A Letter to Dad: Day 22.

    Something really is different this time, Dad. I don’t know how to describe it other than it’s different. Not just different between this rehab and the last. Something different from my whole life up to this point. I am starting to believe that – even if He didn’t intend for me to become addicted to drugs and alcohol (although, who knows, maybe it was necessary) – God has a plan to use my experience to help other people. He protected me up to this point, and I have every reason to believe that He will continue to protect me. That obviously doesn’t mean that life will be easy, but I truly believe that I have been spared for a reason.

    Truth be told, wouldn’t you gladly trade a decade of chaos, heartbreak, and addiction for a lifetime and an eternity of serenity, faith and hope? I think that’s an easy choice. My addiction was a gift; because without it, I would have lived a life of materialism, humanism and faithlessness. I would have wasted my life pursuing success as the world defines it.

    I don’t have any idea exactly what that means right now, but at the very least I believe that God has spared me from the end so many other addicts meet (described in the Big Book as “jails, institutions and death”). You and Mom have spent your entire lives praying for me. God has answered your prayers in a big way, albeit in a different way than any of us would have ever imagined.

    I used to need people to be around at all times to feel happy. But I think that God speaks to us more often in those still, quiet moments. I feel myself becoming a little isolated from people sometimes. Not in a bad way, though. My intellect has always, always, made me feel a different from other people. I could always feel lonely, even in a room full of people.

    I embrace that now; it feels like preparation. For what I don’t yet know. But I do know that great leaders throughout history have always felt isolated from the people they are leading. I know that grandiosity is a trait that alcoholics exhibit in spades. But I can’t get around the fact that – speaking very honestly – I have leadership qualities that I have thus far neglected. And I believe that God spared me for a reason. And maybe that reason was simply to raise my family and minister to the people in my life. But sometimes I feel like it’s something more.

    Who knows. But my point is that I believe that God will continue to protect me. Relapse is a scary word to all of us, and that is the ever-present danger for a recovering addict. But the God that spared me through active addiction can spare me from relapse, or – failing that – spare me even in the event of a relapse. And before you even say it, believing that is not the same as setting myself up to fail. It is simply acknowledging that the God that has power over death has power over addiction too.

    I love you guys, and I think I may have just written today’s blog post, without meaning to.

The Group Dynamic

    One of the single most important keys to recovery is the group dynamic. Newly recovering addicts are not the most stable people to begin with, brimming with raw and new emotions, lacking coping skills, and never too far from any number of a variety of potential mental, emotional or spiritual meltdowns. And in treatment, we take a bunch of these poor souls – usually total strangers  – put them together in a powder keg and hope that they don’t burn the place down. Hopefully the result is something south of a disaster. In fact, it is the best way we know of to get people like me well. The results can be miraculous. Or….

When group therapy attacks.

    Treatment under the best of circumstances is a controlled burn, like the kind they do with underbrush to prevent full-blown forest fires. On occasion, however, things get a little too combustible. That is the risk associated with losing good people like we have over the last two weeks (losing in the sense that people were re-assimilated into normal life; it’s not like people are dropping dead here at the Notdisneyworld Sober Ranch). 

    Because the group dynamic is a fragile thing. One or two personalities one way or the other can move the needle from the “healthy-group-therapy-dynamic” setting to the “inmates-running-the-asylum” setting, to, worse yet, the “OH-THE-HUMANITY-LOCK-UP-THE-SILVER-AND-HIDE-YOUR-DAUGHTERS!” setting. There is always going to be an ebb-and-flow to the quality of the group. But it does sometimes go bad. And when that happens, it always seems to happen fast. The staff here and our trusty clinical director talk about the group dynamic like salty old sailors talk about the weather. They stand around with ominous looks on their faces, twirl their crusty sea-beards, and mumble gravely about how there’s “trouble brewin’,” or “this one’s gonna be a doozy.” 

    I’m having a little fun with my analogy, but the fact is, for those of us for whom this thing here is life or death, the group dynamic is awfully damn important. In a good, healthy group, we feel safe sharing our feelings in a group setting. I have discussed in these pages how effective that can be. People support each other and lean on each other. That dynamic is a wonderful thing. But it can also be fleeting. When a group goes bad, the gossip starts. And people stop sharing because they stop trusting the other people in the room. Eventually someone will relapse. Then what you have is Melrose Place, and not much else.

