Higher Than Life

I’ve been under the impression that I’ve been mad at something in recent days. For once I don’t think it was NA, and that was refreshing. Because of my anger, I felt detached from NA. I felt emotionally blank while kicking back with my amazing new friends in recovery. Who knows, maybe I even seemed a bit distant to some of them. Maybe. Even as we gathered to celebrate the 26th birthday (real birthday, not clean birthday) of a particularly close one tonight. 

But it wasn’t NA. Despite the fact that my misplaced and poorly drawn out emotions told me to consider cocaine this afternoon, I was glad to finally be able to tell myself “even if today is the day the wheels finally come off that rickety wagon, I’m going to keep coming back.”

After that, I thought I was mad at my treatment facility. No, I KNEW I was mad at my treatment facility.

“Look at these blind-leading-the-blind, Jesus-mainlining morose motherfuckers trying to tell ME how I feel about MY friends. Look at these cocksuckers trying to show me the addict behavior in the thoughts I’m fucking generous enough to share with them. Look at these assholes, always thinking they know better than me; always trying to paint my world in black and white strokes.”

They told me I liked her. Well, no, first they insinuated it. They told me I talked about her a lot and kindly pointed out to me that I had a million and a half machine-gun excuses as to why I couldn’t possibly like her like her.

Oh, I denied it. 

“She’s my best friend! And it’s just too complicated! I don’t like anyone! She’s involved with another one of my close friends…who just so happens we might never see again! I’m just happy for her that she’s starting to come around and get into recovery! I just want to be there for her! We’ve been through so much together! I opened up to her before I ever opened up to anyone else! We just GET each other!”

I denied it like the next ten minutes of my sobriety depended on me denying it. 

“Stop! I don’t like her!”

Everyone else laughed. You know, that kind of group laugh where everyone’s thinking “look at this idiot…white-chip drunk in his wanton desire, and he’s gonna be the last one in his world to even realize it.”

Then I nearly caved. But no, it was all meticulous, maybe. It was that old scheming junkie in me, brewing up a new broth, complete with all the ingredients: denial, rationalization, minimalization, close-mindedness, self-centeredness. I’ll stop there. If you’ve done one too many drugs in your time, you know the grocery list.

But, yeah, I almost got honest.

“Okay, it’s crossed my mind once or twice. But still, no! It just can’t happen! She’s my friend and only my friend!”

The group gave me its “mmm-hmm” nod. Now they knew they had me on the ropes. And I was starting to get pissed, cause I was starting to perceive this as some twisted attack on me.

“Do they want what I have?”

When some in the older crowd- whom in that moment my junkie mind wanted me to all see as jealously downtrodden souls probably trapped in gut-wrenching hurricane-force failed marriages- asked if it was possible for me to avoid contact with her, every instinct inside of me screamed for defensiveness.

“Of course I have to see her! She’s in the Drug Court system with me! She’s going to meetings! And she likes the same ones I like! What am I going to do? Derail my best friend’s recovery for some fucking need of mine that isn’t even a need? In case nobody was paying attention, me and her, we go through everything together! Everything!”

They told me to tell my sponsor about her. Very grudgingly, I agreed- and did so the next day, but not before I could sprinkle the pie with some more minimalizing sugar. He told me he didn’t give two fucks, and when I gave him the old spiel about how I couldn’t possibly handle a relationship right now because of _____ (insert recovery-community-pleasing rationale regarding co-depency defects), he told me that I had no right to not be reserving judgment on myself.

If I didn’t have a sponsor who was a fucking Jedi Master at setting me straight when straight-setting was most needed, I wouldn’t know myself. Not one bit. I wouldn’t know why I had been carrying this unrequited anger around since Monday, because I wouldn’t know where to begin searching inside of myself.

The truth is, if you’ve somehow found this blog and you’re still reading (which I think you will be; you’re not like the rest of them), I DO like you. I have liked you for a while. I buried the feelings in a tomb of denial, but they’ve always been strong beneath the surface. 

I don’t know love, but I do know what’s not love. I know how I’ve felt going into all my past relationships, when I was simply looking for emotional, physical and exterior validation by way of having someone to be seen holding hands with and showing public affection to.

