The Holi-daze

The Holiday season provides many of us with a yearly celebration of family, friends and beautiful memories. There is laughter, joy and love overflowing. We sing carols, eat hearty meals and hug our loved ones and we are left above all with a heart full of gratitude.

There are also many for whom the holidays offer no real or lasting happiness. For that segment of the populace, this is just a time of the year to get through as unscathed as possible. Haunting memories and bitter longing plague this scene. If I’m not careful I can take the seat reserved by my past on my behalf right on the front row of this show.

In spite of your own view of what the holidays mean or the lovely memories they represent, everyone doesn’t share your experience. Many people carry years of emotional and mental scarring from tumultuous holidays of their youth that have carried over to affect those of their adulthood. Others have had serious difficulties and loneliness (some of that is self-inflicted, of course) as an adult and the holidays only seem to serve as a reminder of the emptiness of years past.

For many, the holidays serve more as a stark reminder of those who have been lost than as a time to enjoy the fellowship and love of those who remain. The dismal quicksand of woeful recollection swallows whole any joy or gratitude that lives in the present and he or she often feels left with no comfort outside of chemical or behavioral distraction. The beauty and wonder of the here and now are mortgaged against the brokenness of yesterday and the present is often forfeit as a result.

Our disease has we addicts convinced that our sole comfort lies in the next drink, drug, box of cookies or stranger’s caress. Like any good spree of bad behavior we are left with more questions than answers: How did this happen again? Why did I yet again run away from both the good and the bad and leave such destruction in my wake? How can I repair all the collateral damage for this latest binge? What now, and what lies ahead?

The key here is to attempt to realign our focus. All the negative memories and feelings produce energy, and if this energy is not redirected than the consequences can be dire. We must figure out a way to get out of “self” and get in to service. This time of year more than any other offers a multitude of opportunities to go in either of those directions, and by our CHOICE we can either drown in our bitterness or help ourselves be set free from the bondage of negativity.

If you find yourself wallowing in the negativity of the past or present, get up and get going in the direction of another person you can help. You’ll find that much like a morning frost in Tennessee, your negativity will be gone before you know it. You just have to decide to get out of your own head and get into service of your fellows.

How can you be of service during the holiday season?

What Might've Been

The rooms of recovery offer a fantastic opportunity to revisit the end stage of my active addiction and my early sobriety. It is of great value to pause long enough to remember just why I had to change the road I was on and just how desperate I was for a bit of hope to which I could cling. Without those timely reminders and quick trips back in time to that fall and winter of 2009, I would surely be lulled into a false sense of security in my own ability to hold my life together. I may even toy with the idea of being able to drink or use again in a controlled way if not for these stark trips down memory lane.

The addict has a unique ability at time to see the past through rose-colored glasses, turning a blind mind’s eye to all the pain and suffering our drinking and using wrought in our lives. Sometimes my mind wanders into a “what might’ve been” scenario.

What if I hadn’t left my Financial Aid/ Adjunct Faculty gig at then-Draughon’s Junior College to take on a role that was truthfully so much more demanding?

What if I hadn’t gotten caught with liquor on my breath at Miller-Motte that day and been able to keep pressing on in a tough situation, although with progressively worse drinking and using sure to follow?

What if I had just gone right back out to find another job after I was let go from that job instead of agreeing to go to rehab?

What if I’d come out of treatment, gotten a job and tried to embrace that good ol’ controlled drinking fallacy once again instead of embracing my sobriety?

Then, there are some more positive and affirming “what ifs” that followed the pivot point of my life:

What if I’d never walked into the SSF Submission Academy?

What if I’d never walked into Grace Community Church?

What if I’d given in and relapsed like I wanted to so many times while I worked and wallowed at the motorcycle shop?

What if I had stubbornly chosen to keep diving headfirst into the proverbial meat grinder of unhealthy and ill-advised romantic relationships?

And the seemingly not-so-positive:

What if I hadn’t somehow mentally broken and tapped out with 3 freaking seconds left in the round?

What if I’d gone to visit my sister and her family as often as I should have before she was killed?

