The Aftermath

The time comes after a major event in your life when everyone else has gone back to life as usual and you are left alone still trying to put yourself back together. People mean well and they typically truly want the best for you and your life, but they also have their own lives to live. You are then left with a singular burden and it is often too much to bear on your own.

Putting the pieces back together after a major change in the “status quo” of your life is perhaps the most difficult element of the whole struggle of life. Normalcy is never the same as it once was although life must inevitably go on. The world doesn’t stop turning for anything or anyone. Coping with a difficult loss after everyone else has stopped falling all over himself or herself to check up on you is a tough row to hoe.

When the inevitable temptation to pick up a drink, a gram bag, a joint or some pills arises, pick up the phone instead. Go for a jog.  Write down what you are feeling in a journal. Read some literature you find helpful, or go be with sober friends. Do anything healthy and constructive to get outside of yourself without leaning on something that will only make things worse.

It is important primarily to let yourself actually feel your feelings. You cannot work through something by ignoring it or pushing it aside. It must be met head-on and processed through with great care and rigorous honesty. Masking your feelings or emotions only leads to more damage and a longer timeline for processing.

One especially difficult element in the process is resisting the urge to deify a person after they are no longer physically with us. Not one human among us right now is perfect, and while it is easier to remember them through rose-colored glasses you may be doing your emotional recovery a grave disservice by so doing.

It is perfectly acceptable to feel angry, hurt or betrayed, let down or incomplete. What is not acceptable is leaning on an artificial coping mechanism to deal with those feelings. A drink or drug does nothing to help you truly feel better. Anything that offers only a temporary solution will never be able to help you handle a permanent issue. 

When you are feeling weak, remember that there is strength around you if you will only ask.  Often times what you need is only a short chat with your Higher Power away, or even the distance between you and a telephone. Those who love you would never begrudge you a meaningful conversation.

I hope a bit of this helps someone, somewhere as much as it has helped me to compose it. Thank you for letting me share. Peace, love, serenity and joy to you on this Christmas Day, friends.

BIG changes

Life doesn’t get any easier just because you have decided to live it in a more real way. No one is exempt from either the hard times or the great triumphs that so often propelled us through our very worst benders. Difficulty and instability touch everyone’s life, whether teetotaler or dope fiend. The different ways in which the spectrum of personality types may cope with these trials is a clear indication of our spiritual and mental health.

For anyone who doesn’t know, I lost my father in 2002 when I was 21 years old to a mysterious, incurable lung disease. This came barely more than a year after I was delivered from death’s doorstep by my higher power after a horrific car accident. This was also my very favorite thing to drink or use over and the wellspring from which great waves of resentment flowed over my life for years. I’ve been down that path time and again and I pray daily that I made my last trip several years ago.

On Friday December 7^th of 2012 my life changed dramatically for the better and unchangeably for the worse within barely an hour’s time. Had either of these things separately occurred a few years ago it would’ve been enough to send me even deeper into my addiction. Had they both happened together I very seriously doubt I would have survived the night.

I’d been going through the interview process with an exciting young education assistance company called InsideTrack, based in San Francisco with other offices in Portland, Oregon. At the conclusion of the first part of a dinner-and-a-movie date night with my wife I received a follow-up call to discuss the afternoon’s phone interview, which directly preceded a job offer from this amazing pioneer in the education industry. I accepted immediately and was instantly catapulted higher than I had ever before traveled.

A quarter-gram rail of blow had never made me soar like this. No roll or other pill had made me feel this good. All was right in my world after a long and seemingly fruitless job search tested the limits of both my resolve and my faith. I’d been toiling away in miserable bitterness for quite some time. I was often times angry, hurt and violently resentful. I was much quicker to explode than to believe, and it caused considerable turmoil in my personal life.  “This is it! This is the end of the struggle! It’s finally MY time!” echoed in my mind.

An hour later and shortly before the second half of our date night was to commence, I received a phone call from a Lexington, Tennessee phone number. My sister and brother-in-law had lived there for about four years. Surely one of them was calling to congratulate me on my tremendous blessing, I thought, just from someone else’s phone for some reason. I answered with expectant excitement in my voice and eager to gush on about how happy I was. This would not turn out to be the nature of that phone call.

