January 2007

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Day 16 – He’s Come Undone

January 30, 2007 in Living in Recovery by Chris | 1 comment

This morning as I was lying in bed, groping at the last dusty pockets of sleep and resisting the start of the day my “roommate” (I’m fortunate that I only have the one in my room, most of them being triples) started freaking out about the lack of hot water for his shower. Now hot water in a household of 13 is at a premium. One needs to cooperate. One needs to conserve. One needs to live “life on life’s terms” and those terms are that one may not always get a hot shower when one wants one.

Dan, I’ll call him Dan, flew out of the room. I heard a crash come from the kitchen and at that moment I decided to lie quite still. The next thing I knew Dan was running around the house with a butcher knife threatening to kill us.

Some people who take crystal meth freek completely out and some of them never fully come back. It’s not the first time I’ve seen shit like this. Dan is safely in a locked unit of a psych hospital now where he can get the help he needs and no one in my home was injured, thank God, but the fact remains that crystal meth is a poison that destroys lives.

Dan is a great guy, a wonderful cook, a conscientious (did I spell that right??) recyclers. He is handsome and witty and usually patient and kind. He has also inured possibly irreparable damage because of his drug use. I wonder if I have too and it simply has not manifest itself yet. Or perhaps it has and I am simply the last one to know.

I don’t know any more than anyone else how to get off crystal meth but I’m going to do it by God. I am going to find a happy life somehow. I refuse. I’ve lost too much to crystal meth already. I won’t let it take my shot at a life worth living.

Day 14 (aka Bad Treatment)

January 28, 2007 in Living in Recovery by Chris | 3 comments

I’ve deleted the name and address of the treatment center I have been at because I’m going to say some rotten shit.

Let me start by saying though that after I left the facility and rode a shuttle home (seven hours – better than 14 and half the price, thank you) I did manage to walk from the airport terminal to the Chevron station and with my last dollar (MY LAST DOLLAR, mind you) pick up a phone and call the NA hotline.

I got an answering machine.

We’re working on new behavior here, right?

I left a message. Revolutionary!

As I was thumbing through my phone book for a number for someone who could come pick me up and take me home and/or to an NA meeting the pay phone rang and when I picked it up I was ordered (very nicly, fine, whatever, ASKED! I’ve got your rigorous right here!) to deposit fifty cents. MY LAST fifty cents!!!

Shit! I’m not a gambling kind of man – I go for the sure thing. I win bets because I only bet on what I absolutely know. But “it was suggested to me” that I needed to “move outside” my “comfort zone” and reach out. So I take the leap of faith and insert my last fifty cents and what happens?

A nice lady who is manning the NA pager is on the other side and she sent her boyfriend to pick me up and take me to a meeting where I ran into people I know who got me home.

I left the treatment facility because I didn’t feel like banging my head against the wall of Catholic flavored prejudice I encountered in the form of the program director. He tried to get me to, among other inappropriate things, change the “flaunting” way I hold a cigarette for my own safety and so I could stay sober. I’m 6’3″ and now up to 200 pounds (now that I’ve put on some weight I can honestly say, child, I got a cute ass! woohoo!!!). I know my way around a Home Depot. I look, act, and sound like a regular straight guy (except for the sucking dick part and if you should listen to me and I’m talking about musical theater then you’ll see my true color shining through!) I could eat men like him for breakfast and not make it to lunch and I don’t care if I showed up in maribu mules and a Lilly St. Cyr g-string, my cigarette holding habits are none of his concern and his prejudice and subsequent manipulations left me walking out the door in serch of better treatment elsewhere.

Which is what I’m doing! I’m waiting for bedspace to open up at a well respected facility where I understand the staff have some training in the care and feeding of big screaming speed queens and other GLBT clients.

I could go on (and on and on) but there isn’t a point to that except to say to any of you reading this and thinking about treatment, find someone you can trust and can work with and then take that terrifying leap of faith. If you’re not in treatment but you need a ride to a meeting call the NA or AA hotline in your area and ask.