    And when you’re sitting around with the people who are left, the ones who are serious about getting sober, and you’re wondering aloud who the next leaders are gonna be, the ones who will step into the void left by people like R and J, it occurs to you: those people will have to be us. Me. Because in any group dynamic, there are going to be those who prefer chaos, tension and drama. As I indicated above, people don’t end up at the Notdisneyworld Sober Ranch – or any other drug treatment facility – because they’re well-adjusted emotionally and play well with others. Quite the opposite. So it’s kind of up to those who have been here for a little while to keep that needle on the “good-group-therapy-dynamic” setting. This is all part our natural growth in keeping our paddles in the water. And we do have help: our clinical director, as I have mentioned, is a get-people-sober wizard. She guards the group dynamic like a mother grizzly guards her cubs. She – all 95 pounds of her – is not afraid to knock heads together for the good of the group.  

Do. Not. Fuck.With. My. Group. /shoots lasers from eyes

    So it is a fair statement that we have entered a new phase of my treatment. It is no longer a luxury for me to allow the group to be shaped by other people. I’ll need to share a little more. I’ll have to communicate a little more. I’ll have to participate a little more. And, to a certain extent, I’ll have to demand the same from some of my new friends. Because this is my recovery, and it’s too important to me to let someone else steer it.

Day 18: Sober in Paradise.

    It’s just another day in paradise, and other than feeling a vague lack of profundity, today is a beautiful day. I suppose I’m being presumptuous to assume that anything I say is profound. In any event, I don’t suppose anyone is profound every day.

Not. Too. Shabby.

    I’m down to 10 milligrams a day of Suboxone. From 24 only 17 days ago. That’s a pretty steep decline, and explains why I have extreme lethargy throughout the day. It probably also explains some of the aches and pains that plague me, especially in the morning. Lethargy is the most prominent symptom of the “light” withdrawal  associated with the gradual step-down approach my doctor has taken to ween me off Suboxone. He will probably prescribe something to help with the lethargy for a few days to get me over the hump. One possibility is hormone therapy because past opiate addicts generally have low testosterone levels. My blood test confirmed this today.

    Interestingly, everything else checked out well. Liver enzymes, blood glucose, thyroid. A bunch of stuff I didn’t understand. And my resting heart rate was 47 and my blood pressure was 130 /81. I guess I can thank my parents for hardy genes. Of course, none of those tests demonstrate what is going on in the ol’ noggin, but at least they demonstrate a level of foundational physical health from which I can continue to build good mental health to complete the picture.

    I’m having a difficult time with a few people and boundaries. And it’s not necessarily the people I would have expected. It’s amazing how certain people who I do believe want me to get well have no problem blowing right through boundaries I set in an effort to maintain sobriety. Especially during this very early period when that sobriety is at its most fragile. They see drug addiction as a thing unto itself; the disease itself, rather than a symptom of a disease. The disease of addiction involves a lot more than just using drugs and alcohol. So it’s not just a lack of use that has to be maintained. I have to maintain a state of mental and emotional well-being the best way I know how. Right now that involves setting a lot of boundaries and sticking to them. Which takes some people aback. But as I am constantly reminded, this is my sobriety, not anyone else’s. And like a good friend once told me, I need to just not give a shit what anyone else thinks.

Get In the Wheelbarrow.

Can't type. Palms sweaty.

    Belief…or trust? I would have described these words as synonymous until an AA meeting earlier this week. One morning this week – I forget which: my days all run together – at my 7:00 A.M. (!) meeting, an out-of-town guest spoke about the difference between belief and trust. The difference can be illustrated by this old story with which I have taken artistic liberties:

Tight rope performer: Today I am going to push a wheelbarrow across the high-wire.

Tight rope performer’s wife: Oh that sounds wonderful! Good luck, I have total belief that you can do it.

Husband: Do you trust me?

Wife: Yes I trust you completely. I absolutely believe you can do it.

Husband: Okay, then you’d be willing to sit in the wheelbarrow?

Wife: …

    Therein lies the difference between belief and trust. We say things like we “believe in God” all the time. The people in this world who are certain there is no God number relatively few. The believers vastly outnumber the non-believers. But how many of the believers actually trust God? I’ll ask the question another way: how many believers try to control events in their life? How many believers manipulate people to get them to do what they want them to do? How many believers have fear? Anxiety? How many believers fret about tomorrow? (/hand raised for all of the above.)

