So today I had a conversation with a friend who was unwittingly showing her defects of character. They were based out of trauma like a lot if not all defects of character are born out of. And I frown on them, hypocritically. I knew she was wrong, and yet I preached to her how and why they were wrong, while I sat in my own resentment towards a whole fucking fellowship of people. Persons that wronged me and/or didn’t live up to my expectations of what a true friend is, yet again in my own design of reacting, become what I hate. Hold that thought. I head to a meeting, and the meeting is on fear and how they drive us. Also shared is how our own resentments feed those fears. Being hurt and betrayed often when I was younger led me down a path of character defects that eventually, as I stopped working on them in my recovery, took me out. Fear of betrayal, fear of not respecting myself and enforcing or reinforcing boundaries made it easy to take normal, balanced judgments and overcharge them into being hypercritical. I easily cut people out of myself. I would say that I didn’t judge people, just their actions. But the way I feel I may have gone about it was that I identified people by their actions. Who would want to sit at my table if their implied status at my table was ignorant, selfish, and fake. How could my giving of self be received as authentic when they feel lesser than by my implied labels? Because we’re sick people, we’re all recovering, and this is a fellowship. But that doesn’t change the hurt that is created, exists, or persists. One’s words defining another as a sick man don’t resonate well when the tone of definition is that man’s a piece of shit. I’m in a place now where that reality of how I may have made people feel finally ring in my head. And it’s not that I thought that they were a piece of shit. But it is the thought that the people that did hurt me in my past still were. Forgiving has to do with acceptance. And when I haven’t accepted the things that happened to me or the people involved, they live on as pieces of shit in my head. And anyone’s actions that remotely corresponds to the people that hurt me end up suffering the same connotation that they are pieces of shit too by the judging verbiage I use to describe them and by the very possible connotation they may experience in my actions driven by fear to protect myself and others. In the Big Book of AA it asks us in step 4 to take inventory of the people that hurt us, our fears, our wrongs, and our shame. Within all that we dissect it and discover the nature of it all, and it almost entirely has to do with selfishness, self-centeredness, fear, or all the above. “We began to see the world and its people really dominated us. In that state, the wrong-doing of others, fancied or real, had power to actually kill. How could we escape?” I’m pretty sure drugs and alcohol saved me from the pains growing up that might have driven me to suicide. There are other addictions after we recover that we find ourselves in and defects of character that live on or develop as we face everything and try to heal. “Though we we did not like their symptoms and they way these disturbed us, they, like ourselves, were sick too. We asked God to help us show them the same tolerance, pity, and patience that we would cheerfully grant a sick friend. When a person offended we said to ourselves, “This is a sick man. How can I be helpful to him? God save me from being angry. Thy will be done.” It goes on to say, “Where were we to blame? The inventory is ours, not the other man’s.” And in that moment after years of hearing the same shit over and over again, something again clicks and a new layer of the onion is finally being noticed. In my resentment to certain persons, I know I’m right. They were wrong for what they did to me; simply not being there when I needed them suffices to possession of this resentment. But I think to myself, I used to cuss God out on a daily basis before, during, and shortly after my relapse. Yet, God still showed up and gave me grace, granted me forgiveness. Where had I shown any of these people an ounce or grace that God has shown me? Also, how has the trauma of my past been evoked to end the relationships I’ve had with these people. When have I allowed them time to grow? How am I taking their perceived trespasses and charging them with the traumas during my youth? It’s not fair. And all it has done is isolate me. My compassion went out the window when I saw a close friend be betrayed by people she reached out to. And in turn my judgments have casted out anyone in my life who’s shortcoming I took as personal as the traumas and betrayals of my people. The names of the people were different, but the charges with their severity were just the same. Again, I was right, they were wrong. But how is overcompensating for the injustice in my past any useful in being handed to other people today? It has served no solution. How ironic it is that being right can become so problem oriented. All boiling down to fears. Fear of being betrayed and hurt again. Fear of being alone. Fear of betraying myself for not standing up for myself or others for that matter. Watching injustice happen and yet created it myself. Grace. How grace leads to repentance. How can I be afforded grace when I haven’t afforded it to others? Mercy. I can start with being a little more gentle and forgiving myself. I can start forgiving people in my past by letting go of the hope that the past could have been any different. The past happened. I’m not the person I used to be nor is anyone else who they used to be or are who I perceive them as. I can be or get honest with myself in my own humanity; I’m human and fallible. I can hope the world is warmer from a different perspective and have faith that it is more real than the one I had before. I can evoke courage to dare allow others to be better or to simply be human. I can start with that to create a brotherly love for others that I too wish to have for myself; living by spiritual principles.

