happy new year rio! that sucks about your gf. i do agree that while the requests are reasonable, the timing is abominable. i'm glad you dealt with it though. it may be worth just blocking her if you're not over her. its harsh but i had to do it with one of my exes, every time he added a female friend i'd be convinced he'd slept with her (he was still kinda stringing me along with 'friends with benefits' style arrangement) and it hurt too much.
it sounds like you've used your time very productively, i'm impressed! you should keep a copy of what you've written here, especially about relapse and complacency and stuff. its so easy. its basically what got me onto problem drinking again too. definitely keep up the level of work you're doing now, its way way way too early to stop. recovery took more time than a full time job for me for about the first 9 months, basically until i started an actual full time job again. between NA, CGL, Buddhist centre, gym, therapy, recovery related reading. i didn't have time to use and i was putting in the groundwork of learning how to cope with feelings, regain my parents trust, address some very deep seated issues and i think that having put in that amount of effort for that long is what enabled me to maintain long term recovery.
the 12 steps aversion to maintenence pisses me off too- and i've heard old timers be pretty disingenuous about it 'i went to get help for opiates and they just prescribed me opiates!' making it sound utterly retarded when they must know, through meeting people on it in the rooms, that it can be a massively helpful step in getting your life back together. i would just ignore shit like that though tbh, really do take what's useful and leave the rest. i needed something as hardline as NA in early recovery and still do meetings though much less now its all on zoom. anything that didn't tell me i needed to completely abstain from all drugs would just have given me enough wiggle room to justify using. now i trust my own judgement a bit more and have more insight into my thought processes so i feel much more comfortable completely discounting a lot of what they say in NA but my experience with trying what seemed a few months back like a moderate alternative to complete abstinence and ending up stuck in a cycle of daily substance use that i don't enjoy again gives me a lot more sympathy with them.
@cowboycurtis re your question about life on life's terms- using a substance to numb yourself is actively trying to avoid life. so i think that you can genuinely use the way non addicts can, i.e. drink one evening every couple of weeks, the odd sesh on stimulants, and you can call it living life on lifes terms. we don't get that priveledge because we have shown ourselves incapable. that said, its not just about substance use, to me at least its about facing things head on. for example, my boyfriends university fees didn't get paid (his dad had said he would but went bankrupt) he received a phone call one day in december about it and did nothing, brushed it off. next july bailiffs were after him and he'd had about 2k in fees added. living life on life's terms would have involved dealing with that phone call, and would ultimately have been less stressful and costly. or, when my last job was getting so stressful i spent like 3 months crying nearly all the time and ended up scoring dark. i had to face up to the fact that if i didn't quit i would relapse fully, so i quit my job with nothing to go to in the middle of a fucking pandemic with no jobs being advertised. i didn't secure a new job until 2 weeks before my last job ended so i spent all summer with the possibility of being unemployed in a massive recession hanging over my head. i guess what i'm saying is iy means addressing problems head on, even if its scary, rather than taking what seems like the path of least resistance then suffering for it later.
Why would you ever do anything but encourage someone who is seeking help? It’s so backwards and goes against everything science clearly tells us is fact. Things like methadone and buprenorphine have given millions (?) of addicts the opportunity to lead a normal life and contribute to society. How is that even remotely a bad thing? Sure some might abuse methadone (especially) or buprenorphine, but they’re not in it for the right reasons usually anyway. And for the majority of addicts I doubt their daily dose gets them discernibly high in any way once they’ve been properly inducted. If it’s healthy and sustainable it ceases to be a textbook addiction. It is only dependence. “Suboxone isn’t sober!” God I fucking hate that saying. It’s not about the substance. It’s about the mindstate.