Perseverance

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It’s just like riding a bicycle

March 25, 2011 in Fear, Perseverance, Resentment by Chris | No comments

Twelve miles southeast of Boise is a dam on the Boise River called the Lucky Peak Dam.  In addition to providing we Boiseans with recreational opportunities, the dam also produces a modest amount of electrical power and helps control flooding in our city.  Riding a bicycle home from the dam is a really beautiful journey along our greenbelt. Over the course of 12 miles one drops in elevation by 96 feet.  Not much really.  Enough so that when you turn around and go back you really notice, but on the ride away from the dam the grade is almost imperceptible.

My heart failure is like that.  I didn’t really notice what was happening because it all seemed like a slow progression uphill as I was healing from my lung surgery two years ago.  It just seemed like I never quite got better but in truth, looking back I can see that my heart has been getting gradually worse for at least 4 years.  So I’m taking a beta-blocker and my cardiologist wants to do a catheterization procedure because he’s found out all he can from the outside and all that is that something is wrong, both with the amount of blood my heart pumps (left bundle branch block) and with my heart rhythm (supraventricular bigemini).  Needless to say, even with my precious health insurance, there is a cost and it will be painful.  But unless I have that surgery the most I can hope to do is cover up the symptoms.  Only surgery can correct it if it even can be corrected.

And recovery has been like that lately.  Well honestly I’ve been noticing the slow but steady progression for a long time.  I have noticed that the staying sober part has been relatively easy but that gradually, over time, the living has gotten more complicated; that placing my “trust and reliance on a power greater than ourselves” has become a distant, somewhat quaint idea.  I can buy into the small “h” higher power of the program or of reality, but the God “personal to me?”

The last three months in particular the living part has been almost more than I can bear, and I can’t talk about most of it because it will all likely end up in court.  I can say that my life is permeated with fear and resentment.  I don’t even believe in that Higher Power that everyone talks about and yet I have found myself in the last couple of weeks praying that it would reveal itself to me in a way that I could understand again.  I’m terrified of having the Mother Theresa variety of spiritual experience and not getting an answer until just before I die.  I am afraid that, like with the heart surgery, I don’t have what is required for me to get what I need.  I’m afraid I lack the faith required to have a vital spiritual experience.  I suppose all of this puts me solidly back in step 2, doesn’t it.

In my condition, it really would be a miracle if I stayed sober.  My sponsor told me that everything I needed to stay sober I learned in the first 30 days; that staying sober after that is like riding a bicycle.  I just have to keep peddling.

Four Years Sober

January 15, 2011 in Gratitude, Perseverance by Chris | 11 comments

Can you believe its been four years already?  Four years from the last time I had the compulsion to use.  Before that, in spite of my desire not to, the thought of living without crystal meth was impossible for me to imagine.

Like many others, I tried to get sober on a number of occasions before.  I was actually introduced to AA when I was only 18.  The longest I ever put together was just under 3 years.  I think the only reason I even stayed dry that long was out of sheer terror and will power.

I guess if I am an example of anything it is that chronic relapsers can eventually get sober.

The real hurdle for me was the part that the book “Alcoholics Anonymous” that says we need to “fully concede to our innermost selves” that we are alcoholics and addicts. Those are heavy words.  And like Chuck C. says, we are different cats.  We can’t see until we can see and we can’t hear till we can hear.  I couldn’t fully concede until there was no fight left in me at all.

This has been a hard year.  There is no fight left in me at all in more areas of my life all the time, and if the truth is known, sometimes I just want to take a break from all of it; from meetings, from the people in them, from the steps, from service.  But that never worked for me.  It has taken me 27 years to put together 4 years sober, so obviously all the things I tried before this failed.  This way seems to still be working.

Maybe if I keep doing it, someday I’ll actually feel like I have some kind of message to carry or be in better “spiritual condition,” but at the moment, I am simply grateful to still be sober.

Coming Home

January 8, 2011 in Acceptance, Justice, Perseverance by Chris | 1 comment

My mom completed her treatment and came home from Minnesota last night, and in spite of walking into a month of mail, an imminent divorce, and more, she seemed OK.  It was very late in the evening, and I could see as she went through the mail that she was becoming more and more distressed, her voice tightening and her hands trembling.  In the best situations coming home is a big deal.  She isn’t coming home to an ideal situation.

Home for me is in many ways the kind of emotional sobriety that I usually abide in.  Home is serenity, sanctuary, stability, safety.  Home is the place where I can be myself; where I don’t feel like I have to meet someone else’s expectations.  I haven’t been to my emotional and spiritual home since before my mom left to begin her journey there.  I need to be home and I have been working to get back there with a fervor and I have only just begun to get back there.

Mom coming home hasn’t really caused me to get back here.  Coming home has been the product of step work and prayer and honesty and it has been the product of how a Higher Power works in my life.  In spite all I have been angry about and hurt by, coming home, coming home to that place of acceptance and forgiveness, has helped me see that I’m free now from the noose I alone created.  It has been taken away, root and branch, and even though I occasionally snap back into believing that the memory of it is the thing itself, my conscience is clear.  And I am free now of the intense burden and stress that I have been bearing alone for so many months; I am free of it and yet I have kept my side of the street clean.

It is clear to me, also, that I could not solve this problem on my own, that without some work and some people with whom I am able to be honest, I might yet be trapped in an emotional landscape that is a continent away from where I belong.