But you? I just like spending time with you. I like when you text me. I like sitting next to you. I like your laugh. I like your smile. I like that thing you do when you run, the way you hold your arms out like you’re a bird trying to take flight; especially when you’re excited or just late to something. I like the way you react like a little kid at a toy store every time you see a Crown Vic or a Camaro. I like the look you have on your face for that split second when you get sarcastic or smart-assy. I like the way you text and type with a whole gang of big SAT words that you almost never seem to use in person. I like the way you say “flustered” and “sketchy.” I like your smile. I like your eyes. I like your hair. I like the way you look at me. I like the way you love your son. I like your shyness. I like your clumsy awkwardness. I like the way you don’t ever seem to care, even though I know you do. I like the way you like Nirvana. I like the way you let me know that you struggle. I like the way you like telling everyone about how crazy your mom is. I like the way you make me laugh.

I like the way that everyone else has come and gone, and you’re still here.

Who knows, maybe someday I will know what love is, and I’ll know that I love you. I mean, really love you. Not the I love you that I tell you every now and then when I’m proud of you or just relieved to know you’re still alive, but the real, everlasting I LOVE YOU. 

You know, I was scared for a little while there. When the state placed that no-contact order against us, and your parents just seemed to drop me fifteen billion spots on their “tolerable people” list, I thought about you every day. I wondered how things were going with you. You have no idea how excited I was when I first saw you again that morning in court. I stood by the back on purpose. People offered me seats, but I wanted you to turn around and see me, so I could sneak in a smile again. You know the smile. The one we give each other whenever our eyes meet. The one we give each other whenever we wind up in some new bullshit together, because we just couldn’t seem to stop feeding into each other’s wildness at one point. The one we gave each other at our first appearance three months ago.

You know me inside out. You tell me things about yourself and it’s like you’re picking stories from my mind. You feel the urges I feel. That’s why I almost had to cut you out. When I changed phone numbers in order to fall out of sight from my past, I wanted so badly to give you the new one, but initially something inside of me told me I shouldn’t. And I hated that. Oh, I hated every second of that.

But life just has this funny little way of always bringing us back into each other’s lives. Have you noticed that yet? It’s like one of these days we won’t be able to fight it any longer. Are we meant to spend our lives with each other? Sitting next to each other in NA meetings just as we used to sit next to each other in my Civic or your Camaro, parked in sketchy apartment complexes.

Is there supposed to be a meaning to all this? I don’t know, because the only thing I do know right now is that I don’t know shit. There seems to be too much at stake right now. Too much in the way. And I need to make sure that I don’t simply want you finding your home in NA because I want you to be able to stay in my life. That’s selfish and unfair to you. I need to know beyond any shadow of a doubt that I want you to find your home in NA because I want you to fulfill that world of potential inside of you; because I want you to grow into that beautiful, intelligent, lovable, funny, charming, caring, irreverent woman I know that you are inside; because I GIVE A FUCK ABOUT YOU AND YOUR WELL BEING. But I do really believe deep down that’s why, I just need it verified in the way that only time, experience and wisdom can verify it.

So maybe I do love you. Or maybe I just don’t know how to love. But one thing’s for sure: You mean the world to me. In ways that no other girl ever has before. Every day’s a little better when you’re just simply in it.

Wow. I’ve been dying to say that for a real long time.

I tried to believe in some all-seeing, all-knowing eye in the sky with an ongoing plan that none of us can understand.

The idea depressed and nearly derailed me.

What is a power greater than myself? A mechanic, if my car breaks down. A doctor, if I’m sick. A dictionary, if I don’t know the meaning of a word. A sponsor and a program, if I can’t stay sober.

What is a Higher Power? Humility, hope and community.

What is prayer? Being pro-active in the right way. Prayer is calling someone in my program if I feel like I want to relapse. Church is wherever a meeting is being held.

As far as I’m concerned, there is nothing comforting in the belief that everything happens for a reason and I just need to shut up and accept it. Narcotics Anonymous is more loving, caring and forgiving than the God of any organized religion, no matter how large or small it is. Narcotics Anonymous has never written a book that made excuses for rape, slavery, the stoning of women, locust plagues, mass flooding, or crucifixion. Narcotics Anonymous does not ask its GSRs to die on the cross for the newcomers. Narcotics Anonymous does not banish those who are sicker than others in some eternal oven for their faults or mistakes. 

My will is what my friends in the program want for me and what I will someday be called upon to do in return for the favor that was my recovery. My program wants me to stay clean, find happiness, laugh, drink coffee, become honest, open, willing and recover from my faults. 

