I'm putting this in a separate post, as it's completely unrelated in all ways to saying hello to Manta and to how I feel about where I stand this morning in relation to my own journey of not drinking.
After reading a post suggesting to somebody that they consider rational recovery as a path toward living without alcohol, I went to that site and read about their philosophy. I came away shaken by what is suggested there about the idea of recovery groups as being detrimental to the individual and to society. It seemed so black and white, framing the whole process of being either a moral or an immoral act.
Some things are either/or, we drink or we do not. But to think that I could have gotten to where I was today without a community is unimaginable to me. And to think that I was jeopardizing my own behavior by being in one left me with my AV alone. All sorts of other negative thoughts came into my mind, putting me into my unsettled world. I wanted a drink!
I share this here, 1) because I wanted a drink; and 2) because I don't want to start a general thread about the merits of rational recovery. Ultimately I do frame my recovery (and I use that word intentionally, as it's a broad-spectrum way of describing what I do now) as being moral decisions based on life but not on my own worth. SR practice is not to debate different systems that people follow to get to where they need to be, although that does come up loosely around here, sometimes even in direct statements.
This was the strongest feeling I have had about having a drink in a long time, predicated by reading something that suggests that I was a failed person in addiction.
I had to express my thoughts somewhere, and here is the safest place to do it. Now I am feeling okay again, I shut that AV down when I realized what I was doing, and some distance from the reading leaves me on firm ground. It just goes to say, there can be things out there that will challenge us in ways we do not expect, and we just have to use what we know works for us to get past them.