There is an overwhelming sense of foreboding, fear, always mixed with a little shame.  My only way around this, my only respite is to pretend everything is fine.  To enter into that special part of my brain, that instantly takes me to my world of make believe.  But I have to come to believe with a clear and true understanding, that the world I can escape into so easily is even more dangerous than my feeling of inadequacy.  Because by being able to escape reality so very easily, I become impaired.  I do not address the problem; I pretend it away.

So why am I feeling this way?  It is because I am scared.  Scared that I am going to be a failure.  I feel stuck, unable to move forward.  This career I so desperately want to have seems like it will never materialize.  I have done so much in the last two thousand two hundred and forty-six days since I have become sober.  I graduated from university, magna cum laude, I received a master’s degree in Ethics.  Right out of graduate school I got what should have been the type of job would allow me to lay the groundwork for my career.  But that has not happened.  Instead for that last eighteen months there has been a glimpse of what we should be doing, but the gentlemen I work for does not seem to have it left in him to produce the work needed. 

Instead we have become very close friends on a truly spiritual level.  I can say with all seriousness that I have love for him as friend, in that Greek way of agape.  I see in him the qualities that I wish to possess.  It is strange he has in our conversations taken on the father figure role that I lack.  But that love so far has not helped lift me out of the morass that I now find myself.

I am well aware of why I am where I am.  That my past is like an anchor that I am unable to break free from, no matter how hard I try.  My current situation is because I am an alcoholic and drug addict, I have dug myself a hole.  My greatest fear, the thing that actually an almost soul stopping panic is maybe I have dug a hole so deep that I will never be able to climb out.

I have been looking for another job, searching, but to no avail.  When you see my resume it is no wonder.  I do not know how to explain to the people seeing it that the person on that paper, who basically only worked for two years at a time, with large gaps in between, is not the person sitting in front of them today.  I have been reborn, through my sobriety.

I need that break.  I need somebody to just give me a chance.  I am becoming increasingly scared that the opportunity I so desperately want will never come.