Day 16:Goodbyes and Butterflies.

Butterflies cause hurricanes. Jerks.

    There is a randomness to life. Randomness, in fact, permeates every stitch in the tapestry of human experience (too much?). And we humans do our best to whitewash God’s hand from that randomness. We devise things like chaos theory, which describes how small permutations of initial inputs to large dynamical systems (weather is an often cited example) have vast and wide-ranging effects in the outcomes of those systems. The oft-cited example is that a beating butterfly’s wings can cause a hurricane a continent away. Said yet another way, shit happens.

    But, although chaos theory gives us a what and a how, it leaves us wanting for a who or a why. Who made the butterfly and why is he here? Because of the randomness of the human experience, the odds seem stacked against the alignment of all the thousands (millions? billions?) of moving existential parts required to create those special associations we have with other human beings. Those associations which – due to specific factors of time, space and experience – are sufficient for us to bond with these special persons and become open to them changing us. And when certain events and people come together in our lives in a certain way, the role providence plays in directing those people and events becomes all but undeniable. Without that providence, how many ships would just pass in the night?

    Which brings me to J, who you already know. Today was his coin-out, a process with which you are already familiar. I think most of the people here were dreading J’s coin-out, because – as I have mentioned – J is a phenomenal person. He’s fun to be around, he’s funny. He’s the proverbial straw that stirs the drink (see what I did there?). He’s also kind, sensitive and considerate. So I don’t claim to be special in being sad that J is gone. But sad I am.

    The thing I can’t overstate is how important he has been to my recovery. Something clicked for me when I watched him give his life-line talk. He showed me what surrender looks like. What humility looks like. What vulnerability looks like. I have some pretty high walls up around the real me. I am emotionally unavailable, even aloof. Very few people see the real me. As a wise person recently told me, I am often afraid to let people see what I see.

     But J showed me the way. And I don’t think I even knew how important it was while it was happening, or even when I wrote about it. But something has definitely changed inside me. I don’t know how to describe it other than emotional honesty. For the first time in a long time – maybe in my life – I am being honest with myself. About a lot of things, but primarily about what I am feeling. Or in some cases, that I am feeling at all.  And I haven’t been able to turn it off since.

    As far as J goes, that was just the beginning for us. We were more or less inseparable after that moment. In this environment, 16 days feels like forever. So I feel like I’ve known J my whole life. Today was not an easy day, if I can be entirely honest and selfish for a moment. I was a part of the crew that took J to the airport. I gave my number to J’s dad, and told him to call me if something comes up. I don’t expect that it will, but the fact remains that a certain percentage of us relapse. And then we all hugged and cried and said goodbye. Then they were off.  The actual goodbye always seems so sudden.

    So it occurs to me once again I’m in a strange place with a bunch of relative strangers. I miss my kids. I’m coming off of Suboxone. I don’t have alcohol, cocaine, opiates or any of the other crutches I have relied on so heavily for the last 15 years. I have terrible feelings of guilt about my family, my kids, a marriage in shambles and a career that I took a flamethrower to. And I have this newfound ability to feel things that I haven’t learned how to control.

    J was a big part of me feeling comfortable here. He is a true confidant. I have others here, but he was like my emotional twin. After two short weeks he could read me pretty well. He knew when to ask if I was alright. And if I wasn’t, I would tell him so. I have known people for years that can’t read me like that. And to be honest, I don’t even know if I was all these same things for him. This might have been an entirely one-sided friendship. I hope not.

    Our attitudes, our preconceived notions and our prejudices are too often outcome determinative of the experiences we have in life. Furthermore, those attitudes, preconceptions and prejudices are often shaped by people – for better or worse. And, as far as I am concerned, J completely turned my attitudes, preconceptions and prejudices on their head. I’ll never be the same person, or at least I hope not.

   I hoped to have a life-changing experience when I checked into the Notdisneyworld Sober Ranch. I had to; I’ve got a lot of people whose lives depend on it. I didn’t foresee this. I have just witnessed the hand of God reach through time and space and rearrange some of the pieces on the board. I am thankful to have shared an orbit with J for a short while. And I’m going to miss him. Good-bye for now, J. I will see you soon.

