Tales of Recovery from Crystal Meth Addiction
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I’ve been sober five years today and I’ve been writing and erasing this post for 2 hours now. I can’t seem to be able to communicate this without sounding pathetic, so maybe I should just say it in the most concise way possible.
Recovery has made nearly everything in my life better, except for one thing. I am still profoundly lonely. And I think I may need to move if that is ever going to be different.
This year we get a matched set of holiday mug shots. In less than a week mom had violated the terms of her release on bail and violated a restraining order. Sober people, and I mean that in both the physical and emotional sense, don’t violate restraining orders, do they? Now, even if her husband did tell her to come home, she isn’t above the law; and the law said she couldn’t come within 100 feet of him.
To be fair, I’ve done the same thing. Read the rest of this entry »
The last time I felt like this I was headed for a relapse. That is a terrifying thing to realize, but the last time I caught a resentment toward 12 step programs I wasn’t very far from heading out the door and over to my dealer’s house. I’m nowhere near actually using or drinking. I’ve even been able to keep the urge to smoke cigarettes in check. That isn’t to say I’m not acting out but I haven’t acted in a way that can harm anyone except possibly me, and even that is doubtful.
I have given up my service commitment at my home group and don’t intend to go back there for awhile because I just don’t feel like I can be honest, even in a general way, and be safe. I cannot rely on being anonymous there. I certainly can’t be anonymous here. I recognize that I am the one responsible for having ever had my real name attached to this blog and I am the one responsible for sharing it with people that I know. I accept my part in that. In 4 years though I haven’t had to monitor the comments for vicious, libelous, bigoted, and hateful statements. It has been so bad that I shut down commenting for awhile and have decided that none will be published without my review.
People around here are always patting themselves on the back because, according to them, there are “so many meetings” around here. I suppose they are right. We have something like 200 a week. After you subtract the smoking meetings and the women’s meetings (only because I’m a man) it is more like 100. Take out the 10 PM and Midnight meetings and we’re down to 70. I guess even that is alot, but I haven’t been to a meeting in quite a long time where I don’t know at least half the people there. And I’m sorry, but AA is not a hotbed of mental health. You know what? In all the time I’ve been going to meetings I have never “hooked up” with anyone there and I just can’t believe how many people either try to fuck their way sober or simply fuck their way through the rooms. I can’t believe how many people seem to have nothing to do except meddle in peoples lives and gossip.
I realized today that one of the people whom I feel so hurt by has always been a gossip. She has told me how she feels about someone she sponsors. She has told me how someone she knows feels about someone she sponsors. She has told me the flaws in other people’s programs. And through all of that it never occurred to me that she might turn around and say the same kind of stuff about me, or that she would say that kind of stuff to people who intend to harm me. Never occurred to me. I feel like such an idiot.
Here at the tail end of this really shitty month though I have had a couple of wonderful and deeply needed reminders that my staying on the path and that my sharing as honestly as I can is not meaningless. I’ve been reminded that when I do this it occasionally generates some good in the world. I am deeply, deeply grateful to Jonathan, Cody, and Stuart, three men I have never met, who reached out to me this week. If it hadn’t been for you I may well have abandoned this and perhaps abandoned the path entirely. Thank you guys for making a difference in my life.
Anyway, I know I’ll get through this. I need to step back and pull focus back to the real thing; away from personal drama and back to recovery. I know that I will have to find a way to forgive these people for my own sake. I know there is a lesson about recovery in here somewhere. I know I’m going to grow spiritually somehow. I just want to know the lesson and be done growing now.
OK. Enough ranting. I’m going to go work on getting spiritually fit again.
That I am not too well at the moment may not be the most obvious thing to those around me, but it is true. I am not too well at all. I have for some time now been trying to conceal the fact that I am enraged; that I wish for the slow and painful death of my enemies. I am so angry that my work is impaired, my life is diminished. I cannot fall asleep and once I do I have a hard time getting up.
I don’t remember being this unhappy at Christmas. Four years ago, maybe, but definitely not since. Maybe I’m just emotional, but God gave us emotions for a reason so I suppose there is something there that I can be growing from. So you’ll excuse me if I rant for a second, right?
