Finding Your Self at Work: The Fifth Step, admitting responsibility

26 Nov Finding Your Self at Work: The Fifth Step, admitting responsibility

Admitting responsibility: Here we are at the Estación de Llamaquique (Llamaquique Rail Station, Oviedo, Spain). Uploaded to Flikr and taken by Nacho, accessed via Creative Commons although this photo is no longer uploaded to Flikr.

Admitting Responsibilty

Once you’ve done the self-inventory of Step Four, this Step is easy. Imagine how easy Step One seems now? Try it if you haven’t. You can find all the Steps here.)

Recap: Step Four, Self-Inventory

Step Four was privately taking your own inventory of how you caved in to capitalism’s insanity and abandoned yourself.

What to Do Now: How Admitting Responsibility Begins

Step Five is telling other people about it but you’ve already done the quiet, private part. (In another way, those 12 Steppers are sneaky! They figured out to separate into two different steps the quiet private work of self-inventory and the public acknowledgement of how we caved.) Here is Step Five: we

5. Admitted to that Power greater than ourselves, to ourselves and to another human being the exact nature of our wrongs.

My Personal Inventory, as Promised

In my last post, I promised you my self-inventory. Here it is! This is my start at feeling and acknowledging all I abandoned of my precious self to the Great God Capitalism (the chase for money, remember, not money itself)

• • my self-esteem
  • my identity
  • my reason for existence
  • my intrinsic goodness, my worth
  • my knowing what needed to be done next for real (whatever made the most money, right?)
  • my friendships
  • my interests.

And that’s just a sketch, a start.

Feeling the Feelings Makes it Real

While each of these items may sound abstract, for me to write it out to you, I had to feel it. Before you determine what yours are, feel it. Forage around in those wild gardens of the self and uproot some abandonment. Look carefully at it before you toss it on the fire. So that even if your words are the same as mine, what they represent will be intensely personal.

You can see how deep this goes. You can see now why we need to move this s–t out of the way in order to even know Whom or What to Trust. Remember: you don’t have to believe. You don’t have to hate on capitalism; I don’t! I’m just done with it running my life. Oops. I mean I am done with abandoning my life to it. And I know there is a path out of that self-abandonment. To stay on that path through the fourth and fifth Steps means I turn within to my own self-abandonment, “searchingly and fearlessly.” Or as fearless as I can be right now. I get more fearless as I stay on this path.

Step Six is here. All the Steps to Recovery from Capitalism are here.