I am an addict. My recovery is my gift from God. What I do with it is my gift to him. I was thinking about keeping what I have by giving it away. I realized today, that does not just mean helping a fellow addict. It means so much more. Through recovery, I have been enabled to participate in many things that I had shut myself out of before. All of the negative self talk that kept me from reaching out to healthy people and productive things...
With my gift of recovery, I can take my daughter outside and burry her in leaves. We can laugh and play and create memories together that will endure long after I have said my last goodnight.
With my gift of recvoery, I can be a leader at school. Take the knowlege I have and share it with people who are struggling.
I can do that. God made me ABLE to do that.
With all of the things that my gift of recovery allows me to participate in. I am blessed everyday. For everytime I laugh with my daughter, it fills me up. Everytime I help make something easier to understand, I am understood.
With recovery, I am able to not take myself so seriously, to live as an imperfect person. God knows my imperfections, he also sees my strengths.
The gift of recovery is not a way of life. It is an uplifting existance.
Kathleen.
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Yes, I bought a ticket on the crazy train.....Good thing it was a return ticket.
heart warming kath great share, thanks. Today i really wanted to get to a noon meeting. My car only takes premium gas and there is none available. All was not lost though, my daughters car was available. Its an older model and takes regular. Now imagine, ME a redneck dad tooling into town in my daughters nissan thats covered in TINKERBELL !!!!!! ROFL. I mean covered to. steering wheel cover , seat covers , stickers, fuzzy tinkerbell dice, even tinkerbell flying arieal cap..lol.
I hope it dosent mean ive got some kind of issue, because i think i almost liked it. luv ya girl keep coming back.
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" If you have built castles in the air , your work need not be lost ; that is where they should be . Now put the foundations under them . "
Anthony, you cracked me up!! I won't be able to sleep because of this visual I have now!! Kathleen, I envy your ability to express yourself. You seem to be growing at an exponential rate! You are right about keeping what we have by giving it away, it does apply to every area of life. It's called the principle of reciprocity or sowing and reaping. In the streets we called it "What goes around, comes around." Whatever you call it, I believe it is a universal spiritual law. As you are sowing happy memories with your daughter, keep in mind that the seeds you sow may be reaped by HER children. What a beautiful legacy you are leaving her. Keep up the good work, and keep posting that GOOD STUFF!!
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"With a sweet tongue of kindness, you can drag an elephant by a hair." ~Persian Proverb
I agree. Recovery is one of the most exciting things ever to happen to me. I look forward to every day clean and alive. Thankful. What a gift to wake up and have life offered to me. Recovery is not a burden. It is a blessing in every way.
So wink does that car even need gas? If it stops don't you just clap like crazy to bring it back?
That's friggin' beautiful! LMAO~!!!!!!!!
Kitizzy ~ I love reading your posts...but I want to share something with you...I don't know if anyone else has talked to you at all about this, and I'm a pretty blunt person, so PLEASE don't take this as anything other than a mild concern for your welfare...
I got here and got clean, found recovery, used spiritual principles, live and worked these steps, got involved in service, hung out, made lots of friends helped people, shared, cared, trusted my HP, reached out, etc. etc. etc. ~ It felt REALLY REALLY GOOD!!! Somewhere around 18 months clean things just started going downhill. Recovery wasn't fresh and new and exciting anymore. I was still pretty enthusiast and willing, faithful and hopeful. I was working steps and growing like mad that first year and a half...but then it kinda went dry.
I didn't feel so connected...so I tried harder to get that connection, I surrendered more and more, waiting to feel like I once felt (high on life)...then after two years clean, and seeing many defects in myself, other's defects, and how unfair and cruel life can actually be, I started losing hope. Not a fun place to be, hopeless & clean. I still did the footwork, and I continue to still do that footwork, praying, going to meetings, working steps, etc. etc.
My warning: Recovery gets good...then it get's really good, then, it gets REAL.
(I believe you are doing this, but...) Please enjoy these moments of growth, these moments of serenity, all the simple pleasures recovery brings, because, I can promise, if you stick around long enough, there will days you don't want to get outta bed, days you question your HP, days you don't want to go to "yet another" meeting because those same people will be there saying those same things...but VIGILANCE is a spiritual principle to practice, use it every moment. Guard your recovery by putting it first in your priorities every day; it is very precious, and it can go away as quickly as it has come.
Love you Kitizzy and I just wanted to share my experience, and some passed on experiences of my predecessors.
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"We are all in the gutter, but some of us are looking at the stars." ~Oscar Wilde~
Your advise was listened to and accepted. I realized that by my posts, it may seem that I am living in a world that is coming up roses.
The reality is that by nature, I am the most negative person that I know. A lot of days it is an effort to have a good thought about anything. I go to face to face meetings, and there I share my crap....There is a lot of crap.
When I am posting on this message board, I am at home by myself.
For me, it is safer to find something positive that is going on and write about that.Being alone is not a safe time for me to focus on the crap.
Due to my natural tendency to look at things in such a poor light, I have been making an effort to start to see the lighter and better side of life.
This is why I post like this.
I wish that I walked around 24/7 thinking like I write.
I don't yet, but by doing this exercise regularly, I am learning
the power of my own thoughts. I can be having a really bad day,
and then stop with the destructive thoughts and think up something new.
This is all knew for me, when I used, I felt like crap, went and used, then just didn't feel.
An old-timer told me one day after a meeting that when I was snowballing myselfand really going down hill with my thought, to pray, or find something to do to get outside of my own head.
My writing is me getting out of my own head and pulling out the small slivers of things and thinking about those.
After a little while of focusing on the blessings, I start to feel better.
Thank you for reading my posts Golden. You are one of the people that I look up to on this board.
-- Edited by kitizzy at 09:39, 2008-09-27
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Yes, I bought a ticket on the crazy train.....Good thing it was a return ticket.
I can totally relate to that! I was just worried, there was this guy in my hometown that used to say "everybody gets a turn." And I've seen too many people leave due to having unrealistic expections. Hell, I was almost one of those people. My first few posts on this board was me complaining about how recovery wasn't paying off.
I know for me, life was utterly beautiful for a while in recovery, it seemed like nothing could touch me, and instead of it coming crashing down, it more so trickled downhill slowly. So creeping, and slowly that I didn't even notice until one day I was just utterly pissed that life sucked so badly. I'm not even sure what changed, or what happened. It just happened, and I was left with, "Now what??" Thankfully, I had and continue to just keep trying, because I am aware enough now to know that life will never again be beautiful if I'm getting high. I just need to hang on to my bootstraps, and ride out this storm in my life.
I heard someone say life is nothing but a series of storms: You're either in the midst of the storm, just coming out of a storm, or it's the peaceful calm before the storm hits.
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"We are all in the gutter, but some of us are looking at the stars." ~Oscar Wilde~
