This is a good one for the day. Keep'em coming.

PEACE

I remember in early sobriety going to a meeting. My sponsor walked up to me in a crowded room, took me by both arms, looked me in the eye and said "you look so pretty tonight". Thinking other people had overheard her feeling "sorry for me", I ran out the back door and drove home. I really thought that everyone was looking at me, talking about me and plotting ways to make my life miserable, lol. That was the measure of my delusional thinking. Talk about selfish & self centered.

I'll always be grateful to my first sponsor who, when I thought someone was out to get me, would say "Dianna, you're not the center of the universe". Thanks for the look in that rearview mirror Billy. I'm so glad to know that the only one out to get me is me, lol.

if I insist on being the center of the universe , then I'm responsible for it's every detail. Nobody can measure up to that.

The facts of my story haven't changed over the years, but the literary style in which I tell it has gone through some drastic revisions. There's a interesting paradox here, and I say that because when I first got sober I was a legend in my own mind, the fallen hero in the last act of a three-hankie tragedy. I mean, it was the Second-Greatest Crucifixion Story Ever Told, don'tcha know, a cautionary tale with a moral lesson in it that I damned well expected other people to heed. That, as I dimly understood it at the time, was what AA meant by sharing experience, strength & hope.

I call it a paradox because the people who helped me the most turned out to be those who didn't buy that story the way I was telling it for a minute, but who instead gently but very firmly pried my sweaty hands loose from it. The first time I told it at a meeting was the day I got my 9 month chip. Everyone applauded on cue, and when the break came and most of us went outside, I expected my new fans to ask me for more of the juicy and gruesome details.

But, alas, the only person who had any comment at all was a skinny old lady named Cynthia who had buck teeth and talked like Katharine Hepburn, and who'd been sober since Lyndon Johnson was President.

"You were very good, actually," she chirped, with upper lip ever so slightly crinkled. "But you said 'compulsion' when you should have said 'obsession.'"

"Lady, I just told you my whole life story," I protested. "Is that all you have to say about it?"

"That was the only part I haven't heard a hundred times before," she said dryly.

That knocked me right off my post-dramatic heroic pedestal, and that was the last time I've ever fancied that I'm special or that I deserve to be coddled just because I'm scummier than thou.

I was a precious little darlin' when I slithered into the rooms. A victim of life, if you will. Didn't appreciate people who saw through that and then had the audacity to state it . It messed up my schtick,lol.

But ah!!! the possibilities to create a different personality sober.....Lol