pause for reflection

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my best day

August 5, 2009 in up(on) awakening | 3 comments

today i have my happy face on










I hear people in meetings say with some frequency that My worst day sober has been better than my best day drinking. And that just simply isn’t true for me. I was not always the hopeless, soulless being I became. There were times I was happy, joyous and free, when I felt love and loved others, when I was filled with optimism about the possibility of life.

There were times that I drank like a normal person. There were times I could have a couple of drinks. For that matter, there were times when I was able to recreationally use other drugs, like ecstasy. I used meth once every six to eight weeks (at most) the first couple of years I used it.

However, those times are long past. When I crossed which imaginary lines and became addicted to which chemicals isn’t really important. I’m an addict now, period.

I choose not to use chemicals that alter my mood or mind not just because of the horrible place I arrived in my life of my chemical dependence, but also because I realize that the person I am now is unable to be present for the people in my life when I am drinking or using. I can no longer be in the moment with others, I cannot be there for them, when I am in active addiction.

Still, it is important to me to be honest about the past. I think it is unwise to retrofit every action of my life into parts of a script I hear retold in meetings—some things fit, some things don’t. There were some really amazing times in my life, and more importantly, some amazing people who I still have loving relationships with, who bear no part in the isolated and sad life I would go on to lead.

To the people who were never able to make true friends because of their addictions, who were never able to feel the joy of living at all before coming into recovery, what a remarkable thing to experience.

Best. Worst. Why must we use so many superlatives? Does everything have to be in black and white? Is our existence so stark? Must we be such a glum lot when we look at our pasts? If you cannot find a moment of joy in your past before coming into recovery, I feel for you, but that is not my story.

My past is not so clear cut, but my future is. Life for me is now an either/or equation. But it wasn’t always. My best days using were fucking awesome, but my worst days using caused immeasurable sorrow in the lives of my friends and family, and almost cost me my life on multiple occasions.

My best day is today, because it has possibility in it. That isn’t an entirely new feeling for me, but it feels new, and it feels great.

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file under: isn’t it ironic?

July 13, 2009 in as I retire | No comments

“Somebody does somethin’ stupid, that’s human. They don’t stop when they see its wrong, that’s a fool.”  Elvis Presleythe man in the mirror

I’m in the middle of a big project (service work of a sort), and don’t really have time to post the way I like to, but I ran across this quote and just had to share it.

A subtle reminder of… a lot of things.  But especially that being able to say the words doesn’t mean we understand them, or can apply them to ourselves.  Constant vigilance for me means surrounding myself not with people who love me, but who love me sober, and alive, and who will tell me when I’m doing something stupid.

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getting my marbles back

July 9, 2009 in as I retire | 3 comments

it really does keep getting better

Last night I marked nine months clean and sober. I’ve been off meth for eighteen months, but for me, drinking but not using didn’t really work out so well…..

It’s hard to believe it has only been nine months since I sat in my car, listening to Harry Potter and breathing in exhaust fumes, waiting to die. Life is so different now. It gets more difficult every day to remember the feeling of how much pain I was in then. I remember the insanity of the actions I was taking at that time—how reclusive I had become, how sad, my fits of rage, crying on the interstate—but it gets more difficult to recall the feelings.

I can remember my mom calling me one morning at 6:30am about a year ago, and I was hysterical, sobbing. I couldn’t find my keys, and my computer had crashed—just mundane everyday crap—and it sent me completely over the edge. She said We’ve got to get you some help.

I told her I would be fine. If I could just find my keys…. If things would just be like I wanted them to be. I didn’t listen. Why is it so difficult to listen to the people who love us the most? Who we know only want what is best for us?

Today I listen.

My sponsor from when I was going to AA meetings a couple of years ago (but was still drinking and sometimes using meth) gave me my nine month green marble last night (at a meeting where they give out marbles, not poker chips).

I am so fortunate to have so many people in my life who have stuck by me through so much insanity. A lot of people didn’t, and I don’t blame them. I was so sick. But I’m getting better everyday. Life is amazing.

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like a fish

June 26, 2009 in just random thoughts..... | 1 comment

Shortly before I “graduated” from rehab, one of my Terminally Ridonculous Caregivers mentioned in passing during a therapy session that one of the men who had previously been living in my domicile (but not a direct roommate of mine), and who had already graduated, had “wanted to gut [me] like a fish.”

The sort of seething, simmering homophobia I encountered when I moved into that place was rank with hatred. It stank up the place. I raised holy hell to get out of there. For the most part the hatred was not overt, but I have not lived to be this age (40) as a gay man in the rural southeast without having a finely-tuned radar for hatred.

