Still in Recovery

Still Doing This One Day at a Time

Irrational fear and Cleaning House

Posted by on Mar 11, 2016 |

When I was a kid we had a swimming pool in the back yard. I used to love swimming in that pool all the time. Splashing around with my brother and friends. Lots of good memories were provided from those days. Back then JAWS had just come out and in the bottom of the pool there was a bunch of leaves and dirt that had gathered over time. For some reason my mind saw them in the shape of a shark and I stopped swimming. Missing out on having more fun with my friends and enjoying the water for the whole summer until we finally got rid of the pool. Now some may say why didn’t you just clean it out? Looking back, I am not sure why we never did that. Maybe it just looked like too much work.

What I see in the rearview mirror of my life now is that it would have been a lot easier to just skim all the crap off of the surface of the water on a daily basis before it had a chance to sink to the depths of the bottom and become overwhelming to clean up. Because I did not take the action of cleaning up daily I developed an irrational fear of something that I knew not to be true, however I could not shake the fear and stopped enjoying life.

A daily inventory as outlined on 86,87 and 88 is like skimming the crap off of the surface before it gets deep into my soul making it hard to clean up and overcome.

I don’t want to miss out on anything in my life now, so I will continue to do steps 10,11 and 12 daily so that I never have to build up any more fears that are not real and prevent myself from having to do step 9 ever again. It is much easier to skim the surface everyday than have to empty my pool, scrub away the grime and repair the holes.

I will keep skimming and swimming through my days.