I sent my mom off to rehab earlier in the month. My step-dad was trying to figure out a way to get her thrown in jail, but I managed to talk him into rehab and then I had to talk her into going. Hours of screaming. It took hours of screaming. He promised to do several things while she was away and he promised he would attend family week. He has done none of the things he said he would do and he is not attending family week. He is a flaming bag of assholes and I wish he’d die. But if he isn’t going to die, I hope my mom survives divorcing him.
The older of my two sisters has been a raving lunatic for nearly a month, (plus some 40-odd years, but who’s counting) and in spite of the fact that my other sister bought her a plane ticket to fly down from Siberia, she decided not to come and to blame everyone else in my family for causing her to not use her non-refundable ticket.
I have spent an inordinate amount of time defending myself against my step-father’s assertion that I am on the verge of relapse, an idea he is anxious to tell everyone. It is possibly a marijuana induced delusion, but he doesn’t have a problem with pot. He’s just an alcoholic. Ironic, isn’t it? That someone who claims to be sober, but isn’t, would be warning about the imminent relapse of someone who is actually sober?
I realized when I was barely able to keep myself from crying over it at a meeting tonight, that I am already fearing the day that my sponsor dies. He’s 76, I think. He isn’t going to live forever. I hadn’t realized before tonight, though, how strongly I feel love for him.
And just for a wacked twist to everything, I’ll throw this in. I haven’t thought about the Imaginary Future Ex-Husband in a long, long time. He crossed my mind briefly on the 13th which is the anniversary of the night he vanished on me, making my recovery possible, but except for that, he is not part of my consciousness. Tonight I ran into his brother at a meeting. He has been sober for 4 days.
All of these things, and more, have been weighing heavily on me and I have barely been pretending to be normal-ish, and I am only one more disaster away from bursting into tears and running away from home. I feel powerless to change any of it. I feel unable to even change my point of view or my attitude. I am not sure, but I don’t think I’ve been this fucked up in 4 years.
“But what’s to be done? What can one do in such a case? Must one despair?”
“No. It is enough that you are distressed at it. Do what you can, and it will be reckoned unto you. Much is done already in you since you can so deeply and sincerely know yourself.”
-Feodor Dostoievsky, “The Brothers Karamasov”
It hardly seems like the fact that I am distressed is enough. I suppose, however, that it is a beginning of a first step on the situations that face me. I have been trying ‘The Best Short Prayer” for awhile now, and it seems to not yet be working. I suppose if I just said ‘fuck it’ I would get up and go paint my bathroom or something. Pink, I think I have gotten all the hideous wallpaper down so I suppose it is time to do something. There is plenty around here to busy myself ‘doing’ – and in that I might at least find myself ‘being’ productive or distracted. If I found something to do for someone else, like Zossima suggests farther along in the narrative, I might even grow to again have faith in a plan and a purpose for me and a connection to a Higher Power that can solve all my problems.
“But I predict that just when you see with horror that in spite of all your efforts you are getting farther from your goal instead of nearer to it at that very moment I predict that you will reach it and behold clearly the miraculous power of the Lord who has been all the time loving and mysteriously guiding you.”
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.
I’m mostly okay now. Most of the time it feels almost like none of it ever happened; like my life in addiction was a bad dream. Looking back it is almost incomprehensible to me how far I had fallen, how much I suffered, how much effort and pain it took to get through to the other side. It seems like an almost impossible feat, particularly in light of the fact that the real insanity that gripped me before has never really returned.