The wheelbarrow says put your money where your mouth is.

   The answer is relatively obvious, but I’ll spell it out anyway: all believers at one time or another do all of the things I identified above. And isn’t it impossible to do any of those things if we trust God? Trust in God, it seems to me, means the complete absence of fear. Of anxiety. Of manipulation. Of fretting. Of doing anything but living in the moment. This moment, the here, the now, today: those things are God’s gift to us. And by fretting, worrying, being anxious, manipulating, etc., we in effect say: no thank you, I’ll pass on your gift of today, God, because I don’t know that you’re going to be here for me tomorrow.

     My anxiety, worry and manipulation are all rooted in fear. Fear that either there isn’t a God, or fear that, if there is, he didn’t really concern himself with me. Fear is the primary emotion I was trying to squelch with my using. If, as I have suggested here, trust in God is tantamount to the absence of fear, then trust in God is also the absence of drugs and alcohol. For me anyway.

   Buon weekend.*

* this is the only phrase I remember from three semesters of Italian, and one of those words is the same in English.

Keep a Paddle in the Water.

This is where that five-minute tutorial really pays off.

    Before they set you loose on grade four rapids at one of those white water rafting rides, they give you just enough of a lesson to presumably keep most of the people in the boat for the duration of the ride.  It usually works. Usually.

SON OF A...*gurgling sounds*

      The most important thing, they say, is to keep paddling. The act of keeping the paddle in the water has the effect of pushing you back into the boat. When you are in the boat and hit your first rapid, your instincts tell you to move to the center of the boat, pull your paddle out of the water, cower in the middle of the raft, and pray to your god of choice, lest you die a violent and terrifying death at the bottom of a rapid hydraulic (the scariest word I had ever heard when it was explained to me as we put our boat in the water).

    The last thing you want to do when panic sets in – and it always does set in – is keep your paddle in the water. The right thing to do in white-water rafting, as the right thing to do is wont to be, is completely counterintuitive. Recovery can be equally counterintuitive. One of the critical parts of treatment, is getting used to attending AA meetings (or NA meetings) on our own. These meetings take place off site, and we go to at least two a day every day we are in treatment. The idea is to get us in the habit of spreading our wings and taking the reins of our own recovery.

    As a newcomer, our instincts, when we appear at these meetings – which can admittedly be intimidating – is to cower on the back row and not participate. “I’m just here to listen, pass.”  Sometimes, that feels like the respectful thing to do, to defer to the veterans. And perhaps for the first time, or even the first few times, that is okay.

     But I believe our best bet for a lasting recovery is to put our paddle in the water. I have chosen to participate. I’m gonna say stuff. Even if it feels like the wrong stuff. After all, AA is predicated on giving away sobriety: newcomers are the lifeblood of the group. I would propose that newcomers should feel welcomed to participate (at most meetings). If I for some reason do not, I think it’s time to find a room where I do. I have come to the determination that this is something that is critical to my treatment.

A Good Meeting.

I was told there was going to be a camp-fire, hand- holding and Kumbaya, and I'm not leaving till I get it.

    Group meetings are a part of treatment, everyone knows that. The group therapy concept is fodder for mockery in an uninitiated popular culture. And I get that, the concept is a little hokey. But it absolutely works. I had a fantastic meeting yesterday, and I want to give you, my readers, a little glimpse into the inner sanctum of the Notdisneyworld Sober Ranch.

    Today, we heard from one of our own, a guy we’ll call J, who gave his “life-line,” which is a talk that everyone in treatment must eventually give to his brothers and sisters in recovery. The life-line is basically the Reader’s Digest version of our autobiography. It takes a lot of guts to give this talk. And the staff usually gives people about three or four weeks – at least – before they are asked to give their life-line.

   I asked for, and J gave, his permission to share this story. J is an affable, good-looking fellow just this side of thirty. Treatment has done him good: he is articulate, intelligent, tan, and has an extremely positive outlook on life. He looks ready to go home and set the world on fire with his talent and positive energy. So it was surprising to hear how the events that lead him to treatment unfolded.

