thank you everyone for your responses. it means a lot to me.
today has/is going well. over the weekend i attended our AA state conferance and it was great. today I've attended 2 meetings and spent about 5 hours at my home alano club. I feel better than I have in a long time.
I have spent about an hour working on step 6 on paper (it's was four months ago that i started this and left it sitting until today).
today I experienced step 2 at the meetings with a new awareness of the insanity of drinking/using......with this I feel myself opening to possibility; to saying yes to life.
my fourth day again. this day is the "clearest" that I have felt in a long time. I have prayed and am determined to continue this beginning of prayer every day. I sang a prayer in the shower...and old prayer/song that i used to do years ago. it has felt good to pray today.
I will continue to stay in today, and live in the moment, and to listen to others and the universe around me. and I will live and stay clean today.
maybe long term sobriety can happen for me. i had it once for almost 8 years...depression became unbearable and i drank...then i turned to crack...and now for the last 9 years crack has been in my life. the first 3 years were the most use...but the insanity in my brain gets worse and worse over time when i use the stuff.
i don't enjoy crack...If i enjoyed crack i don't know how i could quit since it's been so hard and it brings me pain and i always know it will bring me pain.
it's the few moments of getting it, these moments are "exciting" ....they releive the discomfort in my body that comes from anger and boredom. then the excruciating discomfort of the crack also releives the pain with an even greater trauma.
i need to find something else that is exciting and compelling to releive the pain. I need to turn to prayer to releive the pain. I need to experience the pain instead of run from it and numb it. I need to really really get it my head that crack or anything else does not releive this pain. today i feel that I can do this, but today i am not feeling pain
pain and uncomfortablness will come and i hope these thoughts are etched enough in my heart for me to really get that the crack and alcohol doesn't serve my life, or the life of anything or anyone. i will continue to work at my recovery today while i'm feeling well, instead of slacking off in front of the tv.
thanks everyone and sr. i'm grateful for sr. it's a very helpful tool in my recovery tool bag.