The Last Chance Texaco

Archive for the ‘promises’ Category

My body has been a challenge from the moment I got sober.  Things bother me that I would never have noticed before.  And I don’t know if it is that I’ve totally damaged myself from my years of crystal meth use or if I’m just some kind of unluckily predisposed to illness kind of being.

Early in recovery it was respiratory stuff; bronchitis, sinusitis, that sort of thing.  It didn’t help that I was still a smoker.  Getting through the first winter sober required several rounds of antibiotics.

The second winter sober required several rounds of antibiotics, too, but I guess they didn’t do much good if I ran around with pneumonia for 3 or 4 months, eventually needing a couple of major surgeries to get me better.  I don’t know how better I got.  I still have pain from the surgery.  I look at my back and side and I feel like Frankenstein.  And all that time, those 2 months of recovery, laying in bed, taking vicoden (as prescribed – but so what, that shit is hard to do when you’re “sober”) losing faith, losing hope, losing “conscious contact”.  All of that is normal, I’m told, for anyone in recovery going through what I went through.  But it’s been a year and some months later and I’m OK.  I don’t have the Burning Bush kind of Higher Power that baptized me into recovery.  It’s quieter now.  I have to look for it.  I miss the Burning Bush – but what I have now is OK.

I have convinced myself that my head is OK – but my body says otherwise.  A week ago last Saturday the skin on my leg became really sensitive, but there was no rash; nothing to indicate that something was wrong.  I thought maybe it was the length of my shorts rubbing that part of my leg or maybe my new detergent wan to blame.

Last Saturday I woke up with a full-on, huge case of shingles that was spreading before my eyes.  I went to the doctor immediately and I started taking medication to stop it within hours, which I guess is a good thing.  It continued to spread, in spite of the medication.  It seems to finally be calming down.

It makes me wonder, am I really the same as I was before I had half my lung hacked out?  Am I still so completely unaware of my mental and physical state that things like this happen.  I thought when I straightened out spiritually I was supposed to straighten out physically and mentally.

I thought I had been taking pretty good care of myself; three meals a day, going to bed at a decent hour, etc.  I thought that I was handling beautifully the pressure I’ve been under at work.  Then my body tells me what’s really going on.

I know that I must be recovering from my drug addiction because when I was using I might not have even seen a doctor.  This could have been much worse than it was.  Like that terrible relationship I almost got in to, I recognize when something is wrong now and I take action.  I put “first things first”.  The first thing to do when you can actually see the blisters forming is go to the damn doctor.  I guess that is what progress looks like.  One of the differences between me on drugs and me sober is that I see a doctor when I need to.

Maybe – just maybe – God is doing for me what I cannot or will not do for myself; slowing me down.

By the way, don’t get shingles if you don’t have to.  This hurts like a . . .

It’s easy to forget how things were three years ago.  It’s easy to forget how things were as I was first getting sober.  I’m lucky that I have a pretty raw written record of the experience.  It helps sometimes to go back and look at it, especially when it feels like things are changing.  And things are changing.  Everything.  All at once.

Rereading my early entries it is almost painful to remember the fears I struggled with.  Fears like wondering how I was going to make a living, the desperate loneliness I felt, the feelings of inadequacy and shame that plagued me constantly.  At the same time, I can see that in spite of all of that I had some glimmer of hope and a little bit of courage to move forward.  I had an eagerness to grow.

Now I don’t struggle with wondering how I’m going to make a living.  Tomorrow my partners and I are buying the company I work for, which right off the top will give me health insurance, a 401K and a very modest raise.  It also gives me a large stake in the future of the company.  If I manage it well I anticipate my share of the profits will equal three times my salary.  I’ll pay off all that medical debt from my surgery.  Pay off my student loan.  Sock money away in savings and make some financial amends.  My economic security picture has flipped, or is flipping 180 degrees.

The loneliness thing has changed substantially, too.  There are friends, of course.  There have been friends from almost the day I got sober and the relationships I have with people now are wonderful.  But it appears that I have also attracted myself a boyfriend.  A gorgeous, ambitious, successful, intelligent, sober boyfriend.

Its almost too much to take in.  But I’m liking it.  I’m liking it very much.

“Although financial recovery is on the way for many of us, we found we could not place money first. For us, material well-being always followed spiritual progress; it never preceded.”  -Alcoholics Anonymous

I’m still doing my usual routine, staying close to sober friends, attending meetings, writing inventory when it is indicated, seeing my sponsor regularly; the same stuff I’ve done for the last 38 months or so, yet I find myself in an odd situation.  As I have taken on a larger role and accepted more responsibility in the company I work for I have discovered that the reasons I have had my paychecks bounce in the past is only that my company is astonishingly mismanaged.  And that is unacceptable to me.  So I’ve written inventory about my boss and about my job.  I’ve prayed and prayed and prayed.  I’ve talked to my sponsor and with a small handful of close friends and family. Read the rest of this entry »

I never would have thought I’d have an opportunity like this again.  The end of my drug use, and even for the most part the first 3 years I’ve been sober, have been pretty uninteresting and I have actually become pretty resistant to change.  Variation kind of freaks me out.  I feel so secure in my little rut.  This week though, I’ve had to travel to the Central Valley of California to a huge farm show for work, something outside of my usual comfort zone, and I’ve been happily expanding my vistas.

