As many of my friends here know, I had been in relapse mode over the past few months.... struggling and battling with things that came easily for me in a few years of sobriety and ACTION, but with the "dawn of a new age" with impending divorce and the crap that surfaced which I had buried for a few years even while not drinking, I found myself in a very bad place spiritually and got tangled up in my disease again. Divorce is no excuse, nor is death, illness, war, torture, or any other excuse one could think of... I take responsibility for the complacent place I was at in recovery (no longer enough meetings or giving back to the program and it's people) when all the big changes in my life started to take place. That was my own fault, and as a warning to me and all others, we never know what a day will bring, so we had better be spiritually fit for ANYTHING. I was not. Almost a year of complacency and hiding behind a picket fence and a marriage and slacking on everything spiritual is what got me back to square one. My cushy life could not keep me sober, but I tried to make it so without you (AA). But that is in the past now, and a lesson I would not like to have to learn again the "hard way".

Just for today, and for the past few weeks, just as the Big Book promises, "the problem has been removed" 24 hours at a time. If I wake up tomorrow and throw my Higher Power back out the window, refuse to go to meetings, sit and sulk instead of sharing my feelings and stinking thinking, think of no one but myself and my selfish interests, then the problem comes back. Wake up tomorrow with my meeting under my belt from tonight, and the ride I gave to a young lady who has lost her license, and the "meeting after the meeting" in my car... along with an effort on my part to seek my Higher Power once again, get to another meeting, and help one other person if I can... this will keep the problem at bay and "removed" for another 24 hours. If I choose not to do these things, the Miracle of my recovery could begin to crumble once again. This Miracle, this flower that has been re-planted, will only grow if I continue to water and feed it, every single day. I would not deny my dog her food or water for a day... I cannot deny my recovery it's food for a day either. 

I don't have to keep going through this up and down crap, I am finally realizing. I can get off the rollercoaster for good, by practicing what I know works every day, instead of slipping back into old isolating habits. I got to a place where isolation was comfortable, because it was increasingly familiar. When I went to meetings, I was tempted to talk about the cheating that was going on, and how much it hurt. How the marriage was crumbling beneath me. I knew that women in my life who were in AA and had "been there" would encourage me to face and deal with the problem, but I chose to hide right in the middle of the problem, where I did not have to look at it. Basically, if I did not step outside my home to a women's meeting per se, and shed a light on the darkness, I could just sit there in the darkness and pretend it wasn't there, as I went to work and cleaned the house and did the laundry and so-forth... (though I revealed it online... only) my pride kept me from revealing to my AA friends locally that the wondrous gifts sobriety had given me, all the "trophies" (marriage to a nonalcoholic, financial stability, etc...) were getting tarnished. It was too embarrassing. I was too proud. I was ultimately too proud to save my own azz. And I got drunk. And into a cycle.

Not a good place to be when I was simultaneously trying to learn how to live alone again, and trying to heal from the insecurity and low self-esteem the other's infidelity caused. I can't heal or learn or adjust or adapt or COPE with a drink of alcohol in my hand and alcohol on my lips.

So I am going to a lot of meetings again. I am only working sporadically right now, so instead of whiling the hours away thinking thinking thinking... and feeling feeling feeling things like self-pity and loneliness and despair in quantities greater than I reasonably should, I am keeping my mind and body occuppied. I am reading A LOT, praying more, sitting in meetings as if my life depended on it (because it does), forcing myself to go out with women in AA afgter the meetings, and offering to give rides and sneding emails to local women in AA, some "new" and some re-treads, like myself.

I don't want or need a pat on the back, but I do need to describe what is different-- or rather, what is repeated from healthier days in recovery. I need to mirror what I see working for other people, and I need to recapture what worked for me years ago when I first built a foundation for recovery--- for at the very least a new direction for my life, even if I did get turned around on occasion, when I let my roots whither a bit.

This is what is happening today for me, and I am going to make it, if I can make each day like this one, my Higher Power leading the way.