Wisdom Of The Rooms - 2016

[bluidkiti]

November 14

Quote of the Week

“Keep it green so you don’t forget where you came from.”

Before recovery I had an amazing ability to recover from a night’s – or a weekend’s – worth of debauchery. While one day I might swear off that kind of behavior with various promises to never drink that much again, or never do that kind of thing again, but inevitably I’d forget the pain and demoralization and do it all over again. Having the physical ability to recover was good, but not being able to remember the ugly consequences and not being able to control my drinking or other abuses which led to them caused my life to become unmanageable. Finally, I surrendered.
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When I entered the program and got sober, the familiar cycle began again. After 30 days I began to feel great physically, and I began to forget about my inability to control my drinking. Soon I was thinking that while there had been some bad incidents lately, these were isolated and surely now that I had some time and knew more about alcoholism, I could be more careful and could probably control and enjoy my drinking again. My sponsor suggested I work my First Step more thoroughly by writing exhaustive inventories, and then move into the Second and Third Steps. Most of all, he recommended I didn’t drink one day at a time.

Boy am I glad I didn’t. What I found is that the more sober I got, the more I realized how bad things were for me. I also learned that alcoholism is the only disease that tells you that you don’t have it, and that every night while I sleep it’s in the closet doing push-ups getting stronger and waiting for me to let my guard down. It chills me still when I hear of people going back out after long term sobriety. To avoid that terrible fate, I’ve been taught to keep doing the things that got my life good – attending meeting regularly, helping others, etc. – rather than the things that got good. Regularly doing so allows me to keep it green, and that’s a good thing because I don’t ever want to forget where I came from.