My doctor convinced me early on to stay despite my misgivings, as my feelings about such people was probably a part of my addiction and self-identity, and that if I was going to stay sober I needed to work these feelings out. He was right, but that provided me little comfort when he later told me someone that he and the other Terminally Ridonculous Caregivers had placed me in an unsupervised living situation with had wanted to gut me like a fish. It’s a little too vivid, right?

So, I found out yesterday that the fisherman of hate is dead. He died recently of liver failure.

Talk about mixed feelings. I feel for his family. I feel for him. At the same time, am I especially sorry there is less violent rage in the world directed at me? I wish I was sober enough to say that I wish he was still alive to grow into the loving person he was capable of becoming, but he was not growing in that direction. And I am not that sober yet, apparently.

He said some pretty hateful things to me on the day he left (I accidentally walked into a room where he was waiting before his graduation ceremony, and we were alone, so there was no point in bringing it up to anyone immediately), but when I asked one of my therapists later why they would let someone leave who was so clearly full of rage (his sarcasm and bilious, bellicose humor were his primary means of communication), I was told rehab is the starting point, not the ending point.

I was told he would take the skills he learned in rehab and build on them. And etc. Hate is not a skill. And now he’s dead.

He successfully completed a 14 week course of treatment by not drinking, following the rules, and saying what they wanted to hear. If he was a danger to me, he was a danger to himself, and they knew that.

Are my Terminally Ridonculous Caregivers responsible for his death? Are caregivers anywhere accountable for anyone’s recovery? No. Are they responsible for treating hatred? Can you treat hatred in 14 weeks?

He is the second person to die from the group of 20 or so that were a part of my residence during my twelve week stay. I graduated six months ago.

I am alive, and I am thankful. I am conflicted, but I am grateful for the conflict. When I was still using, I would have been glad he was dead. I was as filled with hate as he was. Today, I’m not. Today I am sad for him and his family, but also sad for me that I don’t feel as much sadness for him as I should. Progress, not perfection, right?

Is tolerating hate a part of love and tolerance? Is that part of our code? I dunno. More gardening, less typing, I think.

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the Great Reality

June 18, 2009 in 12 steps, meetings | No comments

The Daily Reflection for yesterday (June 17) took me a while to digest. Normally I just swallow the daily reflections whole without bothering to taste, but this one had something more to it for me.

It reads in part “We found the Great Reality deep down within us….. By coming to meetings, staying sober, and taking the Steps, I had the opportunity to listen with increasing attentiveness to the depths of my soul.”

For me, there should be a caveat to this reflection, because when I first started attending meetings back in the fall of 2007, the depths of my soul looked and sounded like modern-day Chernobyl, a sort of primal scream from a nuclear wasteland.  For one thing, I wasn’t actually sober—I had just stopped using meth.  For another, I was not working the steps (it’s sort of hard when you are actively drinking to really work the steps).  Attempting to listen to the depths of my soul in that state of being was unwise, unhealthy, and nearly fatal for me.  Taking meth out of my life without filling that void with something just left me empty.

When I did find the Great Reality, the greatness of it was very simple:  I could change.  I did not discover that until after I reached my spiritual bottom, until I got out of the car because too much time had passed, and the carbon monoxide wasn’t killing me.  My lungs were expanding with the exhaust pumped into my sealed car, and I was having a lot of trouble breathing, but those effects were not part of the plan—I was supposed to be dying quickly and painlessly.  When I realized that was not happening, and that I might be making a vegetable out of myself for my family to deal with, I got out of the car, went out into the cold October morning, and breathed, and called someone in the program.

That was my first step.  The Great Reality came later.  I don’t know when I actually began to believe that I could change.  It probably was not until after I already had changed?  Dunno.  Doesn’t matter.

My Great Reality is that today, I really want to live.  And today, I really do not want to do meth, or drink, or lots of other things I used to do.  I go to meetings, I stay sober, I take the steps.  It works.

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a walk on slippery rocks

June 17, 2009 in as I retire | No comments

Some program literature is better than others.  Is it all great?  No, but it is all worth reading.  At the very least, it is a better use of time than the entire weekends I used to spend watching porn while high on meth.

So anyway, I’m reading “Came to Believe” today, and I ran across the following passage:

“I can see no beauty in art.  Sculpture and architecture are man-made and cannot rival the Creator’s work.  How can we hope to better the Master who taught us?”

