September 8

FREEDOM MONTH: DAY 8: “The most important kind of freedom is to be what you really are. You trade in your reality for a role. You trade in your sense for an act. You give up your ability to feel, and in exchange, put on a mask. There can’t be any large-scale revolution until there’s a personal revolution, on an individual level. It’s got to happen inside first.” ― Jim Morrison

I use this quote each year for freedom month, because it is the quintessential Jim Morrison, first of all. Secondly, it describes an aspect of personal freedom that is also essential to the process of granting others their freedom.

I am not one of the flag-waving people on fb or anywhere else. I believe we are only as free as we become in uncovering, discovering and discarding. The work we do around here is the only freedom I know of and appreciate or even embrace. The rest is, for me, rhetoric. Oddly, I see and know that the same rhetoric is used universally to every member of every culture and society.

So I am a big fan of the personal freedom I receive in performing this particular step. Here is where I began to recognize that the chains of addiction and the cycles of abuse are being loosened and I am becoming free.

We are blessed to be able to walk away from those things that have kept us locked in to the dance we were taught and lived for so many years. In my case, it was the dance of dysfunction in a family that had no hope for happiness. Rampant abuse and addiction flavored everything we did and no successful relationships have been created or formed in this dynamic.

I get to be free, not because I had a supportive environment or because I was loved by this family in healthy ways. But because drugs and alcohol kicked my butt and gave me the tools to heal ALL of the dynamics in my life.

I am here and happy and healthier because I applied these principles to those things that are what the BB refers to as “causes and conditions.” They are primary in this disease, because drugs and alcohol are just the tip of the iceberg, as it were.

I played all the roles Mr. Morrison speaks of. I was an actress pretending I knew how to do life and that I could navigate it without stopping the insanity of the thinking I developed while surviving life; never living life; surviving it. I hid behind the masks and the roles and never, ever felt what I needed to feel. It is absolutely true that I cannot be free without letting go of all of these things, and it takes a very long time.

So we come here and let go of our masks as we process through this thing. We become authentic and the way we feel is something we need to learn to pay attention to. Because these feelings are the things that may propel us into damaging behaviors and ideas and other things that must change, or we will return to active addiction.

There is nothing so painful as watching people do this for a while and then believe they have done all that needs to be done. They are so dishonest with themselves that they do not see the horrible pain that we can all see. The old behaviors have to be let go of, the old ideas must leave, or we are going to do it all again! And then we are even more destructive, because now we believe that 12-step recovery has let us down! Wow!

Today we are free. As with any other precious gift, we must open that and do whatever is necessary to maintain that freedom. Every day, there is work to do! And every day, we are blessed beyond measure with the gift and the path and the amazing freedom that comes when we get authentic!