bad days

May 15, 2012 in just random thoughts..... | No comments

After my last post, I was left wondering—is my life as sickeningly serene as it sometimes come across in my posts? Honestly, am I that person? Because that isn’t the me I remember.

But the me I remember isn’t the me I am, either.  I don’t live in fear or shame or anger or any of those things today… But what happened to all my bad days? I used to have a lot of them…. Strings of days, sometimes weeks, maybe months, when nothing seemed to go right until and unless I was high.  Where did that me go? Because he is the person I started writing this blog for. He is the person who read The Last Chance Texaco when he was still high, wondering if he would ever be able to put down the pipe.  That me would have had very little patience for what I’ve been writing about over the past year or so.

I just wanted to stop smoking meth. I did not want spiritual bullshit. Unfortunately, it turns out spiritual bullshit is how I was able to stop using.

But, what happened to my bad days?

I came to a realization a while back that I am an extraordinarily inept judge of good and bad. Some of the days that felt like the worst days of my life while I lived them became some of the most useful and productive in retrospect. Would I choose to relive them today? Certainly not—I don’t think anyone would. But my ability to judge the value of a day, or a situation, or even a moment, while I am in it, is just too limited. I’m not that person.

So today, when something makes me sad, or uncomfortable, or angry, or scared, or whatever, I don’t give myself permission to call it a bad thing, or allow myself to say I’m having a bad day. I just feel the thing and let it pass, and then it is over.

The difference between the me I remember and the me that I actually am is that today I have a choice. Today I have the skills to let go of anger, fear, resentment, etc, almost as soon as they appear. I don’t always make that choice, but I have an awareness that I am choosing to feel agitated, irritable, restless, discontent, etc.  And when I have been doing the things I need to do to stay sober, I almost always make the choice to just let go. I have a very easy litmus test:  I ask myself, Is what I’m doing right now helpful to me or anyone else?

And if that doesn’t work, I ask myself Do I want to be right or do I want to be happy?

And if that doesn’t work, I will call my sponsor, and he will ask me those things. Usually with a smug You know the answer to this question already tone in his voice.

The real answer to What happened to my bad days? is that I just chose to stop having them. The process by which I became able to make that choice is a continuous one, and includes an active life in recovery (working the steps, etc), but life is good today. Every day.

A man in my recovery community recently doused himself with gasoline and set himself on fire. He died, and while I am very sad for him and his family, I am very grateful that I haven’t had that desire in a while. I remember it, though.

I remember a period of time when I couldn’t drive down a highway without thinking about crashing into pylons. I couldn’t be in a tall building without fantasizing about jumping.  There were few means of escape I didn’t contemplate and consider.

Those days are long gone, but I remember. That is why I keep doing the things I do to keep the feelings that I have. I work as hard at staying sober as I did at staying high, I’m just getting better results.

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all is beautiful

February 2, 2012 in just random thoughts..... | No comments

“God has made all that we see, – he has made us also,–poor atoms mixed up with this great universe. We shine like those fires and those stars; we sigh like those waves; we suffer like those great ships, which are worn out in ploughing the waves, in obeying the wind which urges them towards an end, as the breath of God blows us towards a port. Everything likes to live; and all is beautiful in living things.”

When I finished reading The Man in the Iron Mask in December, this passage (in which a father is saying a final farewell to his son) struck me because I couldn’t decide if it was true, or, at least, whether or not I believe it.

I know there have been times in my life—some when I was using and/or drinking, some when I was not—that I wanted to die. Several of those times I was in enough despair that I actually tried killing myself (with various degrees of success). What could have made me find beauty in my life in those moments? I do not know.

But I do know I lived. Against all odds, against my own will, in spite of my own violent indifference to myself, some part of me,  some unconscious, or more likely nonconscious, nonphysical part of me—some part that I cannot alter (God, or something)—prevented me from achieving the essential self-destruction I craved.

I just passed my four-years-off-meth mark. Life is so strange, and wonderful, and beautiful. Sometimes a little scary, but not for very long. I’ve spent most of the past couple of months looking for the beauty in living things, and it really is there. And today, I can see it. Not just in myself, but in the people around me. And for that, I am grateful.

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my hula hoop.

January 1, 2012 in eleventh step | 2 comments

just keep at it.There’s this great lady I go to meetings with who introduced me to the concept of the hula hoop—it’s sort of like a “personal space bubble,” but extending beyond physical space—it’s a sort of spiritual hula hoop. It is easier for me to conceptualize than keeping my side of the street clean—a street is a public place, where anyone can go. I can’t keep you off my side of the street, but whether I let you in my hula hoop is entirely my decision—without my consent and cooperation, you can never be fully in it. What is usually of more concern to me in my daily spiritual life is not who is getting in my hula hoop, but whose hula hoop I’m getting into. And why.

Because the reality is, 99.999% of what goes on in the great world happens outside my hula hoop, and is quite frankly none of my beeswax.

