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.
That is my favorite phrases in the book “Alcoholics Anonymous.” It is part of chapter 1, Bill’s Story and it is in a place where he has described his life and his alcoholism to that point in pretty graphic and heartbreaking detail. “Gradually things got worse,” he says, though one can hardly imagine how. Things in life are like that. Sometimes you cannot tell anything is wrong at all until, seemingly suddenly, they are terrible and then looking back you can see that you’ve been ambling down a gentle slope for a long time.
I started a part-time job recently; a little extra income to keep my hefty health insurance bill paid. After enduring what I went through two years ago I hope never to be without care again. So I got this little job at a discount retail store as a sales associate in the home goods and furniture department. The were happy to capitalize on the fact that I am 6’4″ and I was happy to have a little extra structure in my life that has lately been an emotional, economic, and professional free fall. And on my 2nd day at work I was asked to carry a large terra cotta pot to the front of the store.
I could not catch my breath. The effort required to do that simple thing shocked me. That small event drew my attention to the symptom and I noticed that breathing was often hard for me, even at rest. I remembered shooting a small video with my cell phone back in December and noticing that it’s most pronounced feature was the sound of me breathing. Well, having worked to maintain health insurance I took myself to the doctor’s office.
My own physician was booked several days out but the nurse suggested that my symptoms dictated that I be seen immediately so I came into the office, fully expecting that they would listen to my lungs, prescribe some kind of inhaler or pill or both and send me on my way, symptom free. They did listen to my lungs, and heart, and then they strapped an ECG on me, ran the test for several minutes, and sent me off to the emergency room.
If you have ever walked into an emergency room with cardiac symptoms you know it is a really different experience than a regular ER visit. I was scooped up in a wheel chair and rushed into the back faster than I could say infarction and within seconds a swarm (probably not the right word for a group of medical professionals) of people in scrubs surrounded me, putting stickers and electrodes on me, piercing my skin and drawing blood, hooking up IVs and sticking oxygen under my nose, and asking me questions.
The doctor, who to my delight was one of the most attractive young men I have ever seen, was in the room in record time. I love that young doctors tend to introduce themselves by their first and last names rather than Dr. Last Name the way older ones do. It makes me more comfortable. He had his stethoscope all over me with his lovely blue eyes closed and his head tilted and I am pretty sure my heart was beating out “I love you” in Morse code.
This post will come to talk about my experience, strength, and hope regarding my addiction, but that is going to happen in part 2. Right now I have to go to work so I can keep myself covered with health insurance.
I seem to be less possessed of hate today, so that’s nice. It isn’t that I don’t still hate; it just doesn’t seem to own me today. So that’s good news. There are still a couple of people that I feel I can be honest with safely and I’m glad of that. There is also a new cat that has started popping up in meetings.
Scott, the dude who helped me get high as I was getting on the bus to go to treatment, is out of prison and going to meetings. He got arrested not long after I got out of treatment and in his mugshot he looked dead. I always liked Scott, not because of the drugs, but because Scott is really smart and really funny. He comes from a really good family. He grew up in a way very similar to the way I grew up. And at the end of our using, he and I would talk. We both knew we had to find a way to stop. We knew if we didn’t we would end up in prison or dead. But the only time we felt good enough to discuss it was when we were high. We understood the irony of that, too.
So when we could no longer distract ourselves by making mandala out of Jelly-Bellies or taking pictorial essays of Ken dolls in flagrante delicto, we would talk about our fears about trying to get sober again and we would wonder if it was possible. He told me that as I was getting out of his car to get on the bus to go to treatment, high out of my mind remember, I asked him if he wanted a can of tuna. He said he didn’t, so I produced one from my pocket and gave it to him anyway.
After he told me that I had the vaguest recollection of it and I’m sure its true, but I really thought my behavior was more ‘normal’ than that. That kind of crazy probably really is beyond the reach of human aid.
Anyway, I hope he sticks around.
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.
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.
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.
I forgive you because hating you takes too much out of me. I would rather hate you, but every moment I spend doing that blocks me a little more from “the sunlight of the spirit” without which I cannot long survive.
I forgive you for lying to me about your love and support of me and my family. I forgive you for lying to me about your motivations. I forgive you for trying to harm my mother and I forgive you for stealing from me. I forgive you for calling my mother in rehab to tell her that I have relapsed – when I haven’t. I forgive you for being intentionally cruel and manipulative. I forgive you because I know how sick you really are. I have known it for 28 years and I have ignored it, for my own selfish reasons, for as long as I can.
I didn’t back off when I should have and I own that. But I forgive you for the harm you did between then and now.
“Perhaps there are some individuals I should back away from as soon as I meet them. However, there’s a difference between dismissing a person because I am being controlled by some mindless, reflexive bias, and my ridding my life of an individual whom I can see –because I am looking clearly– bears me no goodwill.” Hugh Prather, Notes on Love and Courage
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