What if she had just worn her stupid seatbelt?

People can “what if” themselves to the point of institutionalization or worse. I learned this the hard way after my own car wreck in 2001. You see, things have unfailingly unfolded in exactly the manner in which they needed to even when I can’t make sense of it all. The truth is if any of those critical scenarios had turned out differently I’d be nowhere near the place in my life that I am today. In many of the above cases, had they turned out differently I’d have no place in life because I probably wouldn’t be left among the living. Relapse for me is a death sentence.

There is an unbelievable peace that accompanies the realization that right here and right now you are exactly where you need to be. No matter how blindingly confusing it is at the time, even those life-defining moments that seem to be so awful in the midst of the moment can become an amazing positive force in your life if you so choose. You must resolve to press on and stay in the fight when you’re hardest hit. That’s largely what separates a life well lived from the chasm of what might have been. 

Pain Pt. 2: Find Your Pain, Find Your Purpose

While day-to-day pains are an obstacle to overcome in this life, there is also the presence of the behind-the-scenes bigger sources of grief to negotiate. Those big-picture scenarios that make you cringe or cause your heart to beat a bit faster are usually inauspicious evidence of your life’s necessary direction. The remnants of childhood scars or early adulthood trauma reverberate through your consciousness in a way that should compel you to act. These associations represent purpose, provided you don’t allow yourself to become paralyzed by them.

All grown people on this Earth have something that particularly stirs them; something that hits close to home each time they hear a story related to this particular place of pain. I am a firm believer that this painful association is a guidepost on the path down which we are individually called to tread. It is a shining beacon that calls us to act and to do and be something more than we are today. It is our purpose.

A person who was bullied or harassed as a child has a few choices to make as an adult: curl up into a ball every time they hear or see such behavior and encourage others to do the same, or become so enraged that they act impulsively and perhaps become bullies themselves. Another choice is to positively impact other former victims and to sew the seeds of self-defense, knowledge and high-mindedness amongst a new generation.

A person whose life has been touched by emotional, physical or sexual abuse can choose to be crippled by that pain (and no one could or would really blame them for being so affected, at least for a time) or they can recover from it and allow the experience to help them work to prevent that same abuse from befalling others. Their pain can push them into a place of advocacy and care that can positively impact hundreds or thousands of lives.

Finally, we come to my pain: addiction and compulsion. As a recovering addict whose addiction manifests itself in countless substances and behaviors, I know that I am in a unique position to be a voice of reason, experience and hope for others in recovery or those still struggling. I know this to be a particular part of my purpose in this life.  For a time, the humiliation of my struggle kept me from feeling like I was in a place of helping others, but I know now that all those hard times were simply forging the foundation of my life’s aim.

What is it that uniquely stirs in you a particular passion? What has been your struggle? Once you pay necessary mind to your pain, I urge you to look beyond the hurt and find your purpose and ACT on it. Life takes on a particularly meaningful glow from that point forward, just as it is supposed to. 

Turning Pain Into Progress

Life on planet Earth will forever be touched by pain and tragedy. No one is immune, regardless of race, belief or socioeconomic status. Much of the time we allow this pain to suck us in and keep us in stasis. We sit in it, mired in the muck of it until something or someone comes along to shake us from our stupor and help us remember the fundamental fact of life: it is meant to be lived.

Pain can become an excuse for dispassionate inaction. It is used as an excuse to disregard the outside world in the same way that a small child thinks you cannot see them if they cannot see you. It is (perhaps most unfortunate of all) an excuse to hurt others. We quite often will give another person a proverbial pass for terrible behavior because we think we may be just as bad to others if we ourselves were in the seat of suffering.

Inasmuch as pain can be a great burden, it can also be a fantastic motivator. You see, in the crucial moment we decide for ourselves which role it will fill in our lives. Pain reacts differently in the hearts and minds of different people, but in the time after the initial reaction our choices determine its’ effect. Pain can pull you down or it can push you into action.

