So in the 2+ months since I last posted here, I've moved about 900 miles NW of my former city and I've gone back to school. I've also had to work very hard to maintain my shreds of sanity. Ok, work hard is the wrong phrase. I've had to muddle through as best I can, much like usual.
Meetings here are different. And of course I'm having a hard time settling into meetings. There are no 8:30 meetings here, which is pretty much all I went to in my former city. In fact most meetings here I would consider early evening, and hence hard for me to get to. Between commuting home on the bus from campus and then having my usual struggle with making sure I eat adequately, early meetings are really hard for me to get to.

This past weekend I had a crisis of 'faith', but not in my higher power, more in my need of the program. I wondered why I still needed to keep coming around. It is obvious that I am affected by the disease of alcoholism, but I'm really not affected by alcoholism if that makes any sense. I deal with no one's drinking. While I wonder if certain people I currently interact with have problems with their alcohol consumption, I know it isn't my problem and their behavior doesn't bother me. But I still need this program. Desperately because I have been affected by this disease. I hadn't really thought about this topic much lately, until after this weekend.
I ended up at a meeting where the topic suggested was 'having had a spiritual awakening'. I know I've had spiritual awakenings, but I couldn't get my brain going. So I opened my 'Hope for Today' which I had with me to the first reading on the topic. Lo and behold, the exact reason why I still need this program. While the things that got me into this program no longer beat on me on a daily basis, my thinking still hasn't fully cleared. I still react to many things with the same. What were my coping mechanisms, my survival mechanisms at one time, no longer serve me. Not now that I want to be healthy. But I still do them. Regularly. Hourly. Minutely. It's hard to break old habits. It's even harder when I think I have to do it myself. Without any help.
And that is why I need this program. That is why I am in "recovery". Not recovered. Recovering. I'll always be recovering. That sounds like a scary thought, but hopefully one day I can look at my character defects and think of them gracefully rather than with a grudge.