!Amends --- agk's diary 1 March 2025 @ 02:47 UTC --- written on Evy's GPD Micro in bed with the window open as a cold breeze blows --- I woke up about a week ago with a moral thorn in my side. I suddenly remembered that I took a big sum of money from an ex-girlfriend seventeen years ago, and it's intolerable to me that I did that. I can't remember the amount. At first I thought it was thousands of dollars, now I think it was hund- reds. That I can't remember the amount is also in- tolerable to me. It's a sign of how I thought then: my justification, lack of concern, or entitlement. I felt I had lived a life dedicated solely, self- lessly, to service, and had unfairly been subjected to violence, abandonment, discrimination, and extreme hardship. There's truth to that, but I had more agency in the matter than I could admit to myself, I was an adventurist, and my days of self- sacrificing service were over. I'd become a mooch and a parasite, as well as a hysteric, an addict, a paranoid, and a creature of resentment and fear. It's embarrassing to have clarity on my degraded state come flooding back. I'm ashamed. But I also feel something else, a softening around my edges, a possibility for me to become more yielding, more of a flower and less of a stone if I respond to this moral thorn correctly. There's no roadmap. I talked to my sponsor, prayed and journaled, discussed it with an alcoholic in my network, my wife, and an old friend who's still in contact with my ex and I. Even with all that, I'm going to wing this. I might do absolutely the wrong thing. I don't want anything to do with my ex. If she has any sense she wouldn't want anything to do with me. After I left her through a psych hospital, domestic violence shelter, and group home, I tried to be no contact, but we saw each other a few times in the subsequent two years. Every time overwhelmed me with resentful, hysterical lust; greased rails back to Hell. I took the money from her account after I left her, after I quit using and started going to Narcotics Anonymous meetings. It's been seventeen years, I'm sure we've matured. I don't care. I want this thorn out. I want to pay her back whatever I owe her, an amount she probably wrote off or considers herself to have given to me, even though I definitely misappropriated it. I want to pay her back because I never want to think like I did back then ever again. I want whatever's curling around the edges, the promise that if the part of me that protected me from awareness of this evil can forever rest, I may be a better wife, a kinder, more passionate, more gentle woman. I want to do no harm to my ex or my family, but I want to get to where my soul calls me to go.