Thursday, December 16, 2010

This was a note to a friend with Job issues and addiction issues. I wanted to save a copy to read later.

M, I had to make a "for real" decision. Is the world a place of lack or is the world filled with more than enough. My choice shades the things I see and experience. When I remember that I am enough and the world has plenty, I don't stress so much. There is either enough or there isn't. My experience with stopping drinking was that it popped up in the form of pills, which turns to my original drug of choice food. When my illness perceives I am going to be shorted , slighted or left to die I reach for something that makes me feel good. Food, sex, alcohol, pills, food has been my progression of quick fixers. And they all have individually kicked my as repeatedly.

Don't let the fantasy of work or "Mike at Work" make you forget the difference between attaching identities to you for the simple ease of not having to become the real you. In the 50's men were "business men" who joined "Chamber of Commerce" and "Elks Lodge" and they were "Republicans" and "Methodist" and "husband" and "father". All of those things let the ego tell those men that is so they were but those were just identifiers that allowed them to be and function without having to look to deep. I know who I am, look at all the clubs I am in. Remember how a club was formed for Saturn Drivers. People used it to join a larger group that supplied some form of identification for them. One reason I got tired of the AA group I used to go to is they filtered everything in their life the the premise of "I'm alcoholic'. It's like that was the only thing about themselves they could claim. For me, I know I have to balance out in my life and reconcile my choices with the Narcotics Anonymous Program I work, but Addiction doesn't define me. In fact I think being an addict and gay are two of the least interesting things about me. Don't even get me started on the men who's soul mission is to perfect being "a gay man". I don't have the money or the costumes to be a professional gay guy( or the desire).

Life is really something

We go along assuming that we have seen it , done it and felt it all then suddenly, boom. Your exposed to something foreign and completely different from anything you have know. I dreamed last night that I had fallen in love. I fell in love with someone who loved me back. The chemicals that get produced in our brains when we fall in love must have kicked in in my dreams because the love was intense , powerful, consuming yet gentle. It was so fantastic that when I woke up this morning my body seemed to be mourning for the loss of the dream love. I've been 5 inches from sad all day. It isn't the sad without hope that is drepression, it is just the sad for a loss of something that was beautiful.

I've never been in love as an adult. I have learned to get the most out of flirty school girl crushes, but I haven't been in love with anyone since I was 18 years old. For most of the time in between, I certainly wouldn't have been able to love much in return if there had been someone. The dream only reminded me what was possible. I'm much closer to being able to hold my end of a relationship up because I have many moments strung together now, where I feel like I am worthy of being on the planet AND that I have something important to give away.

In many ways the dream of being head over heels in love with something has only high lighted the fact that I have a place for it in my heart and I deserve unconditional love.