Understand that the source of the pain can determine the initial course of action. If your pain is the result of a relationship gone awry, you first must distance yourself from the relationship. Then you have to become very intentional in your effort to redefine what qualities you are willing to accept within a relationship. If the source of your pain is an addiction or compulsion, the initial step is to stop drinking, using or acting out. Once you are removed from the haze of the high, you can look upon your life through clear eyes and with humility and open-mindedness you can move towards a better life.

Things become a little more difficult when the external “sources” of pain are stripped away and you begin to get honest with yourself about the fact that you may actually be the source of your own pain. Once you have come to realize this you have taken the first huge step in the direction of turning your pain into personal progress. You must know and understand why you’ve done the things you have done, and then you must address those root issues humbly and with a willingness to change.

Pain can fuel progress or paralysis, and it’s never too late to change the road you’re on as a result of making the choice of allowing your pain to consume you. Life is a series of choices. Even the most important of those choices can be redeemable when you decide that you want something better. Choose progress, and by so doing choose to live your own authentic life rather than settling for simply being alive. 

Four for 4

“Birthdays” don’t keep us sober, but taking a moment to recognize the milestone affords us the opportunity to positively reflect upon just how far we have come in the days and years since we last picked up the drink or drug. My life is nothing short of a miracle on even the worst days.

At the time of my birth, there was a genuine risk of being stillborn or brain dead due to my body’s position during the delivery. A bit more than twenty years later my life nearly ended on a grassy highway median. More than once in the years that followed I drank or used enough of other substances to have killed a person on multiple occasions. In spite of all this, I am still here. I’m alive and for the last four years I have really lived as well.

The days leading up to my sobriety birthday tend to both threaten and reinforce my sobriety. As counterintuitive as that may seem, you should certainly expect that type of duality from any addict. The weeks preceding November 4^th tend to find me emotionally drained as flashes of my old life and especially of that final binge play on the movie screen of my mind. If I am not mindful, I will begin to drift into a really negative and dark place. A time that should find me especially gracious and grateful will instead find me curt, angry and trying to isolate if I make the choice to focus on all that drinking and drugging took from me instead of all the things that sobriety has given me.

Gratitude is certainly one of the cornerstones of my sobriety and sanity; it is necessary to remain grateful in the constant battle against guilt, shame, self-pity and remorse. Gratitude is choice about your way of thinking and your way of living. Your ability to remain grateful in even the worst of times says a lot about how much you’ve grown emotionally or how much growing that still needs to be done.

Another of my cornerstones is the expansion of my spiritual life. While I am wholly faithful to my beliefs I am secure enough in them to allow you to have your own as well, even if they directly conflict with my own. Nothing about my life or my sobriety necessitates anything from anyone else, which helps me in my effort to stay clean and to stay I my own lane. I choose to live and let live; I also choose to pray for the very best for all of you at every chance I get.

A third cornerstone for me has been crafting a life that I no longer want to escape. It goes hand-in-hand with dealing with life on life’s terms and makes it a bit easier to do. You see as an active alcoholic and addict I was operating in cowardice behind a veil of bravado and hubris. If I could convince you of how great my life was, maybe I could eventually convince myself as well. I viewed everything through a lens of negativity, anger and pessimism and was so busy feeing sorry for myself that I forgot that I alone was responsible for the life I make for myself. When I got sober I learned that I had to stop blaming others, grow up and be willing to accept the consequences of my choices, good or bad. I made the choice to do what I could to make my life what I wanted it to be and that has made all the difference.

Last but not least is that which has been by far the most difficult and necessary part of this journey: becoming willing to love myself enough to want more out of my life than what I had become. I honestly struggle moment-to-moment each and every day with the two wolves inside my mind: one representing self-love and the other, older and stronger one that is representative of my self-loathing. While I choose to try and “feed” the self-love, the self-loathing has never known a moments’ hunger. My days consist of a million instantaneous decisions about how I’ll feel about myself and I don’t always make the right choice. Today, though, I at least have a choice to make. I am no longer bound and a slave to the hatred with which I regarded myself for far too long.

