It’s Good to be Sober. It’s Good to be Alive.

Neither is really a condition I thought would persist for much longer as recently as last December. I am, quite frankly, astonished; both by how bad things had become and by how much better it’s gotten. If you show up in a 12 step program (like I did) and grab on to it with “the desperation of a drowning man” (like I did), a number of things become clear, not immediately, but pretty quickly, provided of course that you do the work. For me, one of the things that I noticed by about my 3rd month clean and sober was that some of the people who made sense to me when I walked in the door no longer made any sense at all. Others make more and more sense over time.

One of the men who falls into the latter group tells a story about coming to a place where life had become so painful that he decided to bring things to an end; he overdosed hoping to die. The very next thing he did was call 911. He realized that he didn’t really want to die. He just didn’t know how to live. That is a story I really identify with; not wanting to die but not knowing how to go on.

At one point, near the end of my use, I was sitting at the front door of a ‘friend’. The IFX was there. He was supposed to have come by my place three hours earlier, one of the times when I actually needed his help with something and one of the astonishing number of times he let me down. I tried calling from the security phone. No one would answer. I managed to get in and knocked on the door. No one answered. I sat in front of the door and waited. I could hear them talking inside. I knocked again. Silence. IFX was kind of a knife obsessed kind of thug and for some reason I happened to have one of his knives on me at the time. So there I sat, at my ‘friend’s’ front door, listening to the object of my affection, who’s neglectful actions were at that very moment mounting harm on me, and my ‘friend’ talk about how crazy I was (and I’m sure I was, obviously). I took out IFX’s knife, which he sharpened obsessively, and figured this was as good a place and as good a time as any to bring the pain I was in to an end. But, pressing the edge of that blade into my wrist, I realized how easy it would be to go that way; how a truely sharp instrument really wouldn’t hurt at all. That wasn’t what I wanted, after all. I wanted him to hurt the way he had hurt me and I wanted to stop hurting. I kicked my ‘friend’s’ door and screamed some obscenities, left the building, walked to the parking lot in the strip mall next door where the IFX626 was parked and there, in broad daylight, in full view of several onlookers, took his knife and slashed his tires.

In all honesty I felt some relief; enough to face a few more days, but not much more. Yet that was my condition when I reached out for help. I was afraid to die but I didn’t know how to live. I couldn’t continue on, yet I couldn’t stop. After the knife story I had just enough left in me to propel myself in the direction of someone who could show me the way out of the mess my life had become. It took several months, though, to discern who in ‘the rooms’ had a solution. If you’re new to recovery and you’re doing the 12 step thing the way I am, give yourself some time there. Don’t feel compelled to talk at each and every meeting. Be present. Be still. See who only shares when they’re called on and among those see who reaches out to new people. Listen for them to talk about hopelessness and about finding a solution. Find one of the people that does those things and who you think you might be able to trust, introduce yourself to them and demand that they show you how they did it. They will. They’ll be more than glad too.

It’s good to be sober, today. It’s good to be alive. By the grace of God I haven’t had to imbibe, ingest, inhale or inject anything to change who I am today and for a guy like me that’s a miracle.