“Your sister was in a car accident tonight, and she passed away. She’s dead.”

Silence.

“What?!?”

My brother-in-law’s voice cracked as he handed the phone off and began to cry. His brother-in-law then got on the phone and basically repeated to me what I had already heard and could not believe. My sister had been killed in a car accident a bit earlier in the night; the death certificate would later reveal the time of her death to be about ten minutes after I concluded the phone conversation wherein I’d gained my dream job.

I was literally as lost and confused as I hope to ever find myself. How could this be real? How could this possibly happen only an hour after being seemingly so high? How could my life be so immediately slammed down to the depths so close in proximity to the time when I was flown directly to the mountaintop?

The next few words are kind of blurry, but what I could make sense of was the request of me that I be the one to go and tell my mother what had become of her only daughter. Hesitation exploded in my mind at the thought of how much pain my disclosure would cause my mother.  After the longest car ride of my existence and with an immeasurably great deal of difficulty, I managed to convey the message to my mother. That was the hardest thing I have ever had to do in my life, but there could be no other way. It had to be done, and I had to do it.

Now, these circumstances by themselves represent a deadly quagmire for any recovering addict. Either of them could be all the excuse I needed to run from the truth I have come to know for myself and that is that I can never ever have another drink or drug. Period. Combined, they could spell almost certain disaster if I wasn’t carful to take a moment to do some fundamental things that have carried me thus far.

I had to immediately connect with my Higher Power, because without the help that Power provides me I could not deal well with too great of a triumph or a tragedy. I’ve proven time and again incapable of dealing well with either. I also had to reach out to my closest friends and loved ones for help. Many a person finds a moment of great failure after being unwilling to seek help when they desperately need it. Most importantly, I allowed myself to feel what was happening. I lived in the feeling, even if it stung me to my very core. I don’t wish to run from my feelings ever again. This was the focus of my active addiction; I didn’t feel that I could deal with the curveballs life had thrown my way.

Next time we will focus on getting through the aftermath of tragedy, that period of time when all the people have gone back to the normalcy of their lives and aren’t checking on you hourly. This is the most difficult time, because you can feel isolated in your attempts to work through your emotions. If you think this is a lot to read, I must beg your patience as I continue to actually process it.

Rock bottom

People in and out of a program of recovery have heard of the concept of “hitting rock bottom.” Just as with the diagnosis of an addiction, no one is qualified to set the bottom for anyone else. While your observation may lead you to believe that a person is a hopeless addict or that their lives are at their worst, the fact is that your opinion doesn't matter a single bit.

However heartfelt your pleas or from which place of love and caring your point of view happens to come, a person has to accept the truth for themselves or it isn’t their reality. If it isn’t real, it certainly doesn’t have to be confronted. Most often your efforts to convince and addict that he or she has a problem will result in the behaviors becoming immediately worse. We are honestly grown-up petulant children and you are trying to take away our security blanket.

You hear it often and from a very early point in recovery that everyone’s bottom is different. This is an absolute, inarguable fact. The best way it’s ever been defined to me is the place you reach where you aren’t willing to lose anymore. You realize that the addiction has cost you more than it has or will ever give you in return and you are fed up with losing.

You see, an addict is drinking, using or acting out to hide from something. Normal, non-addicted people drink to relax or have fun. We, however, are avoiding having to deal with things that we feel as though we cannot handle. That might include stress, embarrassment, shame, guilt or anger or any number or combination of things that normal people may struggle to deal with, but deal with nonetheless.

Ours is a policy of avoidance. We avoid dealing with even simple problems and wonder why things get so bad as a result. At that terrible point, we pass the blame onto anyone or thing except ourselves. At some critical juncture in the addict’s life all the mess and turmoil becomes more than we can bear, drunk or high or stoned and we break down. We break down to the point of enough being enough, finally.

Once the addict has hit his or her own personal rock bottom, the options narrow and it boils down to deciding to live or deciding to die. You either come to want better for yourself and more from your life or you give up and end it all. Either choice ultimately means a necessary surrender, but the force to which you are surrendering is the thing that makes all the difference.

This time you must surrender your selfishness and self-centeredness, self-will and pride on the altar of the life of your dreams. That life doesn’t appear overnight, but every bit of struggle you must go through is more than worth that promise’s ultimate fulfillment.