   One of the natural things we do as human beings is size-up other human beings and compare them to us. That is doubly true in treatment; how do these people and their problems stack up to my own? Natural as it is that we do this, we’re not necessarily any good at it. I had J all wrong. Which goes to show that judgmental-ism is more art than science. And it’s a dark art.

   It is a credit to the work that he has done here that when I arrived, I assumed that J probably didn’t have a problem on the level I did (he was about 70 days in when I got here). After all, people arrive here in all different phases on the hot-mess scale: not all drug problems are created alike, or so my thinking goes. That thinking is flawed, evidenced by the fact that it only ever seems to surface in concert with two negative emotions: shame (e.g., “I don’t deserve forgiveness; what I did was too bad.”) and vanity (e.g., “Ha, my problem was way worse than your problem.”). I had sized J up along the lines of the latter: I thought there was no way he could relate to my problems. Until, that is, he started to tell his story.

    J talked for almost a full hour about his history with drug abuse, and we are substance-abuse soul mates. He was unflinching in his honesty. He wasn’t afraid to let us see his emotions. He cried early and often, particularly when he discussed his family, for whom he obviously has great affection. There wasn’t a dry eye in the house; I was overcome myself, several times during his talk.

    I connected with J’s story in a very powerful way, because his story is my story. So many features do we share: same substances, same crazy drug-addled psychosis, same feelings of guilt for letting our families down. J spoke at length about how hard it is for him to forgive himself for putting his family through such a long ordeal.

     The cycle of active use-getting clean-relapse, along with all the lies that we tell our family in the process, is devastating for our loved ones. And right now, we have nothing but time, and none of the crutches or coping mechanisms that we had before, so that guilt and shame is REALLY raw. As I have indicated before, I have been working on my problem for the better part of 15 years. I can’t tell you how many come-to-Jesus conversations I’ve had with my parents, my brother, my friends over the years. It’s enough to just about kill a parent. Or a sibling. Or a spouse.

    More times than I can count, my inner circle has had to stop what they were doing to try to put Humpty Dumpty back to together again. J’s story is almost identical along these lines. The pain I saw in his face when he discussed what he has put his family through over the years – particularly his mother – was like an arrow through my heart.

    I hurt for J, because I can relate to so much to his story. After he finished his life-line, we had an opportunity to give feedback. When it was my turn, I tried to tell him how much I could understood because of what I had put my family through, and I fell apart. And J fell apart again. Two tough-guys in a room full of people crying like babies, and no one was laughing at us or judging. Just total and complete silence and respect for two people that were working through some really heavy shit. This is why group therapy works.

    The most poignant part of J’s life-line was when he discussed his little girl. Almost the same age as my little girl. For a good portion of the time that he tried to talk about his little girl, J just sat with his face in his hands and sobbed. If we could have, every person in that room would have walked up to him and put our arms around him, and told him, “Dude, it’s okay; you don’t have to do this now.” But he did have to do this. He needed it, and so did we. It’s part of the process.

    So this grown man, with all the talent in the world and his whole life ahead of him, is sitting in front of us, completely unable to speak, unable to face us, unable to read his notes, unable to do anything but hold his face in his hands. So we just sat there for a few minutes, all of us in complete silence, until he was able to continue, which he did. This is a man who has been the most popular person in the room everywhere he has ever been. He is proud, intelligent and accomplished. He knows the joy of victory and the agony of defeat, in all phases of life. And because of his honesty, because of his raw display of emotion, because of his humility and his because of his willingness to share it with us, everyone in that room did some healing. And when the time comes, everyone in that room will be able to give their life-line. J set the example. It was one of the most courageous things I’ve ever seen another man do.

   I’ve known this man for 5 days, and he’s done more good for me in five days than my drinking buddies have in years spent together, getting to the bottom of a thousand bottles. J, your daughter is getting back her Daddy, your family is getting back a Man, and I have gained a Friend.

    Real men do cry, in spite of what you’ve heard.

J is on the left. The guy in disguise on the right is your humble author.

Honesty. The Only Policy.

In addition to being honest, Abe also spit mad game, yo.

     If don’t start being honest, I will die, and probably sooner than later. I don’t know how to put a finer point on it. If I did I would. Without honesty, I will relapse and die from this disease. I can’t directly apply my free will to an addiction and expect to get a handle on it. That approach would be doomed from the start. But I can indirectly use my free will to tell the truth, and telling the truth can in turn tame my addiction.

