Welcome to the Hope Fiend Blogspot. The Dopeless Hope Fiend  chronicles my journey to recovery. It wasn't easy to write. With each page, I relived the insanity, pain and heart break that I spent so many years accumulating. Some days, after sitting at my computer terminal for several hours I remember being mentally exhausted. I felt as if I had just finished running an emotional marathon. It was almost as if I were walking down a metaphoric alley and someone beat the crap out of me with a baseball bat. When the manuscript was complete, I sat back in my chair and took a deep breath before a big sigh of relief. I contemplated what I had written, what I had to go through to get to this point in my life an thought how great it felt to be in recovery.

In retrospect, I realize that I had been sober at different times in my life but had never been in recovery. It's relatively easy to attain sobriety. That's all I had to do is stop drinking and drugging. But to recover, not only do I have to stop using, but I have to deal with the underlying reasons that I started using in the first.

Abusing drugs is only a symptom of my disease so I have to deal with the character defects and personality flaws in my life. I have to examine the root causes of my desire to start using in the first place. This life long quest requires work. Who knows, it may even make me a better person. I am a work in progress and it's an inside job. Let me know how you feel about this topic.