July 22

PATIENCE MONTH: DAY 22: “Maybe that’s why life is so precious. No rewind or fast forward…just patience and faith.” ― Cristina Marrero

The moments that are most precious to us are fleeting. If we are lucky, we can hold them in memory. A great deal of money is made in mementos and things that we believe hold those memories for us; they act as reminders of something we enjoyed or loved, even sometimes disliked or hated.

In today’s culture, we take pictures all the time, hoping to hang on to an image that may later evoke a memory for us of something we enjoyed or loved or that stirred deep emotion for us in some way. It is a very sad substitute for the event or the person or the moment.

Most addicts have had trouble with their memories from the past. That is an interesting dynamic as well. We may have been blackout drinkers who lost many memories while drinking. Or, we may have that interesting “twist” of perception that is quite common to addicts, where what we remember is very different than what actually happened.

I know I am capable of believing the stories I have told myself over and over. There are entire chunks of my life where I have had to go back and check the validity of what I believed. Why? Because I found that my version of the story was heavily slanted to support what I needed to believe about my life. Oh! That is an interesting piece that most of us become familiar with as we travel through these steps.

What is it about Step 7 that brings these things up? Well, we are attempting to recognize who and what we HONESTLY are in this world. And, to be brutally honest with ourselves, it ain’t what we thought it was, a great deal of the time.

Oh! Again! So, we must become diligent about looking through and sifting fact from fantasy. And, for most addicts, there is a great deal of fantasy among the facts. Oh! I love this process! It has so many benefits for me.

I get to let go of some of my omnipotence…yeah, another form of “grandiosity”! And realize that while I had a ton of guilt about some of my old behaviors, it was very minimal impact I had on many lives, at best. I considered myself to be a train wreck in some relationships where I was, at best, a minor irritation. Not that significant. Oh!

OR, I found out that I had really done big harm and needed to work through some real stuff in Step 8. Ok. So, Steps, 4-6 were very vital in Step 7. I had to do the thorough and fearless stuff and get it in line and then realize I needed to be willing to stop doing it. Ok.

So, my feelings of omnipotence were another factor in how I viewed my life. This IS a character defect. As is the dishonesty I color EVERYTHING with in my life. I blow it up or I shrink it down. No matter; it is all just dishonesty. Ok.

This goes on and on…there are so many ways that I practice my character defects. It has been a slow and patient process for me of going through these things, over and over. And learning more deeply each time the level and depth of my character defects and just how powerfully they have impeded accurate memories of who I have been and what my life has truly been about.

As I go, however, I am blessed to be able to live more fully in the moments that life presents me in the here and now. It is a beautiful and blessed circle of life. I am so completely grateful to be just me, a person, a woman, a recovering addict, and to know that I am never done here, never “recovered”, just in the process of living and loving and feeling and experiencing. YAY!