There are parts of my experience at the end of my use and in the early part of my recovery that I have been hard pressed to imagine would ever be an asset; something I could share to help another addict recover, chief among them my relationship with Dan, the Imaginary Future Ex-Husband (IFX). Dan’s skill at using my lonliness at the end of my using days, his disappearance on my birthday, and most particularly his extrarodinary meanness when he got out of prison and started showing up in 12 step meetings places him at the center of some of the most painful moments of my life. Read the rest of this entry »
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Tonight I witnessed one of the greatest acts of faith and willingness I’ve ever seen in someone new to recovery. I don’t even know what word describes how I feel. Fulfilled. Grateful. Sruprised, Happy. Blessed. I don’t know. Full. I feel full.
I’ve been spending more time with the Cheerleader lately and I’ve been doing it because he’s been reaching out. I’m probably the only guy in town who understands about what it is to be a gay man in early recovery from crystal meth addiction that actively makes himself available to other men trying to get clean. Maybe not, but when I was trying to get clean I had a hard time even finding honest voices out in the blogosphere. Marc and Rod were the first and only for quite awhile. Read the rest of this entry »
I didn’t have to work yesterday and I got up pretty early with the intention of getting a bunch of chores done. By 10 o’clock I realized that unless I got up and left the house for awhile that nothing was going to get done, There is a Sunday morning meeting here that is very popular and that, being like I am, I haven’t attended in many months, so I thought maybe I’d go. I got on my scooter at a quarter to 11 and headed over to the Sunday Spiritual Meeting, only to find that it started at 10. Read the rest of this entry »
Whatever 12 step program (or programs) we come from, we are a fellowship; “an elite group of experienced people who work together as peers”*, sharing our experience, strength, and hope with each other in the pursuit of a solution to our common problem and to help others to recover.
My sponsor/mentor/adviser/friend, a man who has been sober for 38 years, told me that there have been times when he’s shared at meeting level something painful he’s going through that other people have told him that he must not share things like that at meetings because he’ll scare off newcomers. They’ll think this thing doesn’t work. The fact that he’s managed to go through life sober for decades won’t speak for itself.
I couldn’t disagree more. One of the reasons that I chose Joe as my sponsor is the fact that he talks about what is really going on in his life, how difficult it is sometimes to pick up the tools, how practicing this program works, both in terms of how we practice it and in terms of the results we get. By sharing more than just his drunk-o-logue and letting people know what’s really going on with him, I was able to see that at the level of recovery we are peers. None of us are better or worse. Some of us just have more experience staying sober.
I also saw the power that sharing our experience has to help others step out of our personal dungeons of despair and into the solution.
I started keeping this blog on January 9, 2007. It was my 5th day clean. I relapsed 6 days later, right before I got on a bus to go to treatment. Through all of that and since then I have used this blog as a means to share my experience, as a meditation, as a prayer, as an inventory, all with the secondary objective of showing others that people like me do recover, if only for today.
I don’t spout too much 12 step history here. It’s not my history. I haven’t found that I need to rewrite my story or to deny what I’m experiencing in life in order to show that we recover. I share my story because I’ve learned that when I do, when I write about what’s really going on in my life, I get the support I need to make it through another day sober, I get closer to being the person my Creator intends me to become, and sometimes, someone says, “I wanted to thank you so much for posting about [that]. It’s given me the courage to finally start posting about [my] issues. And that has been good for me. Not only that, but other people have been reaching out to me [for help].”
And isn’t that our primary purpose?
In the late 80s and early 90s they were not an uncommon site along the freeways leaving downtown Los Angeles; huge condo projects festooned with banners that read “If you lived here you’d be home now.” When the topic was brought up at a meeting, what are you doing today for your recovery, it’s what I immediately thought of. In the rooms we usually hear the same sentiment described as, “I live in the rooms and visit the world.”
I’m an egomaniac. I like my way better. Read the rest of this entry »
You may have noticed a link at the bottom of my sidebar for Me Not Meth -a project of the California Department of Alcohol and Drug Programs. I’m giving them an extra plug here because they bribed me with a groovy t-shirt.
Yes. I’m cheap. Read the rest of this entry »
Over the last couple of days I’ve occupied my spare time building a custom search engine using Google’s search service. You’ll find it at the top of my sidebar. I have painstakingly included every single blog listed on the Top 100 Sober Blogs to be the exclusive sites searched for results on this engine. In other words, I’ve built a search engine that compiles the collected experience, strength and hope of over 150 sober bloggers. In the interest of full disclosure I should point out that I directly benefit from the Google advertising on the results pages and that may actually make this blog become self supporting. It is certainly better than placing advertising directly on the blog. But I also thought that it would be a great thing to have, a search engine that was specific to those in recovery looking for personal stories.
If any of you are interested in placing this search box on your own blog or if you’re interested in adding other blogs to the engine send me an email – outofgas@thelastchancetexaco.com – and I’ll send you the code to include or add the blog.
Peace out.
I spent yesterday in service to AA. I began the day at 7 AM with my friends Owen and Robert driving to Oregon to attend my first Area Assembly, the semi-annual meeting where the General Service Representatives (me) from around southern Idaho (the area) gather to conduct the business of Alcoholics Anonymous. It is intensly, what’s the word? Boring. It really is amazing to me that when you get a group of 150 alcoholics in a room that anything productive gets done at all.
I used to have a terrible bias against the service structures of AA, thinking that “AA as such ought never be organized” should exclude the kinds of middle management “service” that we do. But having attended this meeting I see the importance of this work and the value of having the process be so cumbersome. There is no more efficient way of carrying the conscience of individual groups up, to the larger group conscience, to get important work done. The most important work we’ve done recently has been to provide financial and experiential support to carry the message to Idaho’s large Spanish speaking community, including books and other literature, translation equipment so those groups can participate at assemblies and round-ups, etc. I am happy to have been able to participate in directing the use of 7th tradition money for that purpose and I am grateful to know what this kind of service is about. The process of getting that done, though, is an exercise in letting go of the outcome and not giving up on the process.
I got home at 7:30 PM and made my way to the 8 o’clock meeting and when I got there I called one of my sponsees who I had given directions for starting his 4th step a couple of days before. Without going into any of the sad details, in the last conversation I had with his parents at 9:45 PM I shared my experience with them that no one who ever stood in the way of the natural consequences of my use ever did me any favors. Helping me never helped. Because of the terms of my sponsees out-patient program and his disregard of those terms, he was thrown out of his house last night.
I had great hopes for this kid. He’s smart. He’s attractive. He’s talented. And he’s a real alcoholic, at least as nearly as I can tell. He’s the kind that actually has the best shot at getting sober the way we do it in AA; what we call a Type IV Alcoholic. He has that level of powerlessness and that level of unmanageability. I still have great hope for him, but I can’t manufacture willingness for people. God knows my own willingness was hard to earn. I know if he somehow manages to find that willingness he’ll be able to recover. He has to find his own way here. I pray he will find it soon.
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