Surrendering my will is learning to listen and follow suggestions. It’s coming to the realization that I don’t have the answer to everything, nor can I solve everyone’s problems. It’s also realizing that the world would go on without me. I’m cool, but I’m not all that special. And I’m not made of gold. Surrendering my will does not have to be a surrender to life. I shouldn’t have to feel like everything is already mapped out and it’s now pointless to have any hopes or aspirations. It shouldn’t have to feel like my only purpose is to go sit on a road in silence, waiting for lightning to strike me.

This process has to feel empowering and life-affirming, or else I would jump ship in a heartbeat, because jumping ship is still tempting as fuck most days. The God I feel some people in my treatment center want me to accept, it doesn’t give me that feeling. It makes me feel weak and hopeless.

Narcotics Anonymous does not ask me to remain lowly and utterly powerless for life. My sponsor is empowering. He taught me that it’s possible to pick up 16 years of sobriety without having to blindly give up the conviction that the world would be better off without organized religion. He taught me that I WAS powerless, but today I have a choice. And he’s okay with me wanting to get laid in early recovery, so I choose him over most of my counselors every day of the week. He also doesn’t allow babies to be born with Spina Bifida or into the heart of a ruthless civil war and then ask the rest of the world to just accept that this was done for some esoteric “purpose.”

Everyone, on their own, can find some measure of hope and guidance beyond themselves, but the world as a whole is too random, chaotic and sometimes painful for it to be controlled by some all-powerful, but invisible entity that I’ve never found comfort in praying to. Trying to rationalize chaos is like trying to dry water. To me it feels like a hopeless endeavor.

When I hear people in my treatment center sharing about problems they go through and then saying that the only thing they’ll do for them is pray, I feel even more disconnected. I just don’t see that as healthy. If I developed cancer, my program would want me to see a doctor, not get on my knees and beg the air for patience. I choose to turn to a voice that I will hear, and that will guide me, whether the answers I get are the ones I want or not. 

I’m sorry if you identify with an organized religion and this offends you. If you are willing to look past all the cracks in the foundation and still stand firm because that’s what you feel will guide you in your recovery, then kudos to you. Maybe you “want it” more than I do. Or maybe I want it so much that I simply refuse to put all my eggs in someone else’s basket, especially if I, personally, can’t seem to believe that basket even exists. So what’s it worth for me to forcibly accept something I have little to no faith in? For that I might as well cut out the middleman and just start frying my eggs, or chucking them against the wall.

I choose not to join the team that attracts the hateful, the conflicted, the insecure and the dangerous in droves. Even if in some instances it also attracts beautiful souls who just happen to be caught in a cycle of desperation. Because my personal belief is that if there truly was something above us pulling all the strings and guiding everyone’s life, the former group would not even be able to think of indulging in those monstrous defects of theirs. And I hope nobody feels the need to attack me for that, because I almost left NA for good as a result of some bitter old lady once trying to tell me that “those who can’t accept Jesus Christ as their Higher Power are poisonous” before she began her scorched earth attempt to 13th Step me. 

I need to see my Higher Power. I need to hear my Higher Power. I need to feel my Higher Power. If I don’t, it’s not a Higher Power. It’s schizophrenia. But that’s just my opinion.

polaroidraid:

I’m creating a “recovery blogs” link on my page.

Reblog if you are a recovery blog and would like to be included in the link.

For a good little while in the primitive days of my recovery I was confused by how quickly I had flipped a switch and lost all my patience/tolerance for people who were still out there using and enjoying their drugs. That didn’t seem like the me I always used to be. Once upon a time I took pride in my empathy.

That was the issue, though. Pride. My. I. Me. I was far too self-aware for my own good. Still am sometimes. Now, that’s not always a bad thing, but in my hands it usually is because I still don’t know how to channel the energy I devote to subscribing to every waking moment of my life without eventually attempting to destroy myself.

It’s really sinking in how fucking massive of an ego I have to blow up to get to the point where I’m working to be at. Now, 53 days into my sobriety, is when it feels like my early recovery is beginning. Before that, my progress was made by patiently doing time and overcoming my cluelessness. My miracle in that period was that, in the midst of all those overwhelming and flustering thoughts and feelings, I didn’t once choose to pick up. Not even when every instinct in my junkie body was screaming at me to go out and do just that.

