Living Amends

Amends. I cringe at the thought. There are so many amends I need to make I don’t know where to begin. I’ve stolen, conned people out of money, begged, taken advantage of people, taken up a lot of police, ambulance and hospital time and the list goes on, I nearly forgot about how I have shown no respect to other tenants in my building. They say in AA it’s important to ‘clean house’. If I was to clean house it would be the equivalent of cleaning a ten bedroom mansion set on fifty acres of land. I need to accept who I am today. I’m not a bad person, I just really struggle with addiction. It consumes me. I have no care in the world as long as I get my drink or gamble. I’m beginning to look at things differently now. For a start it would be impossible to pay back everybody I have begged two or three euros from for the price of a Linden Village or a nine percent Karpackie. At a meeting years ago a friend of mine spoke about how today he makes living amends. I’m taking a few moments now to think about how I would like living amends to look for me. Firstly family comes to mind, recently I have been engaged with Mabs about budgeting properly. The day has come where I no longer need to ask my family for handouts. I hope the day has come where I stop contacting them drunk or in need of a gamble too. As for AA, hopefully someday I’m sober long enough to be of service. I’d like to give back too, I’d love to be able to afford solar panels for all the homeless shelters in Galway. For now I can afford to put four euro a week of my money into the basket at meetings. I too one day would like to make a monthly donation to Cope Galway. They engage with homeless people, victims of domestic violence and the elderly too. That for me is the dream today. Even being able to donate ten euros a month would make me happy. The most important living amends I can make is to myself. I can stay sober, I can eat healthily and I can exercise. They talk in AA about a life beyond your wildest dreams. All these ingredients in my soup of life would give me the serenity to live beyond my wildest dreams.