dat 35

Day 35 I am starting to believe being an addict makes it much simpler to get through life, but I am learning that all you are doing is getting through life, not living it. I have a lot to learn about this range of emotions, feelings of sadness, doubt, loneliness, anger, dissapointmement, failure, anxiety and on the other side there is hope, happiness, love, the joy of giving, friendship, companionship, and the empowering feeling that we get when we stand up for what is right. It seems one of these bad things always leads to one of these good things and vice versa. Somewhere along the line as I was growing up I was lead to believe that feelings like sadness and doubt were bad and spent the majority of my life hiding in drugs and alcohol to avoid them. As I am slowly teaching myself how to live life instead of just get through it I am realizing that I no longer believe this to be true. All feelings are good, especially the ones we believe to be bad, and without them we lose the appreciation for the other. I now welcome these feelings into my life because I am realizing without knowing these feelings I will not know life, they are all a tool to educate me in how I am to live, I will no longer just get through life, I will live in and embrace every part of it. I have learned something very important to my growth yesterday, I was very excited about to different things yesterday and neither one of them happened, I felt very let down but the more I thought about it I realized no one made any promises to me I just assumed what the outcomes of our conversations would be, I think a lot of people say things in hopes of doing it and when it doesn't happen the people they said it to feel let down, it's not that there was bad intentions , I have told people I would do something g time and time again and not followed through, and not because of bad intentions, things just happen. I have decided to learn from these let downs instead of being consumed b y them, and I will use this method in a lot of other aspects of my life as well, I will take those feelings of let down and use them to strengthen my character, I will be more conscious of the promises I make as to not make other people feel as I did yesterday, from now on in my life I wan t people to know that I can be depended on, that is how I will live. I feel that I have already become a small hill of strength for people to lean on, it most definitely brings joy to my life and I feel the more I learn and make these changes, the more I see that hill growing into a mountain.

I would like to thank Mark Kennedy once again for going out on that limb for me, and it's good to have you back jack. james