It was those instincts, however, that left me cowering in a corner, paralyzed by constant fear. I tried to laugh it all off, hide from it and downplay it, but I’ve been terrified for my life since the first time I realized that I really had no conscious say in the course of my own drug addiction. From there the nightmare only got worse and worse, until all of my using was done with a sense of complete detachment- as if I was nothing but a passenger along for the ride in my own fucking life. And because of the sobering reality of that nightmare, there came a point where I couldn’t bear to watch someone else struggle or fail, because I was always able to reflect that back onto myself. 

I couldn’t stand to hear the truth about recovery: that most people stumble and fall time and again before, if they’re lucky, they can get up and stay up. Stumbling gave me shivers.

But that’s what I did pretty much every day. That’s what I still do a lot of the time. I stumble. I may not use, but I am painfully imperfect, and I’m not going to grasp recovery the first time someone shows me the ropes. Fuck it. I can live with that. That’s why one of the sentiments I most appreciate from the NA Basic Text is that simple “give yourself a break.” 

I’m trying to do just that now. And in giving myself a break, I need to give everyone else a break, too. 

I still feel for the people who glorify their drug use either on my Tumblr feed or in my life. A part of me still wonders why the ones who still think they’re having fun can’t look a bit further down that bumpy, ugly road and turn themselves around while they might still be able to. And all of me is still often annoyed by you potheads or alchys-in-training who constantly feel a burning desire to let everyone know how high or drunk you’re about to be. But you know what? It’s okay. Everybody will struggle on their own time, and maybe some of y’all are still at that point where you think hiding behind pills, powders or puffs is better than dealing with your lives.

I’ve been there. Once upon a time I was convinced that if I tried to quit shooting up, I’d wind up killing myself. 

Something strange happened to me once I finally had to try, though, because I didn’t believe that anybody- let alone me- could overcome my own bullshit when I first walked into my treatment center. I was still going to die. I was as certain as ever of that. You know what happened next? I found out that it WAS hard to make it through a day, let alone a week, of holistic recovery. Shit, it was twice as hard as I had ever imagined. But so far I have survived. 

So if you’re out there reading this, and you’re just starting to pick up drugs, or you’re out there struggling with a habit that just won’t stop ballooning in size, it’s okay. Just be safe. But remember, right now you are at the only point in your addiction where you face a realistic chance of severe suffering and death.

As soon as you give recovery an honest, open-minded and all-out chance, things will slowly begin to get better. In the moment of you accepting that decision, your life will begin anew. And from then on, any time that you feel the world collapsing around you, you won’t have to pick up a drink or a drug, because you’ll know that it won’t fix a thing. All of a sudden it really will become that fucking simple. Your only job will be to take it one day at a time and never pick up within each 24 hour period. And your only pain will simply be your parasitic addiction attempting to lure you back to your descent into depraved indifference, because it will start to feel itself being starved for good. 

Nobody’s struggles are so unique and above everyone else’s that they are automatically disqualified from recovery. Don’t believe me? Step into an NA or AA meeting and meet for yourselves the severely mentally, and sometimes even terminally, ill folks who have overcome decades of prison, years of spiritually, financially and emotionally bankrupt homelessness, weeks of withdrawal, and every fucking second of their own damn selves to achieve an impressive amount of consecutive days of sobriety. 

Whatever it is that bothers you to the point of compulsively needing to get high, I promise you, it gets better. But until you’re all ready to figure that out for yourselves, I love y’all nonetheless. Even those of you who never will figure it out and will probably die because of that tragic inability.

P.S. Painkillers never numbed shit for me.

I’m thankful for…

• The fact that I didn’t get high.
• Having the strength to not open the door when an active user came knocking.
• Moving up into Phase 2 of the Drug Court program.
• Being able to know I wasn’t alone.
• All of the hugs I received.
• All of the cigarettes I received.
• The new friend that I met.
• Being able to make it to my IOP group.
• Being able to empathize, share with, and care about somebody else in the IOP group who opened up and shared about how he hated the program and wanted to leave (not that I want to, too, but I did have my issues at first).
• Being alive.

It’s still scary and it’s still stressful. It still feels overwhelming and it still feels like maybe I’ll fall apart at any moment. But right now I’m still sober. I’ll go to bed sober tonight. And I’ll wake up sober tomorrow morning. And that is awesome.

Drugs, you suck. Each and every last one of you. Even the ones that most people seem to militantly think are benign and, for whatever reason, medicinally beneficial for everyone. But the problem isn’t you. The problem is me. So above all, I’m thankful for being able to finally realize that.

This sober life really ain’t all that bad tonight.