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I'm very low right now, trying to tell myself its just the depressive yang to my manic ying... its not working too well. Recently, and I dont know why it's started now... well I've been feeling bad about shit. I guess I've always felt bad about it but even when "clean" I was still drinking or smoking weed or otherways distracted. Or maybe its cuz I wasnt far enough from the situation. Anyway it feels like someone took a potato peeler to my skin. I guess that someone would be me.... Joey has a conscience? Shhh, don't tell anybody.

I'd really like to work the NA program. It's difficult not having a standard higher power. Everyone else has this wonderful god-type thing. Mine is something abstract and hard to translate and compress into one or two words that would replace the word "god" like Step 3 "We made a decision to turn our will and our lives over to the care of God" There's no higher power I can describe that could fit into the 12-step mold. Hell, most days its my anger and hatred and thirst for justice that keeps me going. I dont know what kind of higher power that makes. I wish I could put a name on it but whatever it was that got me through those long summer days in the basement as a kid, and those sexual lab rat sessions or when I was used for target practice or as an ashtray and scratching post or treated as nothing more than a tax deduction and whatever it was that influenced me to take the shotgun out of my mouth and caused my heart to beat again and my lungs to breathe again after being dead for five minutes and whatever it was that got me clean... whatever that thing was that did all that stuff... that's my higher power. And it's not any supernatural being or an outside force, this is something inside me, my power, my secret spot so deep and untouchable that nothing has been able to taint it, some place in the recesses of my brain, somewhere where scientists haven't assigned any use for yet, that is where my higher power hides. Something in my brain works right, it KNOWS what I need and what's right and no matter how often or badly I fuck up it will always pull me through, will always restore me, will always be able to reboot. My higher power is my ctrl-alt-dlt, my auto-pilot.

Always remember to quit while you're ahead.

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