Any day is a perfect day for our addictions!
While in the grips of constant insanity from our addictions to alcohol and drugs (and yes this includes pharmaceuticals) often long-lasting residual effects not even considered have now come awake within us. We believe now that any day is a perfect day for our addictions!
While using, we forgot how to think, let alone how to make sense of that thought. Months, sometimes years after our sober date we still have difficulty connecting the dots of logical thinking and try desperately to remember what is true and what is false.
But hope and faith, together with the possibility of a power greater than us are some of the drivers that keep us in a sensible range of safety and logical thinking. In active addiction, many of us lived in blackouts, and years later, cannot remember the events of a week, let alone years ago.
In sobriety, we awaken to a new day of possibilities as we realize that without activating our addictions, we are better than we thought we were! While our blackouts may remain until our Higher Power directs otherwise, our single focus, not up for negotiation, is to keep our sobriety immersed in recovery and even stronger in faith. Our way didn’t work, and it never will! We are successful when we make our Higher Power larger than our addiction of any kind and we abstain “just for the rest of this day”!
Although normal people never have issues with this or anything else surrounding the process and manner of addictions, we who are addicted must understand that for as long as we’ve used, drank, drugged, and more: as long as we participated in any addiction that changed the way we felt, our new sober date signifies the same degree in which most of us spend trying to return, yet again, to a new normal, to that place of a trusted and calm existence.
Cognitively, our brain went into hiatus and what was left when we began our sober journey, is still trying to resemble normalcy. But so long as our pulsating frontal-lobe connections misfire, stay out of alignment, or just die as the result of our addiction, we stay a skewed version of who we are today: a sober mental midget.
For instance, we know that if someone began their addictive journey at fifteen years old, and drank/drugged for ten years, they are as emotionally immature as they were when they started, in this case, still fifteen. You can do the math! Just sit down while you do it…
One Drink Was Too Many
To the newcomer, this is just one of the realities waiting for you if you drank like me. It is what we call, “the phenomena of craving”, the undeniable, inescapable, insatiable mental obsession, the insanity of picking up that first drink or drug that separates us from normal people. Regardless of that situation, we could not stop. Nothing in the world was more important than our next drink or drug. Absolutely–Nothing. We learned that “One drink was too many and 100 was not enough.”
Long-term sobriety is the surest measure of how long it will take for us to return to a new normal that we and our loved ones can comfortably live with. And it requires that, for a lifetime, (one day at a time,) we embrace our recovery by taking appropriate and compassionate action and continue to practice doing everything differently, just for the rest of today!
I stayed away from AA because I could not wrap my thinking around the fact that I could not drink for the “rest of my life,” oblivious to the fact that I could die before the end of the day.
Recovery is where we learn a new way of living and a new way to adjust our thinking. I was told we plan our recovery, sobriety, actions, thoughts, and successes just for the rest of today. And, if we are breathing tomorrow? Then we get up and start all over again.
If you are an alcoholic, you may be dealt with hard-core consequences of your disease because that’s life. So far as we know, no one has been able to stop for the long haul short of plain-ole abstinence and if you want to live more than you want to die, then today is the Perfect Day to do something different!
Life without booze and/or drugs will never be the same as we remember because we’ve lost too much along the way. But that may not be a bad thing! We get better, aware, awake, and begin to experience a compassionate life that resembles others. Emotionally, we lost too much self-esteem, credibility, trust, and self-worth. By the time we honored the surrender and acceptance necessary to survive Step One and begin to trust the process of living life just for today, we were as close to death as we wanted to be physically, spiritually and mentally. One day at a time, we build the tenacity of a warrior and become our best and strongest advocate for change because no one could go to the lengths we did to want to leave this world. The desire for change ‘one day at a time’ becomes the limb we hold on to as we climb to the top and with faith larger than our fears, we make it! Our life changes in a way YOU cannot begin to co prehend unless you’ve experienced the joy of daily success each day you become the miracle and don’t pick up!
On a physical scale, rational and mature thinking can take for some, a lifetime to reconstruct. Missing connections are but obstructions, fragments in our brain, now rendered unusable. As these connections try to rewire themselves in recovery, the fragile cells often misfire with little success. While we seek a new normal, (whatever that looks and feels like for each of us,) we must learn to think and react to life differently. This is one reason staying sober, (regardless of what happens on any given day,) must be our long-term goal! If not, that merry-go-round returns us to a state of immaturity, resentment, and the same dreaded despicable place we just came from. For many, the consequences often present themselves as jail, institutions, or death.
Statistically, we know that even the facade of security as we return to our recovery fold presents many new problems. We weren’t concerned with much except our next drink or drug and so physically, many of us are still suffering from the implications of physical neglect. The impact and aggressive nature from years of neglect from the disease of alcoholism and drug addiction hijacked our bodies with the speed and strength of a cancer-like progression. Emotionally? We were still grounded in what we knew which was drugs and alcohol. But how do we face life, on life’s terms, day in and day out? How do we stand up clean, sober, and sane when our loved ones die, when we lose our jobs, our income, our homes? How do so many others in their addictions hold up? So very often, they don’t.
There is a solution! And there’s only one: The solution is YOU!
If you’ve already stopped the cycle of your addiction for one day, a week, or a month, you already have the fortitude and a strong likelihood that you’ll keep going. Believe that you can, otherwise, you wouldn’t BE Here! The Universe would have you somewhere else.
So, reach out to one or more of the numerous recovery groups around you and get busy, ask questions, and stay willing to not drink or drug, just for (the rest of) today. You merely do what we all had to do one day at a time: Trust the Process of Recovery Just for Today! Nothing more.
Keep looking at your feet, take a deep breath in, and don’t suffer needlessly, believing you can do this alone. Alone is what we do in our addictions!
This is a “we” program where “we” can do anything together, and we do! Don’t ever forget who you are and keep coming back. One of the first things we learn to change is our isolation. Every day sober, you’ve exceeded your greatest challenge and achieved your most amazing miracle. Staying sober just for today! Ask someone to work the steps with you. Together we stay clean and sober.
You can do it again!
Note: if you or someone you know is struggling, please consider purchasing the book, “Miracles of Recovery”, a 365-daily inspirational. You can find it here Miracles of Recovery. We don’t know where the message to a solution will come from, but this book may be a good bet.
Please visit Harriet Hunter’s blog for more insightful and practical thoughts on Recovery and Addiction.