I have moments of it. One shouldn’t think I don’t. I am as susceptible as any addict or alcoholic to be visited by the “strange mental twist” that is the nature of addiction. When I catch myself thinking, “When I retire in Italy I am definitely drinking wine,” I also find myself thinking, “It’s a good thing you’re on your way to a meeting.” When I find myself thinking, as I often do, that there is no such thing as God; that believing in “God” is as ridiculous as believing is Santa Claus, the Easter Bunny, or a magical kitten that lives in a tea-pot on the dark side of the moon, I also find myself thinking that not believing in those things should not keep me from having faith that there is in fact a “Great Reality” beyond my understanding, which has helped me stay sober and which I experience at times as “a new life, a new freedom, and a new happiness.” Again then I find the desire and the willingness to stay on this path. Read the rest of this entry »
It is impossible to live in this world being true to oneself and not hurt other people sometimes. Sucks, but it’s true. Since I’ve been sober it hasn’t been the case that I am “almost always in collision” with others, but it does happen. The Big Book mentions “collision” once referring to living on the basis of self-will, and collision is mentioned 2 more times in the 12×12; first in Step 4, where it talks about a collision of our instincts, and then again in Step 8, when it defines “harm” as being “the result of instincts in collision, which cause physical, mental, emotional, or spiritual damage to people.”
Figuring out whether one owes an amends for being true to oneself is a dicey mental activity. Were my actions really the CAUSE of physical, mental, emotional, or spiritual damage, or was the damage already there, waiting to be brought to light. I don’t think The Great Reality is that I am to be unhappy that others might be spared pain. In fact, I think if I had spared another inevitable pain by setting aside my own happiness all that would happen is that I would grow resentful and end up creating real harm.
I got an email yesterday from someone whom I like, or liked, a great deal; whom I had hoped might be companion material. I spent some time with him last summer and visited him last Thanksgiving. I think he’s a really interesting, intelligent guy but ultimately he didn’t spark my interest. Walking away from that with as much kindness as I knew how to give was incredibly difficult. I hadn’t prepared myself for the possibility that walking away was going to set into motion the reliving of so much old pain within myself, but it did and I ended up seeking outside help for it. Outside help on issues like that is a great thing to avail oneself of. I go to 12 step meetings for my sobriety and while the program may be a “design for living” it certainly doesn’t address everything.
Anyway, yesterday I got an email from this guy and it was signed, “The Idiot”.
What, exactly, am I supposed to do with that? I feel like perhaps I didn’t walk away with as much love and kindness as I perhaps might have, but I also feel like this person is saying I made them feel like an idiot; that a year later they still feel like an idiot and that they blame me for that and I don’t appreciate being the target of someone self-deprecating attempt at (unsuccessfully) causing guilt. Rather I’m angry and I want to retaliate. My M.O. has always been to run away and I want to run. I suppose I could write inventory on it but I’d rather just file the whole thing under “Your Problem” and cut the thing off even though it means losing someone whom I had considered to be a treasured friend.
Living by the principles has taught me how to be a friend. Perhaps it may teach me how to stop being a friend, too.
I guess one way to get a site redesign done is to get motivated by being hacked. There are still things I’d like to change but I think I’m on the right track; and I really like the header photo. God bless those stock photo agencies.
In the old days I would have just gotten mad and deleted the whole thing. Or dicked around with it until it was dead. It must say something about recovery if I find that I am able to look at the problem, work on a solution, and then execute the solution. A design for living that works in tough going, right?
It hasn’t hurt either that I’ve been stuck in bed for a couple of days with an ear infection. The antibiotics are kicking in and I’m beginning to feel much better. The other health problem I am addressing, or readdressing, is the whole smoking thing. I was actually off cigarettes again when I started dating that freak, who said he didn’t smoke, but did, and I’m afraid that I started smoking again. Every time I fail at quitting, trying again gets a little bit harder.
This time I’m trying Chantix. I’ve used a lot of outside help with my recovery from crystal meth addiction, so why shouldn’t I do the same with smoking? I’m 1270 days off methamphetamines. Hopefully I can get that last monkey off my back.
I’m still not willing to give up on the idea of a relationship, regardless of the reaming I received at the hands of my probation officer because she elected to believe a pack of lies she heard from a sociopath. (At the end of the lecture I asked her, knowing what she knows about addiction, who she really believed; someone who was sober or someone with a pending DUI. Of course she demanded a UA – which I passed.)
Back to the holding out for love. Maybe it will happen. Maybe it won’t. But I’m not going to let this experience poison me on the idea. And I’m not going to get high over it.
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