Now that she is back in the dangerous location where she lives, I am hopeful that my mom can keep using what she has been shown in her own journey to her real home.

Another moment of clarity

December 13, 2010 in Gratitude, Living in Recovery, Perseverance, relationships by Chris | 4 comments

Wow.  Here we are 4 years after the day I first saw myself clearly enough, and was in enough pain, to do something about my addiction, and my life today bears almost no resemblance to the life I had before.  I am still me, obviously, with all the same flaws and all the same quirks.  I just don’t have to act on them the way I once did.

It has been close, though.  The last week in particular has been difficult beyond my imagining.  The climax was getting my mom “exiled to the hinterlands” (getting her on a plane headed for Minnesota to go to Hazelden) the day before I moved into my new house.  I don’t remember having stress like I’ve had that week since I still used.  My eye was twitching for a week.

After stalling and missing the first plane, mom finally arrived in Minneapolis just in time for the airport to be closed, and I got moved into my home without too much drama.  Only the garage door opener broke and the oven stopped working.

I spent Saturday unpacking and when I was done I went to the supermarket to buy milk.  In this new store one has to walk down the wine aisle to get to the dairy – and I have never wanted wine (and a cigarette if you please) more in four years than I did at that moment.  Fortunately I know what to do now.  And there were people there to be with me.

And like everything else, it passed, and it passed quickly.

Its good to be sober.  Its really good to be sober.

Peace.

Someone offered me pot the other day.

October 26, 2010 in Honesty, Living in Recovery, Perseverance by Chris | 2 comments

Someone who knows me; who knows me well.  Someone who has seen the progression of my addiction from its very beginning.  Someone who purports to be sober.

I couldn’t believe it.  The other thing I couldn’t believe is how appealing it sounded.  But I’ve been down that road before and I wasn’t about to take it again so I politely declined.  But, okay, here is the sneaky part of the obsession; after I had declined I couldn’t stop thinking about it.  Thinking things like, “was he setting me up?”  “If I wasn’t still on probation would I have taken it?”  “Do I really believe that marijuana affects me the same way as or would lead me back to other drugs, or have I managed to maintain a real first step?  Have I admitted and accepted as true my utter defeat?”

Promptly Admiting When I’m Wrong

July 14, 2010 in Perseverance by Chris | 7 comments

I hear people in meetings all the time say how they do a written 10th step every night.  Honestly, I cannot imagine doing that.  It’s hard enough to find time to do everything else that needs to be done.  But, written or not, I do regularly look back on my day, or my recent past, and look at my motives, and when I am able to, I try to make it right.

The thing is, now that I’ve been sober awhile, it is no longer the really obvious selfish choices that harm others that trip me up; it is the small, ambiguous details.

If I’m dating someone, or thinking of dating someone, when do I tell them about this blog?  Or do I tell them at all?  I can hardly keep some of the details of my past from them, but is it better to hold back on it or to up front with it.  And what if I suspect that I might actually like someone, and become afraid that my history will scare him away.  If I direct him to my story here then, am I not actually depriving him of the opportunity to get to know me, and then decide on his own what he wants to know?  Isn’t that a decision based on fear?

I did that recently.  I tried to scare someone off before he had the chance to decide for himself whether he wanted to be scared off or not.  I did it because I was afraid.  If I was going to be hurt I wanted it to be now instead of later, when it would hurt more.

If a person is curious it isn’t too hard to do a Google search, or go to a library and look in the card catalog for that matter.  There is more than one person with my name in the world, but even so, 8 of the first 10 Google results are me.  If a person wants to know they can.  The only reason for me to direct someone here is either for attention (which I wouldn’t rule out – some of my old stuff is pretty good) or I want to manipulate them into seeing me a particular way.

It’s a very fine line though, isn’t it?  Discerning our motives can be so subtle, and so easy to justify or deny.

Still Beating Myself Up

June 23, 2010 in Acceptance, Faith, Fear, Honesty, Integrity, Perseverance, relationships, Resentment, Shortcomings by Chris | 5 comments

There will be an end to this, right?  I’m still beating myself up for having been blind to, or simply ignored, all of the red flags that went up with The Bullet That I Dodged.  They were there in front of me all the time, from the very first time we met, and somehow I managed to dismiss them from my mind.

It’s a tricky little machine, isn’t it, our minds?  I can be going along fit as a fiddle, right as rain, and ready for love and suddenly, WHAM!  I become blindsided by something that had been clearly in view; something obvious to everyone but me.  At 41 months sober I feel like I handle most things pretty well.  I’m not sure I “manage” them, but they don’t manage me anymore.  Then along comes something like the notion that perhaps romantic attachment may still be possible for me and I experience all over again the same kind of insanity that accompanied my drug use.  I think this time will be different.  This time it won’t hurt me.  This time will be worth it. Read the rest of this entry »

Some days just crap on you.

June 22, 2010 in Acceptance, Fear, Perseverance, Resentment, Shortcomings by Chris | 1 comment

Today, for example.  After an hour of being yelled at by an authority figure who didn’t know what she was talking about and who was under the false assumption that what someone worthless told her was true, I learned that earlier today my sister tried to kill herself.

By slashing her own throat.

And there is nothing I can do about either of those things.  If “by this time sanity will have returned” means that I’m not going to pick up over this stuff, then it is correct.  If it is supposed to mean that I am impervious to the madness around me, that I am immune to feeling angry, afraid, defensive, and confused then sanity has not returned.

Right now I am going to act like it has.  Keep calm and carry on.

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