Hope begins with the thought that there is a possibility that we can stop using, even if it seems inconceivable, and stay clean.
Living Purely, Chapter 7, “Living According to Our Principles”
By the time many of us show up to our first gathering, we've already lost the trust of many people in our lives. For some of us, there was not a single person left in our lives who would believe us even if we told them that the sun rises in the east. No matter how many people we fooled into active addiction, over and over again, one person was more likely than any other to be skeptical of anything we said – ourselves.
This is one of the huge obstacles that prevents many of us from truly feeling hope when we first get clean. We know ourselves! We can't be trusted. Sometimes the people in our lives would see the way we acted and accuse us of having no will, but the truth was that our own will was so strong that we had lost all freedom of choice. There was no margin between our impulses and our actions. Staying clean? Of course, no problem - we can do it just fine - that is, until we feel like using it. Then, everything is canceled.
One of the bravest things we have to do to stay clean is to allow a little hope to enter our spirit, defying all the evidence to the contrary that we have accumulated in our active addiction. People who use the way we do don't clean. But then we find ourselves in rooms full of people who used the way we did. And they are clean…supposedly. Maybe, is it possible?
With our own will, impulsiveness, obsession and compulsion – even though many of us came to NA blaming the world around us for our problems, deep down we felt we were too flawed to have the life we wanted . In NA, we found people with flaws just as deep as our own, and they taught us how to be free.
It's hard to see a way forward when I myself am blocking my way. I will let other addicts show me how to step aside and find a way out.