It’s really like Sandra Bullock in 28 Days – - – I too need to be reminded. I should wear the sign “Confront me if I DON’T ASK FOR HELP!”

Then I can get up every morning with a smile on my face and show the world (this wicked little town) all the love in my heart (something beautiful and new). And the fact that I get to get up to do that today is a miracle.

Day 5 – Revisited

January 19, 2007 in Living in Recovery by Chris | 4 comments

The last thing I did before I took the 14 hour bus ride to Pocatello was get high. That’s sexy isn’t it? Shooting up in the bathroom of a Greyhound station? There’s a way to meet quality friends.

So then I’m trapped on a bus for fourteen hours wishing I could fuck the young russian man next to me.

Then show up at treatment crashing. So wow.

But I’m here now and even though I’m pretty post-acute (yesterday especially) I’m doing better. I still don’t sleep through the night. I seem to have to be high to do that. Perhaps it’s just anxiety and it will subside.

I’ll be here at least another month.

Internet access isn’t really available to me so I won’t really be writing for awhile; just something short once a week.

thanks

The Begining of Recovery – Final Post on the Random Journal Blog

January 14, 2007 in Hope by Chris | Permalink

I’ll be gone for awhile. I’m checking in to a rehab and I expect I’ll be gone for at least a month. I just need to do something about this problem before someone does something about it for me.

I’m not happy. I’m not content. I don’t want to go on living like this. And while there is still the possibility of salvaging a happy life out of the wreckage that I’ve become I figure I owe it to myself to do what I can to fix this.

At this point I’ve tried everything but in-patient treatment so that’s the route I’ll try next. I’ll be going to Road to Recovery in Pocatello, Idaho. I hear they’re pretty good so I expect that I will make some progress there. I’ve been sober more days now than I have been at any point in more than a year and that’s a good feeling. But I’m going to ask for your prayers again. I’m not too proud to ask for divine intervention.

The first time I tried crystal meth I knew that it was going to be a problem. It was the first time in my life I had ever felt OK inside my skin. That was 18 years ago. The most clean time I’ve put together since then is three years. But I can’t go on living to use and using to live. I haven’t been happy in forever. So I figure while I’ve still got one more recovery in me I may as well make the most of it and pull out the big guns just to see if it helps.

I’ll try to be in touch, to let you know what’s going on but I don’t know if I’ll be able to or even if they have Internet access available there. If you don’t hear from me before, look for new posts beginning Feb. 16; new posts all about my new life in sobriety and hopefully new posts that are more worth reading.

Until then, may God bless and keep you.

Day 9 Off Crystal Meth

January 13, 2007 in Living in Recovery by Chris | 1 comment

If you had asked me yesterday at this time how I was doing I would have told you that, for the moment anyway, I had been relieved of that odd hook that has always followed me with this addiction; the regret that I had not gotten high one more time. It left me temporarily.

It’s back today.

Perhaps it’s just that there is so much to do before I head off to treatment or perhaps I stayed up too late last night or perhaps the number of days that I’ve gone without sleeping through the night is finally catching up with me or perhaps perhaps perhaps . . .

Today I wish I could just get high one more time; to say “goodbye” to my lover of so many years. Like many relationships it has ended badly. It’s taken virtually everything I own. What gets me is that my pride was the last thing to go. I could have saved so many of my material possessions if only that had fallen away first. I guess the material stuff helped to fool me into believing that everything was all right when really things were horrible.

The other thing thats going on is I’m getting a cold. I haven’t really hung out with a bunch of people in closer quarters nonstop for ages so I’m probably just getting used to being around all those germs but look, I wash my hands with hospital grade antimicrobial soap at least ten times a day. I avoid putting my hands near my face and yet my chest and throat feel RAW. I’m supposed to head off to the inpatient program here in two days and I just know that I’ll spend the first ten days just being sick. Crap.

Crap. Crap. Shitty-shit fuck.

And my head hurts.