There is so much so wrong with this.  While I can laugh at it today (and I did), I remember the first time I came into the rooms in 1992, and would just become enraged at such nonsense.  Why print something that would be so offensive to so many people on so many levels?  The list of groups of people who might be offended by this includes (but is not limited to) artists (and their parents, and the families supported by artists), architects, designers, etc.  Art and architecture are a big part of my life, and have been for a very long time.  I have never met an architect or designer whose object was to better a Creator.  

People without faith who have been called upon in the rooms to believe in some vague Higher Power (“make it the group if you have to,” etc) are called upon by this reading to acknowledge a Creator (with an upper-case C) and a Master (with an upper-case M).  It smells like bait-and-switch to a suspicious newcomer.  It did to me when I was in my early 20s.  It drove me nuts, and gave me an excuse not to work the steps—it was all bullshit to me.

According to a Gallup poll taken every few years since 1982, at no point in the past 25 years has more than half the US population considered the statement “God created man pretty much in his present form at one time within the last 10,000 years” true.  Less than half of us believe in the creation story in the Tanakh (Old Testament).  

Mucking up a perfectly good twelve step program with thinly (and poorly) veiled religious references is not useful, as far as I can tell (or at best, it may be useful for less than half the population).  For me, an upper-case C in Creator is that same old hateful God who said I am an abomination because I’m a homo, and my blood is own my own hands, and blah blah Leviticus blah.  That lame deity has no more purpose in my life or my program of recovery than Zeus or Pan or Vishnu or Whoever.  Also, any god that forbids bacon cheeseburgers (also Leviticus) is just whack.

I keep it simple today.  I can read program literature like that above, and while I can acknowledge how unserviceable it might be to those who do not want to be sober, I have to find a way to make it work, a way for me not to have a resentment against the person who wrote it, the people who published it, and my sponsor who gave it to me to read.  Because I want to be sober. Program literature can help.  I have to read it.  This is how I do it:

 First, I look for intent.  Is the person who wrote it actively trying to convince me to convert to some religion?  No, he is sharing his experience, strength and hope to help keep someone else sober.  (The same thing I am doing here—I have no religious or anti-religious agenda.)

Next, I look for what meaning I can find (regardless of the author’s intent).  Here, what is the meaning the author is trying to convey, regardless of his (poor) choice or words and (pious) capitalization?  Nature is beautiful and I believe in a power that created it.  Fine.  Everything comes from somewhere.  We agree and I can move on.

Finally, I try to find something humorous (it keeps the bile down).  In this case, it was the upper-case M in master.  If that author could only have known how many future online chat room Masters would insist on upper-case Ms in online chat with their online slaves, he would never have associated his Creator with that upstanding group of leather-clad lotharios.

In this particular case, I can’t really find anything humorous about someone being unable to find any beauty in art or architecture.  That’s just truly sad to me.  I hope I never get to that point in my recovery.  I don’t want what he has, and that’s ok.  Fortunately for me, that’s not the end of the book.

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to the shore

June 12, 2009 in up(on) awakening | 1 comment

the willing suspension of disbelief may be required to enjoy life. just believe.Somehow, since I quit smoking a couple weeks ago, my coffee intake has probably doubled.  For most people that probably wouldn’t be a problem, but I’m drinking close to three full pots a day now, sometimes more.  Really has only been eleven days since I stopped smoking, and I’ve slipped four times since then, but who’s counting—nicotine anonymous ain’t my program. Yet?

 

The crazy thing about my coffee intake is that it has no visible impact on me.  I can feel a slight whatever, but I work with people who can’t drink a cup of coffee before bed or they are up all night.  I have a giant iced coffee right before I brush my teeth to go to bed.  I think I permanently destroyed everything in my body dopamine related.  My dentist/doctors are amazed by my ability to feel things at a point where most people are unconscious or anaesthetized beyond feeling or whatever.

 

A good friend in the program is moving away for a few months to take some classes, so I am giving him a party at the beach this weekend.  A bunch of sober people are coming out tomorrow.  Tonight a few of us will just be hanging out, doing the nachos and board game thing.  I’m taking some reading, some paperwork, buckets for shells.  A friend of mine from college who I haven’t seen in 20 years, and spoke with two weeks ago for the first time in that same time frame, is supposed to be coming to join us at the beach.  We discovered on the phone we are both in the program.  Now that I’m really ready to have friends back in my life, they are re-appearing.  Sometimes quickly, sometimes slowly, everything that needs to happen is happening.  Life is good.

 

 

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