The only way to be clear is to be clean

19770 days an addict and 5 in recovery... more or less... today I used for 45 minutes... But I am committed. I will be clean.

O.K, so maybe it's not fair to count addiction back to my baby years. But the seed behaviors (and feelings) that became addictions were already comfortably well worn before my earliest memories (at three). So how early does addiction start?

All my addictions happen to be legal. I have three: simple computer games (like solitaire), TV, and children's books. A reading addict gets no respect, but people now accept that the computer game rush is just like the gambling rush and even TV changes brainwaves, so it's no biggie to say they are addictive. Shoot, I don't even like most television. It makes me queasy. But I will sit for hours flipping channels (and inflaming my thumb tendons), all the while telling myself, "Turn it off. Now. Off." And I don't enjoy computer games either. What better sign is there that these are addictions?

Yet until recently I had no desire to give addiction up. Or at least, I'd gladly be clean of TV and computer games, but stories. They have been my life.

Still, I'm a binge reader. Every few weeks, I loose a weekend or read till dawn and spend a day too bleary to work, or break a social commitment at the last minute because I can't put the book down. It is fairly easy to get along as a binger. Fairly easy to keep yourself off bottom.

Besides, I've been pretty good at removing temptation. I gave my TV & VCR away (no DVDs then) when I quit DePaul University (it's a long story... I had a vision... see "An Interfaith, Pantheist UU Is Called By Jesus: Part II"), No TV, no temptation. Each new computer, I'd play additively till dawn a few times and then in a spasm of disgust delete all games the hard drive - staying clean of games for some years.

Until last fall when I stumbled on the internet versions. I need parental controls for my browser, but can't seem to figure out how to get them. Now my writing environment is always dirty with a quick click all that stands between me and temptation. This led me close enough to bottom that I finally wanted to quit, really quit, not just have a long, binge hiatus.

Not stories, though... Those have been my refuge since before I could read. By age five, I was very proud that I could sit perfectly still for hours WITHOUT EVEN MOVING A FINGER (every so often I'd check my body to see). Because I wasn't there. I was off watching a movie in my head.

Give up stories? All these years, I have simply refused. I declared myself an addict most definitely NOT in recovery. Until a few days ago. Until spending most of the last two weeks on a binge. Until seeing how sickened this made me - just like TV or computer games - and how it made me hate myself and how that led to despair and how despair destroyed any will to write. Leaving me easy prey to a demon who whispers of the joy of getting lost in another world.

The thing is, not long ago I experienced what could happen if I lived clean. In the monastery, I was clean for 14 months. Oh, make no mistake. There are plenty of addicts in monasteries. And when I entered I worried. I could remove games from the clunky old computer I used, and I had no way to get kid books, but there was a TV in the basement of the house. Would I sneak down there to watch?

Turns out, I needn't have worried. I soon became like a clear, open conduit for something much more satisfying than any addiction - the thing I truly desired, the thing that maybe my addictions were fogging me up so I didn't know that that was what I was really after - the thing I now refer to with the misleading, short hand word "God." That amazing flow of joy/light/warmth/being-completely-known-and-loved energy that filled me, flowed through me, surrounded me and similarly flowed through every other person, animal, plant, rock, star and thing.

I didn't even watch the few approved TV shows (news and nature). The sisters were big on movies. But more often than not, I went for a walk instead - just to breathe/drink/swim in that light.

Of all the things I cried over after loosing monastic life, that connection was the main one.

I want the clarity that let me open to the great flow of divine energy. Only I can't perceive the light - which I know is always there - through a welter of buried feelings, unhealed wounds, and the fogging addictions I use to numb out feeling and prevent healing.

If I want to be clear, I have to be clean. No fog, no numbing. I have to be present to all the feelings, open and heal all the wounds. None of that can happen if I'm using.

The only way to be clear is to be clean.

So here I am. Painfully, haltingly in recovery. Five days and already: falling down, getting up, falling down, getting up.

So help me God.