   I’m not trying to play cute rhetorical games (maybe a little): this concept is the single most important thing for me to take away from treatment. I’ve been in active addiction for a long time. I do not have a habit of telling the truth. For an addict to continue using, they almost without exception create a world that is built on lies and deception. Sometimes the lies are overt, and sometimes the lies fall into a category we might call deception by omission. But a lie is a lie is a lie.

I cannot tell a lie: I CANNOT tell a lie.

   It’s interesting to me that we have two Presidents who are noted for their honesty. Out of 44. Come to think of it, that sounds about right, and not just because Presidents are by definition politicians (and politicians are by definition – you know – scum bags). I think people who strive for 100% honesty are the exception, not the rule. It’s just not a priority for most people, which is odd, because most people are revulsed by the idea of a perpetual liar. But most people are unconcerned with the concept of “little white lies.” I believe that in my post-treatment world, I can no longer indulge myself that distinction.

Does this make me look fat? Yes. Yes it does.

   Lying is an action that is rooted in one of two emotions, both of which are fatal to addicts: shame and fear. Every lie is the result of one or both of those emotions in some combination. I posit that shame and fear drive most, if not all, of the awful things human beings do to each other. Think about it. Except for the few that are rooted in anger (which almost singularly drives violence), nearly every other negative human action or emotion is borne out of fear or shame. Prejudice, envy, gluttony, gossip, sloth, judgmental-ism, stereotypes, xenophobia; even that dragnet of all negative human emotions – hate – is very often, if not always, rooted in fear or shame.

   So I’m going to take my cues from a character from the real Disney World, a character who sets an example from whom we addicts here in the Notdisneyworld Sober Ranch could all learn a thing or two. So much the more that he – like us – learned his lessons the hard way.

Pinocchio: providing pithy analogies since 1883.

The Sad Truth.

This appears in two parts, due to length (and your short attention spans).

If Matlock isn't the gold standard, then I don't know who is.

I have lost a lot over the last 18 months. I hardly talk about my profession, because the toll my addiction and depression have taken on my family is preeminent. Also, I cling to a little bit of denial, I think, about the fact that I have created a world for myself with far less opportunity. In a lot of ways, this is the part that is hardest to own up to. A lot of people have families. Not a lot of people have the means, the talent, or the opportunity to become lawyers.

I am a trial lawyer. I was anyway.

I debated about whether or not to reveal what I do for a living for two weeks. I came to the conclusion that it’s almost impossible to tell my story without revealing that fact. Being a trial lawyer under the best of circumstances is stressful, demanding, and, at times, downright terrifying. There is a reason lawyers lead the way in divorce rates, mental health issues, suicide and substance abuse. It is a profession that chews people up and spits them out. And I loved it for seven years.

And I need to discuss it, because a lot of things in my story won’t make sense without this backdrop. I worked hard for years to get the degree of juris doctor and learn a profession that I expected to be in for the rest of my life. And I was really good at it. I am really good at it. But I don’t know if I’ll ever be able to return to being a lawyer. At the very least, it won’t ever look the same. I have burned a lot of bridges and lost a lot of credibility within my field.

I was making a six-figure income, I had memberships to private clubs; I entertained clients, other attorneys, judges. As you might suspect, I excelled at that part of my job. Which was part of the problem. In the south we have an expression for what I became: too big for my britches. I had a bit of a sense of entitlement, because, in my estimation, I brought in a lot of money in to my firm. I overestimated my worth. And when we got an across-the-board pay-cut in September of 2010, I took it as a personal insult. Suffice to say I would gladly take that salary today.

This period of my life includes one of the saddest chapters in this story on a personal and professional level, because it carries with it one of the worst human emotions, that of regret. I worked for a good man, and good men are not necessarily in abundance in my line of work. I worked for him for seven years. I clerked for him while I was in law school and he offered me a permanent job in August, 2002.

This was a man who cared deeply about me personally. He was a true mentor. He cared about the kind of lawyer I was, the kind of husband I was, and, eventually, the kind of father I was. He insisted on giving me the time to be a family man. He had a great deal of trust in me. And he set a great example. He was like my professional dad. I took a wrecking ball to this relationship. I’m pretty sure I hurt him in the process; he had invested a lot in me. He had even supported me through one stint in rehab.

