The Gift

A friend of mine said recently that gifts are ‘way overdone, nowadays, in our culture’ and have become meaningless. I disagree. It isn’t that gifts are overdone. It’s that they’re given thoughtlessly, that they are meaningless gifts. People I know maintain entire closets and chests filled with little ‘can’t go empty handeds.’ These items are often purchased the season before, from the after-holiday clearance tables, or re-gifts, often very nice stuff, but thoughtless. Receiving any such gift, in my mind, constitutes an insult. They are gifts of selfishness, kept track of and counted and used to support the delusion that everyone is inferior to them. The same epidemic of selfishness manifests itself in other ways; conspicuous recycling (driving the Escalade to the supermarket to recycle the wine bottles - I call them EcoYuppies), manipulative and artificial humility and self-effacement, etc. Guided to recovery for any reason, yet having reservations about stopping drinking and using permanently, these people usually become members of, as I once was once a member of, nice, middle class, church meeting, “MY” program, “MY” higher power, “MY” crack in the driveway problems, high bottom, “I’m doing this for ME,” “I Can’t Believe It’s AA!”

Three and a half years of that, never really knowing what it was to take a step, having read but never studied the book though I could quote it extensively, doing a program of fellowship-ishness and osmosis and in spite of myself, I managed to get God in my head and move God to my heart, but couldn’t even understand, I had no conception whatever, of what it was to have God move from my heart to my gut. Three and a half years of that and I wanted to die.

Even the Welbutrin that kept me happy enough to avoid the work stopped working. By then big enough chunks of my life had fallen into place that I thought I could manage better on my own. Thanks for the info. I’m sure it doesn’t apply to me. I began a rigorous course of controlled drinking and in short order ‘proved’ I was NOT an alcoholic. Armed with that information I could drink like I wanted to, which is to say I was more or less insanely drunk all the time. Now, I’m the kind of drunk that likes to get high, and I pretty soon decided that this alcohol shit really wasn’t hitting the receptors I wanted it to hit so I found some crystal meth and it was on. The craving had kicked in with more force than ever before. The desire to stay sober vanished. I had at last found the thing that was going turn me into the person I knew I was meant to be. Hot, funny, ambitious.

Crystal meth turns on an addict, often, more quickly than other drugs. My best friend became my demon almost immediately. I cannot even parse the losses I’ve survived in the three or four years I was out. All I know is that it brought me to my knees, but not without a fight. I’m smart and I’m stubborn. I’m not used to losing - well, actually I am but that’s part of the denial that kept me trying to control my need to get high. I suffered more and I lost more than should have been necessary. I believe all real alcoholics and addicts do.

It’s strange, though, how one’s demon, at least in 12 step recovery, becomes one’s best friend, how all that loss ultimately amounts to a gift from God, the gift of a first step. All that negative really did become a positive in the sense that it “bears witness to those I would help” introduce to God.