HOLIDAY BLUES: Your Option

So, we did the world this big favor, stopped using alcohol and other drugs, holiday time is coming up, and twin dreads begin camping out in our guts. Holiday time is still using time for much of the human race, and those temptations will be all around us. In fact, that was how we used to spend holidays. Now there are more important priorities—at least, they seem more important right now: staying clean, recovery. The closer we move to that second dread, though, the priorities might change. The second dread is being alone, lonely.

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By the time we get a taste of recovery, many of us have used up friends, family, and even acquaintances. Most of our new friends in the program walked the same nightmare we did and never learned how to make real friends or become a real member of a family either. Smack in the middle of holiday joy and festivities and are we going to sit there alone, no drugs, no friends, no family, no fun, nothing to do but wallow in how much things suck and that things shouldn’t have turned out the way they did?

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No one had a choice in getting the disease, but everyone in recovery has a choice about what he or she will do with it. Here’s the choice: (a) Sit on the pity pot and risk using, or (b) Make plans.

What plans? In rebuilding your life, the first relationship you need to repair is between you and your HP. The next relationship is the one between you and yourself. Ask your HP about plans. Pick meetings to go to, and maybe bring a little something for everyone. Visit your sponsor, take yourself to a movie, pick some programs to watch on TV, take a hike in the snow if you have any, buy some dye and tie-dye a tee-shirt red and green, decorate your place—home, apartment, rehab room, jail cell, cardboard box, whatever. You’re not a Christian? No matter. It’s a time to be happy, to show others how much you care for them, to wish the best for everyone we know, which includes ourselves.

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Happy, joyous, and free. That’s the promise of the program, and the holiday season is just as good a time to begin as any. Better, actually. Most folks feel obliged to cooperate.

Misery is optional. Choose happiness. Who knows? You might learn how to be happy the rest of the year.

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