We didn’t see eye-to-eye on everything, but I miss working for this man every day. Regret is a terrible thing; life is not a dress-rehearsal. I had an enviable position in this world – largely owed to this man – and I blew it.

I also worked with one of my best friends in the world. We worked for this same man. Our offices were next door to each other for seven years. Looking back, I had it pretty good.  I put my friend in a terrible position, because I was acting out in an extremely selfish way at this time. I know it was a miserable period for both of them because my friend wanted to try to continue to be a friend to me – he recognized a man circling the drain when he saw it – but he also felt loyal to our mentor.

When it was finally over in April of 2010, my boss wasn’t even the person I talked to on the phone when I was let go. I’m still devastated. I haven’t talked to him since. I had no idea how much this would effect me. Leaving that job was the real beginning of the end for me. There were some other fits and starts for me in an employment context (I held down one job for all of five days), but the short of it is I haven’t been able to hold down steady employment since the events described above.

And in a sense, thank God. Having a job and money masked a lot of things that were wrong. In fact, my status and my money prevented me from seeking help, even though I knew I needed it, and had for a long time. Somewhere around this time, I broke my hand and required surgery to repair it. Which meant a nearly bottom-less supply of oxycodone. Gas, meet flame.

So began the rocket-booster phase of my demise. It went downhill real fast after this. I managed to flunk out of a few other jobs – jobs that I felt were way beneath my education and experience level, as if that mattered. I had no sense of self-preservation at this point. And I was mired in the worst, most self-destructive cycle of active addiction I have ever experienced. My consumption levels of opiates, cocaine and alcohol were all at all-time highs.

What fight I had in me was all but gone. I didn’t care whether I lived or died. Even if withdrawal weren’t a constant menace at this point, I had a  crippling bout with depression that saw me lay in bed for days at a time. I would just lay in bed and think terrible things about myself. I would repeat lines over and over in my head for some reason. Like, “I hate everything,” “I am a complete failure.” I occasionally fantasized about dying.  I would sometimes just ask God to take me.

I had blown everything I had worked for my entire life. I had hurt the man who was my mentor. I was an utter disappointment to my parents, my kids and wife, my brother and sister. Embarrassed doesn’t do it justice. I was humiliated in a very public, very painful way. Mostly, I was just really really sad.

The worst part is I felt like I was a failure as a dad. It meant a lot to me to be a dad. My Dad had a plaque on his desk when we were kids that said: “Anyone can be a father, but it takes someone special to be a Daddy.” I truly believed my kids were better off without me. If you’ve never been there, with the combination of drug abuse, withdrawal and clinical depression, in addition to a (now-separated) spouse who reacted to my depression with anger, then you can’t understand. I love my kids more than anything, and I had lucid moments when I thought I was more of a danger to them alive than dead.

(I will continue this narrative in The Sad Truth II.)

How We Think.

“The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation and go to the grave with the song still in them.”

– Henry David Thoreau

 

I immediately connected with Thoreau when I read this phrase; it is one of the those pieces of prose that is tattooed on my subconscious. It’s really a simple thing. We are imperfect beings on an imperfect, fallen world. When – God, if – we come across something that makes us feel better – even for a little while – it is completely natural for us to do that thing. I would say it is inevitable that we do that thing.

Under the right circumstances, anyone would use, and become addicted to, heroin. The only reason more people don’t do drugs is because they have no idea how they make you feel. I’m here to tell you: cocaine is not an acquired taste. Yet there are a whole lot of people in this world who hear words like “heroin” and “cocaine,” and swiftly mount their high horse (named Judgy McJudgensteed). 

Knowledge is the primary thing (which is not the same as the only thing) that seperates the addict from the non-addict. When heroin, or cocaine, or methamphetamine or WHATEVER crosses the blood-brain barrier for the first time, the user experiences something that approximates the tasting of the tree of knowledge of good and evil all over again. It is impossible to un-ring that bell.

 

So it’s not fair for you, the non-addict, to judge us the same way you would judge yourself. We are operating under a different set of facts than you are. For you getting through a day without using means…nothing. You did nothing, you resisted nothing, because you know nothing (sorry man, no offense). But we, the addicts, know things. We know how every anxiety in the world washes away – even if for a little while – with one dose of a certain chemical. And if you’ve got a lot of anxiety, a lot of dissonance, a lot of sadness, or loneliness, or anger – knowing makes the doing all but inevitable.

