August 14

COURAGE MONTH: DAY 14: “Confront the dark parts of yourself, and work to banish them with illumination and forgiveness. Your willingness to wrestle with your demons will cause your angels to sing.” ― August Wilson

This quote may be the most related to working ALL the steps. I really like it because his name is August and it is August. I look for small and sometimes insignificant (seemingly) connections in life.

I have lived a life based on these connections. I find it fascinating that EVERYTHING in life is connected.

The older I become, the more grateful I am that I began to learn this lesson when I was a young teen. I found these connections and allowed them to form my early years.

I lived quite freely, as a young woman, allowing things to pull me this way or that. When a door was open, I went through it. None of these openings or connections were approved of by the people who thought they knew what I was supposed to do or where I was supposed to go. I lived from one moment to the next.

The sad part is that the road into and through addiction was also opening up for me then. I had no other way to confront my demons or my early years, so I drank and used drugs.

The desire to live from one moment to the next has never left me. I have had wonderful adventures, because I gave up the ideals so many of us have been trained to embrace. I still do. I say YES when I can. The difference for me today is that I have been able to do seriously deep work on those demons and to see their beauty and transformation into angels.

They are NEVER gone, they are the markers that show my path to me. I will always have dark parts of myself that I will NOT banish, but I HAVE learned to embrace and love. And the Screaming Purple Monkeys are never to leave me, but they don’t get the last say anymore.

That is recovery. I don’t try to rid myself of my life. I embrace it ALL, and learn to sit comfortably with a new version of the old story. I have relearned myself here.

And learned to love the things that others don’t like so much. After all, if I can stop trying to kill or subdue those things, why can’t they be acceptable to you as well. They are the bricks and mortar of my life, of my being. I am pretty interesting, overall.

And I don’t work to squash or contain or hide or twist or lie about any of it. It is crazy, unpredictable and full of really interesting connections that have a framework I will leave here. All the lessons, all the fear, all the fun, all the stories and their new versions, are the totality of what I have done, where I have been, who I have loved, who I worked to love (and maybe failed), and those who have crossed that path. I think both the angels AND the so-called demons are singing together today!