"Cowsbell - 1 Recovery

“Hi, my name is Gary and I am an addict. I like to feel good, I like to avoid feeling bad. In fact, I am willing to give up who I am to feel better.”

I have been in recovery for seven years. No, I am not always happy and I often don’t feel the way I would like but I am me now. I have made peace with the unhappiness of my life, the unfairness of my situations and the mistreatment of others and accepted that I am who I want to be becoming. After fifty years of living to measure up to the standards of everyone else, I now am at peace just being who God designed me to be. I am sorry that others expect me to be someone else but I am content with the true me.

That was not my old life. Born in the first half of the last century (1949 but doesn’t that phrase sound old?), I was the eldest son of a man accomplishing much and creating a real name for himself. Unfortunately, he never came to peace with who he was and destroyed himself before I was 10. Mom returned to her childhood home in Montana, married another fine man who proceeded to try to fix all of my faults from my flawed childhood. What anger didn’t correct, beatings failed at also. I never learned to be me and always felt like I wasn’t good enough, smart enough, popular enough, acceptable enough. No matter how hard I tried to please, I never felt worthwhile.

College, marriage, jobs—nothing made me feel acceptable but I did develop a series of coping mechanisms that helped me avoid feeling disrespected. I did excel at education, performance, and popular behaviors but while I had the appearance of success, I couldn’t feel success. If only the right persons were in my life—the right bosses, the right women, the right buddies, the right friends—I would feel acceptable, or so I thought.

It was at the turn of the Millennium that I collapsed, having lost all hope of acceptance, of worthiness, and finally began binging on whatever made me feel not bad. It took 30 days in the dead of winter before the coldness of my soul became evident to me and I called out for help. Oh, not that kind of help, just help to stop what I was doing, to get back into control. For fifty years I had been able to avoid emotional pain by simply denying the truth of my life and facing how I felt and why I felt that way.

But I was wrong. I was at that point where there was no other way than to admit the damage caused by others but accepted by me and then the futility of the ways I had masked my pains. I worked through the process of recognizing the truth about my self: others had mistreated me but I had accepted their valuation of me as my value. I let them define me.

Recovery is not so much a going back and fixing the past as recognition of what the past was and not confusing it with Now. My life today is not dependent upon the prelude but rather a resurrection of who God created me to be if I take His ultimate valuation of my life as truth and live today as a new person not anchored in past failures but in an abiding reality as defined by God. We are not who others define us as but rather ultimately who God designed us to be as we accept His truth about ourselves and live in it.

For the first time in 58 years, it is okay to be me, it is okay to have lived through the pain of the past, and it is okay to live today as who I really am.
“Cowsbell”