   (Caw-Caw.)

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.

A Happy Medium.

Riding a bike. It's just like ...riding a bike.

I’ve promised part II of A Sad Truth, and you will get it. But tonight there’s something more important for me to talk about. I believe that there are people who visit my blog to find inspiration for their own struggle – I’ll concede that there’s a chance this is just vanity talking. But with the number of daily readers I have, there’s a percentage that I believe are reading because they hope to find something that is relevant to their own struggle. This is an important post for those people to read, and it’s an important one for me to write.

Let me note one important detail about my relationship with drugs and alcohol. I am at the greatest risk of relapse when I am on either end of the emotional spectrum. Too up or too down: those are the places I need to avoid. Both roads lead to using. I don’t think this is unique to me; it’s almost axiomatic: people either drink to remember or drink to forget.

Right now, I’m definitely up. I’m excited to be here at the Notdisneyworld Sober Ranch in an undisclosed location with undisclosed people. I’m excited to be around people who understand. I’m excited about the possibility of pursuing a passion for a living. And most importantly, I’m excited to be getting on with this new phase of my life. I feel like I’ve kept 15 years of creativity bottled up and it all wants to come out at once. Before I left home to come here, there were nights when I stayed up until three of four in the morning working on the blog. I feel this incredible pressure to make up for lost time. And it’s not just writing, I feel the desire to get back to art, music, reading…everything.

And I am savvy enough to know that this emotion will be a danger once I’m back at home. Mania is not my friend, and this feeling of wanting to get it all out at once is dangerous. I need to content myself with the eat the elephant approach to re-assembling my life. Same goes for carving out a new profession. Staying up until three or four in the morning, for example, isn’t healthy, even when I’m doing good things.

Incrementalism, ancient Arabic proverb style.

I need to be smart enough to know that relapse is series of decisions, of which only the final step involves actually using (or as the caption above suggests, using is only the final straw that broke the camel’s back). The using is just the tipping point of a pile of incremental bad decisions which, taken alone, don’t look all that unhealthy. But even though they don’t look unhealthy per se, they are irrational. It isn’t rational for a very recently recovering addict to be staying up until three in the morning, even if that person is engaging in an otherwise healthy activity. Why? Because it still represents excess. Excess is excess, whether the object is sugar, sweet tea, or cocaine. A mindset that embraces excess in one context has a hard time rejecting it in another. Why raise the degree of difficulty?

I am not a normal person. I am exceptional, like all addicts are. It’s not a bad thing in every context. But I do have to keep a wide buffer between me and danger. Wider than people in the general population. The “-isms” and “-ancy’s” (e.g., workaholism, co-dependency) the rest of the world labors under with little ill effect are fatal to us, because the road to relapse is paved with -isms. Working 80 hours a week isn’t good for anyone. But it can be fatal for me. Same with indulging an unhealthy relationship, indulging an obsession, doing anything to excess.

So the thing I am seeking is balance. A happy medium. The discipline required to stay sober is not nearly as simple as the uninitiated think. Avoid using, avoid people who use, and avoid places people use. That sounds simple. But it’s a lot more complicated than that.

It may be counterintuitive, but the recovering addict’s real enemy is excess in any form. And right now, the things that are tempting me are not the bad things. It’s the good things. I want to work on my blog and write and play music and create art and read and exercise and go to meetings and pray and go to church. And I want to do it all TODAY.

It is almost as important as not using for me to understand that I’m not going to make up for 15 years in a day, or a week, or a month. Rather, I need to content myself with doing the next right thing, string together some of those next-right-things into a good day. Then I’m hopefully stringing some good days together, and days become weeks become months become years.

The good news is that good happens the same way bad does: incrementally. It is overwhelming for me to consider having a good week or a good month. But I can make it from breakfast to lunch tomorrow. And probably do the next right thing after that. With that approach, I can accomplish a lot of good, almost without trying that hard.

That’s the plan. Tomorrow I’m going to give you A Sad Truth Part Deux, and I’m going to discuss how I’m weaning off of Suboxone, the only remaining chemical crutch I have. I’m currently taking 24 milligrams a day (which is a lot), so we’re going to do it over a period of weeks. Until then…