 

Getting through one day under that set of facts makes me, the addict, a damn hero. This is why AA and NA are fascinated with days. Our milestones are measured in days. We say things like ”one day at a time.” Because a day can be real shit. And we know things. It seems silly to some people the way they give out chips at AA meetings. Not me. I see a guy with 100 days getting a chip and I’m looking at a freaking wizard. A quintuple-degree ninja blackbelt. I got more respect for that guy than the president of the United States. 

 

 

The one on the left is one of the first enablers.

Human beings have been getting themselves messed up since the beginning of time, because that is precisely how long we have been imperfect creatures living on a fallen planet. This is nothing new. What modern science has done over the last hundred years or so, is give us the ability to get effed up in an extremely efficient manner. Oh, and we made the concept of physical addiction more than a theoretical possibility. We are way beyond chewing on a coca leaf or drinking the juice from a fermented piece of fruit. Somewhere around the time we synthesized diacetylmorphine, roughly 1895, we unleashed a new tree of knowledge of good and evil on humanity.

As a species, we have not yet un-rung that bell. And I doubt we ever will. But the kind of thinking that creates an addict isn’t evil. It is characteristically human.

Day 5. Apple Jolly Ranchers.

I’m sucking on sour-apple Jolly Ranchers to wash down my Extreme Moosetracks (as an aside, when alcohol is removed from the diet of someone who is accustomed to drinking every day, that person craves refined sugars because alcohol is a refined sugar) when it occurred to my that I hate the flavor sour-apple. Then it occurred to me that I loved that flavor as a kid, but – I suppose – grew out of it. I wonder out loud why I never outgrew drugs and alcohol. 

Not a fan.

I would guess that at least half of all people experiment with some form of mind-altering substance while they are growing up. Yet only a fraction of us get addicted. I can remember so many kids – friends of mine – in highschool and college who it seemed at the time used a lot of drugs. And people who used hard drugs long before I did. The vast majority of these people – the ones that didn’t die or go to prison – just grew out of it. They lacked committment to their craft.

But that didn’t happen for me of course, and I don’t know why. I had a happy childhood and parents who loved me and supported me, so the obvious suspects in this case can be eliminated. Hell, I’m detoxing from alcohol and drugs at my parents’ house, with their full support. Seriously, my mom puts out cinnamon cakes and coffee for the nurse that comes and checks my vitals three times a day; I’m not making this up, this is actually happening.

To be honest, this idea – addiction – fascinates me on an academic level: that there are chemicals we can put in our bodies that make us feel good. I liked reading about drugs long before I did them. It’s like I have the most unhealthy hobby of all time; I walked right past the snakehandlers and bomb-defusers and plopped myself down amongst the drug addicts and said: I want to know everything. How many different ways we kills ourselves! Overdose is the fastest, yet it seems so…banal. Suicide, quick and slow, murder, hepatitis, bacterial endocarditis , AIDS, liver disease, I could go on. But we do it anyway. This makes addiction or – more precisely – this yearning for a higher plane, for the sublime, a very compelling actor in the human drama.

And I suspect that somewhere buried in here, I’ll find the reason I feel compelled to use. If C.S. Lewis was right, the world is but an imperfect glimpse of what waits on the other side. We see enough of it to know the sublime exists, but all we get here is a glimpse. Like a far away mountainscape that up close somehow seems ordinary. When it was unattainable, it was sublime. Well I can tell you from experience, drugs are absolutely a glimpse of the sublime. But it is ephemeral: the best highs are the shortest.

I’ll be honest: I’ve run from God the better part of my life. I’ve run for a lot of reasons: because it’s the family business, because I hate some of the things I see people do who claim to love him. And if I can be real frank, I hate some things that God has done to some people who are very important to me. Really really unfair things. Like hate on a level I can’t even describe. But I still can’t bring myself to say I hate God because I don’t know him very well. And I am finite. He knows things I don’t.

I’m not going to be preachy in this place, and judgmental-ism is not welcome here. But I fully intend to investigate the possibility that I’ve been using drugs to fill a void in my life that was intended for God. Or, put in C.S. Lewis’ terms, I intend to investigate the possibility that I have substituted glimpses of the sublime for the real thing. Like I said from the beginning, this has an uncertain outcome, and I expect this to be the central drama.