What you think of me is none of my business. I get that now (after a lot of training), but what about what I think of you? Of what you do? Of how you behave? Of how you treat others? Whose business is that? And when?

When does “keeping up with” others in the fellowship cross the line into plain old gossip? When does an interest in someone else’s problems staying sober turn into relapse rubbernecking? Why does it matter how much or for how many days or weeks someone used or drank? It doesn’t really. They need the same amount of prayer, regardless.  Same with 13th steppers. And near-beer drinkers. &etc.

My conscience should tell me, but when it comes to some aspects of being part of a sober community, some of the tawdrier, petty aspects of human nature in me come out. I have a sponsor to help me through this, but he isn’t always immediately available to guide me in every conversation. To prevent the snark, the sarcasm, the arched eyebrow.

Simply developing a spiritual sixth sense isn’t enough—for me, it takes vigilance to actually do the right thing. I always knew that doing drugs was wrong, but it didn’t stop me. And there are so many shades of grey in defining appropriate relationships and communication (especially for someone like me, who lacks skills in both), that sometimes it is easier just to stay home.

Staying within my hula hoop gives me security, but staying entirely within my own hula hoop disconnects me from the world. Being part of a fellowship means being engaged with it.

So my new year’s resolution? Active work on my eleventh step. More seeking conscious contact with my higher power thingy. That, according to my sponsor (and the big book of AA), is the answer to all of my questions.

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situations that used to baffle us (like Christmas)

December 21, 2011 in promises | 1 comment

It wasn’t that long ago that my holiday shopping concerns were based primarily around my dealers’ travel plans-having a backup of a backup &etc. My family had long given up on seeing me for more than an afternoon (or possibly a whole night, if they were “lucky”), so the holidays for me were basically an opportunity to get fucked up without interruption.

I would frequently travel to see friends in nearby cities (just big PNP–for-the-holidays parties, typically to meet people I only knew from online, if at all).

But there was no joy. There was ngaho love. Lots of meth & sex & booze (and food every once in a while—it was Christmas, after all), but nothing like family, even when I was with my parents and siblings. They were as foreign and strange to me as those famine-ravaged children on television.  The spirit of the season to me was as ugly as fear and a lifetime of cynical disdain could make it.

And, to be sure, the crass commercialism of it all is still distasteful to me. How children are expected to learn gratitude and compassion (or to experience any of the benefits of the beatitudes , or any of the teachings of the man whose birth they are supposed to be celebrating), by demanding (and receiving) the latest version of whatever landfill-of-tomorrow trinkets are the shiniest this season, is just beyond me.

To be sure, I got those things when I was a child. All of them. Every year. It took a lot of effort to coordinate which Atari cartridges I would get from which grandparents. I demanded (and received) Hungry Hungry Hippos without ever knowing what it meant to be hungry. I was never taught gratitude.

I was told to have gratitude, and like most good Christian children, I expressed it when required at meals or at church (as necessary), but I was never taught it until I began to get sober. It took a bunch of sober heathens to teach me to live what I had only known as rote recitation of sentiments I could not value any more than I could understand or feel.

I try to live a life of gratitude and prayer most every day today—religious parading once or twice a year in a room full of strangers just won’t do it. And I still get my nieces and nephews the things from their lists that will make them happy, because I can, and that’s what we do in my family, which I am a part of today. Have I spent more money on Beats by Dre headphones this year than most families spend on their house payments, for children who will likely not remember or care? Sure. Will it make them happy? Of course not.

But I show up, and stay, and love them, and they know that, and we have fun. Not sober fun, just fun fun.

I can be present without judging what’s going on around me—I can be ok with what I thought of in the past as gross hypocrisy, but today I think of as people just doing the best they can. People like me. One Christmas at a time. One day at a time. We get through it. And today it is good.

 

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life & death & living

November 29, 2011 in twelfth step | No comments

I got a call today from a friend who runs a halfway house. One of his guys is (almost certainly) finding out from the health department this afternoon that he has HIV. So he called me to “be there.” Not literally at the health department, but to be present for the aftermath. To be part of his support network (whatever the hell that is).

So, ugh. Finding out two days before World AIDS Day that you have a disease for which you will be repeatedly reminded that There is no cure is pretty awful. When you are in long-term treatment. For the holidays. &etc. There’s never a good time to be notified of your impending death from a disease that makes you a social leper here in sub-suburbia, but this timing seems especially unkind. I know HIV isn’t a death sentence, but that isn’t how it feels. Especially when it still has that new-car-smell. It smells like death. It feels like death.

In 1991 I was dating a drug dealer who fed me about a line of special K (that he told me was cocaine), and when I went into my k-hole, and had no ability to move, or speak, he repeatedly raped me without a condom—the first time I ever had unsafe sex… and I tested positive a few months later. In rehab.

What could anyone have said to me to make me believe life really was worth living? I have no idea. Whatever it was, I didn’t hear it. I don’t think those words existed.

