When I first tried recovery many years ago, I really didn't understand a thing. My journey has been a long one with many falls. Over the years tho I've learned that in recovery, especially early recovery. We need to look foreward and keep on putting one foot in front of the other.

    More often than not we come in with severe resentments, hurts, and pain. It can be so hard to imagine that any good lies ahead for our lives, and all we seem to be able to do is look back at the mountain of shit our lives have become. For myself I couldn't see anything. All I wanted to do was rush back out and fix everything back to normal again, whatever that was at the time. I was stuck and I was drowning.

    By reaching out for help, somehow others were able to keep pointing me back in the right direction. I wanted to go back, but there really wasn't anything to go back to. The damage was done, but I couldn't see that.

    Eventually I gained some hope that perhaps there was still a life ahead for me. Everything I was told to do was pointing me ahead, not back to where I came from, but believe me I fought it. It did not make sense, but after getting tired of arguing and just knowing that I really didn't know what was good for me. I know what I wanted, but that was just wishful thinking now out of desperation. 

    I learned that I had to take my past and all those problems and just put them in a closet for a little while and focus on just not drinking, and that did take all I had to acomplish. For me I learned to just think about one day. That wasn't that hard for me to stay sober. I could never do it forever, that was just too long. And what a sense of reliefe I felt at just not having to carry or deal with that huge sack of problems on my shoulders that I came into recovery with. I knew I would have to deal with them, but not at that time. I needed to get sober first so I could listen and think.

    I did eventually deal with a lot of that  stuff. I also found that about 3/4 of that sack of problems only existed in my mind. In my sickness I was hanging on to them, and they were keeping me drunk. They were excusses to drink.

 Recovery doesn't happen by wishing for it or waiting for it to happen. It comes from taking those shaky first little steps into something new.For some of us recovery can seem such a forein thing to us. It doesn't always make sense to our addictive ways of thinking. For myself, I'm a white Canadian that only knows English as my language and recovery to me was like trying to learn Chinese. It did not make sense to me. It was almost all opposite to my thinking.

   By taking those first tiny steps foreward we start to move into life again. Very slowly and cautiously at first, but others in recovery can be there to point us back in the right direction when we start to wonder. After awhile of taking those steps we start to realize, "Hey, I'm living here." We start to learn that we can even take some steps foreward all by ourselves.

    Recovery is really such a wonderful gift and it's often taken for grantid. Not everyone with alcoholism make it to recovery. Most die unfortunately. Often death through alcoholism doesn't come quickly. All the pain, misery, and lonliness are drawn out very slowly for a long time. Death from alcoholism is an awful way to die, and we don't have to if we can just keep putting one foot in front of the other. It's a life long journey with no finish line, but it can be a wonderful journey because we can really live.