Thy will be done.” ― Elisabeth Elliot

This quote does not make me jump up and down for joy. Recovery has been a process of both maturing and aging. While one is going to happen whether I stop drinking and using or not, the other would most certainly have not. Maturity, for me, is the ability to be less self-centered and less consumed with self in all areas of my life. While I am responsible for what I must do regularly and do not hold others to be in charge of those things, I am not as inclined to think they are the be-all and end-all of importance in the world. I have a comfortable set of boundaries and guidelines that tell me when I am stepping on toes and when I am consuming all of the oxygen in the room. Very good information, indeed, because those things kept me apart from my fellows for so many years and are definitely the signs of immature development and social retardation. I do not hold your life any less important or valuable than mine. I do my very best to respect others’ time and life and do the same for my own. I schedule enough open-ended time into each day that I am usually available for chats and visits. I enjoy them incredibly, because they are the connections I have with others, something vital to my recovery and my existence as a human. Since I do not dwell with another person, I must seek conversation and companionship with others in the world around me. Sometimes this is a big part of my day, and other times I am alone with those tasks and things I am doing with my time. I was not a big fan of patience, but am learning to be so today. While I get excited about much of life and want to explore, express and live each adventure to the fullest, sharing it with someone else quite often; I have learned to set myself on idle and do so at the right time and place. Not all the time, because I still have the inclination to go all Tigger on things, but more and more often I have the patience to sit still with things and allow them to unfold. I can honestly say that my desire for a relationship in the beginning of this deal was a big part of my waiting game for a pretty long time. There was so much healing for me to get through with that part of my life. I was so terribly gifted at all the wrong ideas of how that should be and what it should look like. Yikes! So I would occasionally, less and less often, as time went on; get involved in a dating or sexual exchange. And I would see in very short order that I was not attracted to nice men or good partners. I always wanted the men who were quite unavailable and clear about it. That challenged me (never could not take a dare!), so I would set out to overcome their reluctance…a brutal practice for everyone involved! I got to see that perhaps I needed to let it come in due course and get on with making myself the healthiest partner I could be. This took 12 years! I do not think I could have done that if I had known at the beginning; but, in the fullness of time, it was perfect! When I did fall in love and create a life with someone, he exceeded my biggest dreams! And I learned…and I learned… Now that he is gone, I am wanting to have that again, but I know that love takes time and patience…I am waiting for that, because I can never go back to what I had before. I tried once since then, yikes! So I get it that most of my life is going to be a process of letting things come when the time is right…kind of like cooking a turkey, some things take longer than others, but eating them raw because I am impatient for the finished project is never going to make it work!