[pinoch]

Mozart

I'm genuinely sorry to hear about your recent troubles. But I'm also cheered by your determination, come hell or high water, to rebound.

Rebirth is a good and needed thing. So is heroism--although the forms that heroism takes aren't always the conventional forms people expect. One burden you're allowed to gently shrug off, surely, is the burden of expectations that come with long sobriety. Although we're all allowed to make certain people on this board into heroes--i.e., heroic abstainers--we need to remember that sobriety is, finally, a private decision that each of us makes individually. No one individual here should be "required" by us to maintain sobriety as a way of reassuring us that at least ONE person is getting it right; that just distracts us from our own task at hand. By slipping after long sobriety, you remind us that we are neither more nor less than human, with all the challenges that being merely/gloriously human entails. Our proper response, I suggest, is to honor you for your long and disciplined walk on the path. An heroic walk, even. No 2x4 here, just an arm of fellowship around the shoulder. No one's casting the first stone--nor do stones need to be cast. Who among us hasn't ever slipped? Who among us isn't a work in progress? You're allowed to be that.

Sounds to me like you shed a skin that needed shedding and have woken to find yourself in a place where new kinds of healing are possible. That's a good thing.


Pinoch