Last October I had a couple of dark nights of the soul. I sat on the porch in the rain, listening to music that stirred the grief within me. It was a reckoning. I used to be sober and fell off the wagon. I was an egoic person with everything in my hands. And in a blink of an eye, it all came crashing down by my hand. What happened? How did I get here? So much angst and resentment filled my body and ate away at my soul for so long in spite of my achievements. It didn’t matter. Without God, I was nothing. And without inviting Him into my world on a daily basis and into everything I did, He was nothing. And if I’m an extension of God, a finger, a hair, a thought, then if He were nothing, then I was nothing. With all my angst and resentment towards things, places, and people that transmuted into bigger things, places, and people, everything I had meant nothing. My inflated ego wouldn’t allow me to concede that, because well, I was achieving. My inflated ego is like, “Hey keep looking at the greatness you’re doing, achieving, and becoming. Don’t peak behind the curtain.” The blinders were on. Slowly taking my will back on everything, piece by piece; shutting God out bit by bit, there was no way I could see the truth with it always at my back and me never turning around. The more I shut God out, cussed Him out on a daily basis, the more spiritually bankrupt I got. I worshipped the Morrigan, Cernunnos, The Dagda, and Brigid. None of them I cussed out on a daily basis. They were part of the envisioned world I created and worshipped through my ego. The God I cussed out was Loki and I think deep in my heart I was cussing out the Christian God. If I’m an extension of God, if God is within me, then the ruckus that caused the pain in my life couldn’t have been caused by me or the Gods I worship. Denial. If I deny looking at myself, I deny truth in my Gods allowing this to happen. Or if I did look at my Gods allowing this to happen, then it was victimhood I wore and shame I somehow fed without facing it. Even though I practiced the craft, meditated, and the like I still couldn’t make God’s world my own nor outrun my own darkness. I blamed God for everything when people were no long there to blame. And when I shut the light out at every turn and facet of myself because it’s not right or good enough, then Light I no longer stand in. “Not right, not good enough. Wrong,” – The way I perceived the world, to which my inflated ego, my entitled, self-righteous self kept me from seeing that it was in direct correlation to how I felt about myself. I would deny it for years. I was successful, I was working out all the time, getting in shape, had a man I was planning my life with, a coven and magickal community I was a part of, and a dream of travel nursing was in the works to come true. Unbeknownst to me was the goal-oriented standard I held for myself was hiding the perfectionistic cancer that permeated my soul. Not facing it. Not working a program to even begin to catch on to the truth. When I distort the truth, it is naturally muddled and eventually flat out ugly. Refusing to do the things that would heal me, because I just didn’t have time for that with all this great life I was building, it was just a matter of time till it would all boil over and I would need a fix to escape. I didn’t take time for my spiritual growth and development, at the time aka healing; but I did choose instant relief and gratification of acting out. I no longer had faith in God. I said and thought I did, but my behavior expressed otherwise. I ran to things that would make me feel better in the moment in flesh and then substance in predatory fashion rather than explore my pain and work through it by diving deeper into my shame and allowing vulnerability to lead me towards the light of empathy that would dissolve my demons. In order to do that I had to have faith that I lost. Without faith, loss of hope quickly follows. No inner peace, no real love there anymore no matter what I did, and the perception that God was to blame, what was the point of moving forward. I was far from suicidal. My inflated ego wouldn’t allow that. But I wasn’t far from picking up drugs again. And there I was, at the end of my rope. All light finally shut out and back into the darkness only Goddess would understand and grace me enough with the dark mirror that surrounded me the night I sat on my porch, listening to sad music and reflecting on how I was losing it all. Face to face with not nothing, for that would be numb. Worse than that. My own personal, spiritually bankrupt hell. Having an existential crisis that night, my whole perception of myself and the world was crashing down around me. I was junkie again. I was disconnected again. I was again destroying myself. And the only relief I had was the sobering feeling of how worthless I felt for causing it all. For years I didn’t authentically bring God into my daily life as I willed so much on my own, and I damned Him in the end for things not going my way. It seemed I was even so powerless to prevent my fall from grace. And as I am writing this I hear the words, “may he remain to pray.” See, in my own will, I was powerless. In my own self-centeredness, I’m powerless. I didn’t pray to God for anything than for my own selfish ends. I didn’t seek to understand, no to comfort, nor to love. It was all about me being understood, comforted, and loved. And again, with no effort put into understanding, comforting, or loving others, I then lost my spot in being understood, comforted, and loved. There is a saying in wicca that before the Big Bang, before the creation of Light, the Goddess was there, alone, and saw Her aloneness. She had so much love to give and share and She couldn’t bear for it to not be given or shared. She saw her reflection in the black abyss and said, “Let there be Light,” and the Universe was born. God was born. Man was born. But for that to happen she had to give of Herself. Split off from just being dark and go into the Light. She was worth it. She is worth it. And it is true because it is. They also say in recovery, “you cannot transmit something you haven’t got.” I lost myself in perfectionism so much, I ate up everything around me and unwittingly turned on myself. If I’m living in perfectionism, then I must not think I’m enough. And if I don’t think I’m enough as I am, then I won’t give anything away. And if I don’t give anything away, it won’t have any value for it isn’t shared with the world. It might as well be nothing. And there I was in that moment in front of the drugs. In that moment that “nothing” sucked in that escape from reality and kept on for several more months until the dark spell of addiction would turn my inner “nothing” outward and I was becoming nothing and losing everything. All that came to a head that night on the porch, in the rain, listening to sad music stir to articulate the truth that I felt but couldn’t fathom. Into the arms of the Goddess, I sat, crying my eyes out in total grief of myself till no more. I’ll never forget the words of my future husband regarding that depressing night. I told him it was therapeutic. What does he say? “Yes, but we cannot stay there.” And here I am. My value is in my efforts of giving to others and taking care of myself in order to do that. For if their value is only valued if shared, then value I must give them. And I can trust that I will not be without, for they are no more valuable than I. The love, the light, the esteem, the purpose, it cannot be bought or achieved. So….as it says in Ephesians 2:8-9 “For it is by grace you have been saved, through faith – and this is not by works of men, so that no one can boast.” I remember as well that night, that I was being carried back into recovery. I didn’t want to come back in, but I was being reminded and re-awakened as to why recovery was the answer, and certain occurrences were transpiring that reflected my way back in wasn’t all by my own doing. I was sort of being tricked back in. Certain defects of character were being used against me to bring me back in. Deep down I didn’t want to relapse. Deep down I didn’t hate God. I just didn’t understand and He knew that. Despite my kicking, screaming, destruction in my wake, and damning God, She was still there to hold me and carry me to the Light till I was ready to walk in it again. If that isn’t testimony of being good enough, I don’t know what is. Let there be Light.