ACCEPTANCE MONTH: DAY 27: “Despair is a refusal to accept reality.”― Marty Rubin
This may sound flippant for some, but it is, nonetheless, true. When we fight against the way life unfolds, it can beat us into a state of despair…wanting something other than what is.
Ego is at work here, of course. How many people do you know who were despairing and hopeless when they got into recovery? Most of those I have met, and I remember doing a LOT of intakes and assessments in treatment centers of all kinds on addicts of all kinds…thousands of them.
We are filled with despair, because we had tried every imaginable remedy for our addiction, except the only one that works. Surely, we believed, abstinence is a too-severe way to go isn’t it?
And, for some of us, little by little, Ego was pushed down to size and we were able to grasp hold of the “flimsy reed” being offered by other recovering folks and begin to live again, without despair and we could begin to believe, at least a little bit, that maybe we could do it too.
A lot of oldtimers wished me the “gift of desperation” when I got here. And I did not see it as a gift, but I must have received it. And nothing has been so filled with despair from that moment to this. I have fought a lot of those things that later I had to accept, but never so hard after addiction and its reality in recovery. Thank you for that one!