And all I really have is my story. And my story is that I lived. And somehow, I keep living, and after I started living life without meth, or coke, or Grey Goose, or whatever, my life began to feel worth living. And then it became good, which is what it is now.

Sometimes when I hear about people relapsing and dying &etc, I wonder why me. Why am I alive? And maybe today, this is it—maybe just being there, today, for this kid, no older than I was in 1992, maybe just this is it. And if I can say the right thing, then that will be enough.

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Continental drift/Monumental shift/Sentimental rift/Existential gift?

November 21, 2011 in eleventh step, promises, tenth step, twelfth step | No comments

 

is

it

just

me

or

is

the

world

behaving

badly

again

?

?

?

?

?

?

A couple of weeks ago I had my first real sort of existential crisis in sobriety. It was work-related, nothing to do with health or sobriety, so really, it isn’t that fundamental to my being.  My own sense of panic is over, the externals that triggered my unease will not be resolved until sometime next year (at the earliest).

So, that afternoon,  I texted a friend (my sponsor) that “I’m sort of freaking out.” And he called me and asked “How bad are you freaking out,” and the honest answer was “I don’t know.”

I didn’t know. In retrospect, I think I was freaking out about how (or if) I was going to handle this new uncertainty, this new maybe future. I just didn’t know.  This is really the first time since I settled into sober living that external circumstances made me uncertain of me (and I’ve been thrown a few hardballs).

But, I followed my friend’s advice (to find a sick sponsee to spend the afternoon working with), and it worked. I was able to stop thinking about my problem (me) for long enough to put circumstances in perspective. And I didn’t drink or use, and I helped someone else not to drink or use.

But that day the earth shifted under my feet—or, my precisely, I lost my footing—gratitude slipped from me. And it took a few days to get balanced again.I tell my sponsees all the time that they don’t have bad days—they may feel uncomfortable or sad or angry, but they will never know the results of today until long after today is over. But I sorta feel for them now—it really did feel like a shitty, bad, awful day when I was in it. I couldn’t hear my own suggestions—it all sounded like bullshit, and while I could say words of gratitude, I couldn’t feel them.

It took my whole sober network—sponsor, sponsees, friends, family, meetings, steps—to get back to a place of something like wholeness. In the process, I discovered that nothing makes me feel more like I have a life of purpose than having a life of usefulness.

So, now, I’m diving into this thing, this future thing that I don’t even have a rough outline of, with the knowledge that I have around me the people I need to help me be whatever it is I’m going to be.  And I chose to put them there.I could have chosen to smoke some meth (which I love, by the way), or have a drink (which I really could have used recently at one point—seriously) but I didn’t. And for this addict, that’s fucking amazing. The ability to regroup, refocus, and look at my life today with something like clarity, and to look at the future with something like courage—those are gifts I never anticipated, or would have believed possible. But I am really, truly, wholly grateful. Again.

 

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the infection of wanting

October 22, 2011 in Uncategorized | No comments

There are lots of things that separate humans from other animals, but our ability to use (and understand) metaphors is at least as important, at least to this human, as the ability to use a fork. I use metaphors like I use salt—liberally to the point of unwholesomeness.

I have been reading the Big Book of Alcoholics Anonymous through page-by-page with a newcomer who spent most of his teen life in youth detention centers, and even though he is very clever, he has a limited vocabulary. When he asked me what “theoretical” meant, I knew that my standard “of or relating to theory” wasn’t going to work. Five minutes and fifteen or twenty metaphors later, we shared a firm ground of theoretical understanding.

Anyway, when I saw this very short and very beautiful movie (link below) the other day, I couldn’t decide what in my life it was a metaphor for. It struck me so deeply (which is curious for a zombie movie), I decided I should give it some thought.

Was it my addiction? Likely.
My HIV? Possibly.
My whole me? Possibly the teenage-bullshit-angst-me, or the sitting-on-my-webcam-smoking-meth me, but not the just-for-today me.
The human condition? Sometimes, maybe, but I spend much more time thinking about me than about the human condition, so that probably wasn’t it.

There are some common threads in all of those things, at least from my perspective…. Fear, despair, and isolation have at least partly defined my addiction, my health, my being, and that of many humans around me.

But I think what the zombie in a penguin suit most clearly (and literally) illustrates for me is the human condition of grasping… grasping for something even when nothing is there, the perpetual wanting that infected me for so much of my life… wanting things, wanting love, wanting drugs, wanting sex, wanting more. Even wanting to be more sober caused me frustration in very early sobriety. I just wanted the pain to be over so I could be happy, joyous and free already, dammit.

Today I really do live in the day most days. But I remember being that zombie. I tore through people with almost as much abandon, and with nearly the same result.

But, for the infection of wanting, there is a cure, at least for me, and it is gratitude. Today, I’m grateful I’m not a zombie—literally or figuratively.

PS–This really is worth watching in HD if you have the option.
xo

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