Addiciton on Walking in Sober Boots

Step 11: This Too Is Prayer

Mon, 06 Jan 2020 10:35:16 -0500

Sought through prayer and meditation to improve our conscious contact with God as we understood Him, praying only for knowledge of His will for us and the power to carry that out.

“Seriously? We haven’t talked about God for a while so we better bring Him back into the picture.” This was how I felt when I looked at Step 11 for a long time. The only saving grace for me was that the payer recommended in the Twelve and Twelve was the Prayer of Saint Francis, which despite being a Catholic prayer, has always been a personal favorite and that peculiar word “meditation” in the step.

Step 4: Honestly Recognizing Our Own Humanity

Mon, 18 Nov 2019 07:26:45 -0500

Made a searching and fearless moral inventory of ourselves.

This step scares most people. The language feels foreboding, heavy, daunting. It sounds really hard. And for many people it is really hard.

This step is all about getting honest with ourselves. Some of us have suffered grave consequences and some of us have not. But we all know in our hearts that our addiction has caused harm. And so we must get honest about what we’ve done in our lives. Honest about how we’ve hurt ourselves and others. Honest about how our addiction affected others in our lives.

Step 3: This is Going To Require Some Help

Mon, 11 Nov 2019 08:11:22 -0500

‌Made a decision to turn our will and our lives over to the care of God as we understood Him.

I must admit that upon reaching this step my thoughts were something along the lines of this: “So, here we are. Face to face with the religion inherent in these steps. God. Him. I’ll never be able to deal with this.

Reflections on Counting Days after Four Years of Sobriety

Mon, 23 Sep 2019 19:53:58 -0400

Lets talk about counting days. Opinions vary about whether or not counting the number of days one has been sober is useful or not, just as opinions vary on so many other things in the recovery community.

Triggers, Messages, & Flack Jackets

Wed, 19 Jun 2019 15:36:28 -0400

This one is gonna be messy – honest and messy, like me.

The rooms of 12 Step Fellowships are triggering for me. Not in a “I’m gonna need a drink” way, but triggering none the less. They have been since day one.

I Haven’t Written a Post In 2019, Here’s an Update

Wed, 15 May 2019 08:53:03 -0400

At the end of 2018 I was thinking of combining this blog with an older one and renaming it. I was considering the change because I wasn’t sure that the idea of a sober blog, a sober persona online, was serving me. I’ve long struggled with the idea of identity. And so I’d shut down one twitter handle and renamed my primary handle.

Imposter? I Don't Think So.

Sun, 09 Sep 2018 11:19:05 -0400

im·pos·tor imˈpästər noun

a person who pretends to be someone else in order to deceive others, especially for fraudulent gain.

synonyms: impersonator, masquerader, pretender, imitator, deceiver, hoaxer, trickster, fraudster, swindler

As I sit in the meeting, listening intently, trying to hear a message that I’ve not heard one hundred – (no, thousands) – times before, I hear only the same things over and over again. The medium might be different but the message is the same.

Ericka's Summer Blues

Wed, 05 Apr 2017 19:08:09 -0400

Damien’s Note: Ericka started following this blog on it’s Facebook page a while ago and recently reached out with a series of articles written from her personal experience. Here is the second in the series. I can certainly relate to parts of her story and I suspect some of my readers will as well. This piece was written on August 6, 2015.

Bookshare: Detroit Muscle, by Jeff Vande Zande

Thu, 22 Sep 2016 14:30:22 -0400

Recently, Jeff Vande Zane, contacted me to see if I might be interested in reading his novel Detroit Muscle and offered to send me a PDF version. Since, I’d heard good things about this novel from several friends on Twitter, I was immediately game. In fact, the book was already on my “to read” shelf on goodreads.com. Since I can’t stand to read PDFs even on an e-reader, I bought a copy from Amazon for my kindle.

As I mentioned in a previous post, I was a bit concerned that I might not identify with the protagonist in the story, Robby Cooper, because his story was so different from my own. However, I quickly knew that I would identify with Robby because after all addiction is addiction regardless of the user’s drug of choice. Yes, my drug of choice was Alcohol, and Robby’s was Oxy, but that became immaterial once I got into the story.

The book catalogues Robby’s first few weeks after he gets back to Detroit from a rehab facility. Vande Zande clearly knows Detroit well and includes details about the city and it’s landmarks that pull the reader into the scenes. A story about Detroit would not be complete if it didn’t feature a car and this one does, a 1968 Pontiac Firebird that Robby’s father had restored with his grandfather.