And my sinuses.

And I KNOW if I could just get high I’d feel better.

goddamnit!

but that’s my life. and I know my brain is just playing that amazing trick of telling me how much fun KILLING MYSELF would be.

If you’re trying to get off crystal here’s my advise: DON’T LISTEN TO WHAT YOUR HEAD TELLS YOU. It’s like that song from Grease but inside out. My heart is saying “fool! forget it!” My head is saying “don’t let it go!”

Day 8 Off Crystal Meth

January 12, 2007 in Living in Recovery by Chris | Permalink

I’m not sure if I know what I was getting myself in to moving into the Compas House. It’s a theraputic community run by S.H.I.P., Inc. which is a not-for-profit here in Boise that helps people in recovery stay sober and have access to affordable housing. The “TC” includes housing which I share with nine other guys, food, transportation and classes/classes/classes, case management, and just about everything else I can think of.

Here’s the rub. I’m the kind of guy that thinks hell is other people. I listen to music that few in the criminal justice system have ever listened to (thank you for moving me Kasey Chambers and Patty Griffin) and my serenity has a positive relationship to how well I feel understood. I’m not ‘out’ but you’d have be stupid to not notice and there is a certain level of gay ‘humor’ that goes along with any group of straight guys that makes me a little uncomfortable.

That notwithstanding, I feel I’m in the right place. My energy is comming back. I feel lucid. I seem to be able to complete most things. I still find concentrating to be a bit difficult but I feel stronger physically. I still feel like my best friend died, but Tina was a terrible friend and in spite of feeling like I’m on the right path I feel sad about the future. And about the past. I still feel like it would have been easier to die.

Day 6 Off Crystal Meth

January 10, 2007 in Living in Recovery by Chris | No comments

On one of the blogs I love I noticed this morning that I’m apparantly not the only one going through this. I guess things are shitty all over. Oddly, that makes me feel good.

I don’t sleep through the night anymore. I have a hard time concentrating. It may take me 4 or 5 sittings to finish this post. But yesterday I closed probably the last door on my using. I’m checking into a theraputic community for the next six days while I wait to go to treatment. They do random UAs so there won’t be any more partying as long as I want to keep a roof over my head.

I feel incredibly anxious all the time. Paradoxically, to look at me I seem calmer and more serene than I’ve looked in two years.

Every bone in my body hurts. Especially my spine, which has osteoarthritis.

I wanted to go stay with my grandmother for the week while I waited to go to treatment. She lives close to the facility and 300 miles from anywhere that I know I could score. But she turned me down. My grandmother wouldn’t let me come stay for a couple of days. Ouch.

Yes. I resent it. I realize it’s probably my own actions that caused it but isn’t blood thicker than water? It’s not like I’ve ever asked her for anything. Then I remember she’s the old bitch who told me that my mother should be strung up and horse whipped. (Any more I’m reluctant to argue against that but you don’t say that to a 14 year old who’s father has taken off to europe with some bottle-blonde and who hasn’t paid child support.)

I don’t know what kind of access I’ll have to the internet so if i drop off for 34 days don’t be too alarmed. But, today is day six. And God willing I’ll have one more.

Early Days of Recovery from Methamphetamine Addiction

January 9, 2007 in Living in Recovery by Chris | Permalink

This is day 5. I can’t tell you about the first 4 days. I wasn’t here for them. Not much anyway. I spent the better part of them sleeping. And eating. I think I’ve gained ten pounds since I last used. I want to get high so bad right now I can hardly stand it. I hate the thought of going to an NA meeting (bullshit). Sorry. I’ve eaten so much I’m sick. Technically I’m homeless at the moment. Staying with friends. Mormons. A nice safe family. Someone who can make sure that in 7 days I get on the bus for Pocatello for in-patiend treatment.

I’m not sure what I hope to accomplish here but if you want to know what getting off crystal meth is really like I hope you’ll see it here. If you’ve never used meth, don’t. If you use now, stop. Choose Life.

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