Getting High on Recovery

Addiction: Chaotic Neutral

Addiction is chaotic neutral.

Pick your addiction: drugs, alcohol, food, sex, technology and you will see the chaotic neutral up close and personal

Chaotic

Addiction is outer chaos that matches the rhythms that we feel inside. Inside is chaos, disorder and no direction. Chaos comes from our word for gum.

Addiction is like gum: you and I become chewed up inside and out, we lose our flavor and we are stuck wherever we happen to fall.

Neutral

Addiction is neutral. You know what it feels like: two steps forward and three backwards. You make promises, you are busy working, you rush but nothing feels completed.

Politically neutral rarely gets any votes because change requires dreams, values and boundaries. In addiction, dreams are trampled over and values are compromised so often they become memories. Boundaries are what other people have and they need to be overcome to get what you and I want.

Chaotic + Neutral

Chaotic Neutral means alive but not living, chewed up by what you do and what you think; no longer in touch with yourself.

Recovery: Beautiful Mess

Recovery is not perfection or about cleaning up our lives. No, recovery is not about being clean. Clean is dirt free, kept neat and void of toxins. A clean house brings up images of everything in it’s place and together.

Cleaning house can become its own addiction. A clean house can feel like no one lives there. Too preoccupied with clean; too preoccupied to live.

Recovery is a beautiful mess.

Beautiful

Grace is about being beautifully fucked up… not having to put ourselves together to feel whole. Being loved as we are, cracks and all. You and I are loved, no matter what we may have done or what may have been done to us.

Mess

When we accept that we each are messy in our own way, that is when we get to this thing that we call living. No one is clean: our mess will either become a tornado or it will become a life. 

We love that seeds explode into new life, but we forget they are first immersed in their own beautiful mess: dirt, compost and darkness. Your mess can be life-giving, it can fertilize you and explode with new life.

Chaos is dis/order but mess is acceptance, vulnerability, trust and risk. As you and I live, as we risk being ourselves with other people and as we reclaim our gifts that is the path of the Beautiful Mess.

Addiction creates a hole in your life, your soul and your mind. Only by living, not cleaning, can you become whole.

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Photo credit: Ariadna Bruna