It turned out that the city we are staying in is 3 short hours from Yosemite Valley – my favorite place on earth – and somewhere I didn’t think I’d have the opportunity to see in the foreseeable future.  But as I was planning the trip I happened to notice how close it was and that we had an unscheduled 10 hours.  How could I resist.  I also decided that considering how hard we’re working and the fact that I won’t have a real day off at home in well over a week that the least the company could do is buy me lunch.  At one of my favorite restaurants.  At the Ahwahnee Hotel.  Four courses of glorious, glorious food in the most beautiful dining room with the most extraordinary view in America. Read the rest of this entry »

I was thinking about an old post last night, Nothing You Can Find That Cannot Be Found, and about how lucky I was, that early in recovery, to have been protected from the worst of my temptations.  A little space for a little while can be a good thing while you’re getting your sober legs.  I was thinking about it because Daryl, who used to sell me drugs, and who has been in prison as much of his adult life as not, walked in to my home group last night.  It alarmed me a little, I suppose.  He’s not the nicest guy.  I was just thinking though that if he or any number of other people had been around at the beginning or if for some reason I found myself with crystal meth sitting in front of me, how hard it would have been to stay sober.

When I came to work this morning I found a loaded glass pipe on the side of the building.  I wonder at what point in my recovery the obsession and compulsion left me; at what point I became well enough to be confronted with a supply of crystal meth and to respond by throwing it in the trash.

“There’s nothing you can find that cannot be found,” goes the song.  I’ve found crystal meth on the street now.  I also found a way to not have to use it.

I am really feeling grateful for my life today.  And I’m feeling especially grateful for the time that I spent with my sponsor up in Atlanta and everything that has followed.

Friday night I got to take one of my favorite people, Jill, the friend who let me detox at her house, out for dinner at my favorite restaurant, just to thank her for helping to save my life and get caught up.  Dinner was amazing.  Dessert was breathtaking.  The company was as dear to me as life and I left feeling revived; body, mind and spirit.

Saturday a friend with only 14 days sober suggested we go to McCall for the day.  Now, McCall is hardly a day trip so I called my parents and asked if we could use the cabin they have there.  We headed up, drove an extra 30 miles or so to go to Bergdorf Hot Springs and enjoyed the waters.  We headed back to the cabin, grilled a couple or rib eyes, went to an AA meeting, and talked recovery.  We were having trouble finding the meeting location so I pulled into a grocery store and walked in and asked the bag boy where the Nazarene church on pine street was.  He looked at me and asked, “Are you going to the 8 o’clock?”  Then he told us that he had a year and 2 days sober that day; a little indication from HP that we were on the right track and we were meant to be where we were.

On the way home this morning we continued our conversation about how to do recovery, the barriers to recovering, the problems we encounter and the lies we tell ourselves that take us back out.  We talked about the solution to those problems and about finding whatever formula works.

A few minutes ago another friend called to say that she is sponsor shopping and asked if I thought my own sponsor might take her on.  A little twinge of pride set it.  “What?  I’m not good enough,” I thought to myself.  But I shared some information and I passed along the phone number.  We’ll see what happens.

I feel like I’m back in “the stream of life” again, finally.

I’m dedicating Patty Griffin’s very first love song to myself.  I hope you enjoy it.

I have grown to really love reading Last Chance on the Stairway, a recovery blog written by a cat who’s “experience closely mirrors” my own; not just his experience in his addiction, but especially his experiences in the first part of recovery.  Every new experience is so amazing, and experiencing living again is so clear and so bright.  Over each obstacle lies a new epiphany – the sudden revelation of the Great Reality.  I really loved that time in my recovery, and I really love seeing others go through a similar experience.

“It gets more difficult every day to remember the feeling of how much pain I was in then. I remember the insanity of the actions I was taking at that time—how reclusive I had become, how sad, my fits of rage, crying on the interstate—but it gets more difficult to recall the feelings.,” he writes on the occasion of his 9 month milestone.  He’s right.  With effort, I can still recall the events, but the feelings are much dimmer.  I feel them again when I look back at posts from the first year, so I’m really, really grateful that I had the intuitive thought that I should spill my guts the way I did.  Without having done that I might easily lose many of the most valuable lessons I learned in that time.

In my first year sober I was hardly employable.  I had a really hard time keeping track of time.  To some extent I still do, but having my schedule as clear as it was in those months I had the chance to go to tons of meetings.  Tons of them.  I had the chance to see my sponsor virtually every day.  I had time to read the book and do step work and I was motivated to do this thing and as a result I felt connected to the program and to my HP in a profound way.

As I became able to take care of myself again, as I lost that time to a job and school, that ardent feeling of connection subsided somewhat.  We always say to each other when trouble comes, “this too shall pass.”  The truth is that even the good things pass, too.  The more I’ve missed it and tried to grab on to it again, the more I’ve tried to pull it tightly around me, the more elusive it has become.

Today I find I feel closer to it when I let it go somewhat; when I wear it “like a loose garment.”  I sense it’s power when I feel it brush my skin, and I feel it slip through my fingers when I try to grab onto it.  My sponsor is fond of saying that this isn’t a program of make-make-make, it’s a program of let-let-let.  I stand a better chance of letting myself experience serenity when I let myself shut off the television, let myself breathe, let myself have time, let myself be present.  I’ve realized that I can be as connected as I let myself be.

Today I let myself observe the journey of another addict, much like myself, and it brought me great joy.

Namaste

After taking a coin for my 2nd year sober (today) in a meeting tonight I was surprised to hear descriptions of me as I was during the first part of my recovery.  My first sponsor’s wife said that she had been scared of me.  “Don’t let that freak in my house,” she had told him.  He’s not sober today and she has less than 60 days.  I’m not judging.  I”m just saying.

The book talks about the desperation of a drowning man.  I guess desperate people probably seem a bit crazy, and if I was anything I was desperate. Read the rest of this entry »