Moments before Discovery and the path

i have been in recovery for many decades with some successes but more failures, continually returning to behaviors that were ruining my life, the relationships around me and myself. It has been long and difficult as i rarely was in a frame of mind to even admit i had a problem. This did not stop me from always believing i could be better today than i was yesterday. This single idea kept me returning, trying to understand myself and to address problems my addiction continued to cause within my close relationships and within me. With all these attempts at becoming better, i felt like a blind person stumbling around the counseling world and self help programs and much deep inner searching trying to figure out what was wrong with me, where i could go for help and who could help me. 

i know.. i don't capitalize my ‘i’s’. That is because i, am not important, the message is. i realized early on in my own journey that ego often was at the center of my behavior and was causing me pain and suffering which i discovered through studying of eastern belief systems, Buddhism, The Tao and I Ching. i learned and decided, i needed to destroy my ego. So yeah i adopted the lower case i when writing non professionally about myself.

While my sorted and varied blind attempts only moved the me needle incrementally forward, my addiction always returned and i never could find ‘the’ answers i was looking for. For me the most important first question in my opinion was to understand the WHY? i believed if i could answer this question, i may have the most important ingredient of what made me the way i was. .. For 54 years i cold turkeyed, I sought counselors, i read self help books by knowledgeable authors and asked my higher power for help, but i never found what i was looking for, a sustainable program or idea that really connected to what me.

There was a moment in 2020 when i hit a depth of internal pain i had never experienced, causing me to take a long, hard, deep look in the mirror. All i knew was i never want to feel like this again. This drove me to dig feverishly in the quest to relieve this emotional pain that was so visceral it made me think death would be easier than feeling how i felt. i know, i know the question. .. Did you try to kill yourself? No! Suicide was never a solution in  my mind, and having experienced the grief and loss caused by suicide i knew it was never going to be my path. Yet i still thought it would be better to be dead then feel the way i did. 

This day was the shock my system needed to inspire me to dig deeper inside than i ever had. i hear you and so without further ado.