Enter the narrow mind of twelve step dogma... 8)
Lets seem how long this thread can stay open. Who knows, it might get some interesting responses. I can only hope.
On more than one occasion, the world's beauty has broken through to me, the beautiful character life can take if only we let it, even despite all the things we do as a species to fuck it up. Those moments are becoming more and more frequent as I learn to see things more clearly and move on from the days of harmful substance use.
Beauty is in the eye of the beholder. I am so grateful to have become to learned how to find beauty in the simplest, most everyday and mundane of things. It was infinitely harder to move forward in life when I couldn't see what was right in front of me all along, even in the darkest of time - to see beyond the the fear, the anxiety, the depression that tends to come with being treated as a thieving junkbox and little more than an addict:
To see beauty for what it in fact with eyes unclouded by hate. After a lifetime of being taught to see life primarily adversarial and scary, to prioritize my attention on addressing the unpleasant qualities of experience at the expense of their more pleasant qualities, it has taken a lot of time and effort to begin to break through the limits place upon me by our conditioning. Life is inherently both pleasant and unpleasant, after all. To just see one is to do little but suffer through our various journey's in life.
Being able to see beyond my own little self, the world for what it really is, was a crucial turning point in my recovery. I lived far to long in the world of self loathing and self hatred, a world that I've noticed is inhabited and promoted by how twelve step ideology is too often interpreted and understood. And connection, cultivating a deep, authentic, meaningful connections, makes all this possible.
You remind me of myself when I lived a very small, scared, self hating life. Back in the early days in my recovery before I learned healthier, more balanced ways of looking at the world and understanding my inherently conditioned, transient place in it.
Perhaps a better title for the thread would have been "My Truth"...