This has all been hard to reconcile at the most difficult times of these past four years; no one will ever tell you that life gets any easier when you get clean and sober unless they happen to be a pathological liar. Bad things happen in this world every day to nearly everyone. Life does, however, get better as you begin to understand what “normals” intuitively know from a young age: that this life is less about what happens to you than it is about how you handle it.  

Thank you to all who have chosen to walk this path with me, in person or in spirit. I would not be the man I am today without your patience, love and support. I hope and pray that we continue this journey for many, many more turns around the sun. 

What's Your Legacy?

These days, aging athletes, actors, politicos and pop culture figures seem more inclined than ever to wax poetic about their legacy as their careers draw down to their conclusion. All too often, the idea of your legacy seems to only begin to carry much weight after you’ve already formed that legacy in the minds of your peers.

In this life, people eventually come to grips with the limited life expectancy of everything in our world, be it human life, a career, a job-within-a-job or associations.  We have relationships that form as part of phases of our lives and we all too often don’t consider how we will be remembered when that period has ended until it is too late to actually effect change in that area.

How will people remember you when this season of your life has passed? What’s your legacy? 

It’s the footprint you’ve left long after you have moved on and enough time has passed that the even the vision of your physical appearance has blurred. It’s what lasts about you until even after your bones are only a whisper of dust.

After you’ve moved on, people will forget the nuances of your daily life; the funny habits, quips and stories that accompany you will fade. They won’t be able to forget how you made them feel or the difference you made for them, whether good or bad. They won’t forget the broad strokes. They won’t lose sight of the big picture of who you were to them.

I have been uniquely given the gift of life circumstances that have caused me to ponder my own mortality on multiple occasions. As many of you know, I nearly died at twenty in a car wreck, and a bit over a year later my father died. Either of those events would be enough to effect pause, but combined they forced me to take long periods of reflection.

The loss of my sister last December brought back all of those thoughts and feelings, and they were magnified intensely by my sobriety. I had no choice but to allow myself to feel every twinge of it. There was no hiding from my mind or my heart. If you know me well at all, you know that I am a chronic over-thinker and can never simply let things go without obsessively thinking on them for quite a while.

I’m blessed that I may take comfort in the fact that my legacy is now so different from that which I’d committed myself to leaving in my days of active addiction. My legacy now compared to then seems to be a mirror image standing upon its head. I decided that I wanted more from myself and from this life and that something had to change before my legacy was irreparably cemented.

What’s your legacy? How does that picture look when you reflect upon it? It’s not too late to change the colors or reshape the lines. If you are drawing a breath, it isn’t too late to want more. It’s not too late to become who you were born to be. 

Selfishness and Self-Centeredness WIll (Hopefully) Slip Away

One of the telltale signs of an addict, both active and in recovery is an amazing ability to put him or herself in the center of everything or to drum up controversies that don’t actually exist in reality for the rush of having the attention solely focused on them. This can be done in a variety of ways by the varied cast of characters: the Drama King or Queen trying to generate attention by lamenting their lot in life, the perpetual one-upper, the overeager criticizer, or the melodramatic eternal exaggerator.

An integral part of growing up is accepting responsibility for the things you do or fail to do. For the active addict (or the dry drunk) that concept is often the furthest thing from their minds. As childlike as we are in the midst of our acting out, we cannot possibly see how anything bad that happens in our lives is any fault of our own.  Being held accountable for our mistakes is not only necessary, but also a function of living life on life’s terms. We must seek to be held responsible for the foolish things we do or have done in order to combat the seeds of guilt that could germinate into a full-fledged relapse.

The desire to elevate one’s own reputation or perception within a group by pulling down that of another person is a telltale sign of self-centeredness. We must strive only to produce a positive reputation by our own thoughts, words and actions. This directly opposes the ages-old doctrine of pulling another down to raise ourselves. You have to be too big of a person to belittle someone else for your own gain; gain only by your own merit. If you do the right thing every time you have the chance, your own merit will be enough. What you do always speaks louder than what you say anyway.

The eternal exaggerator is the person more known for their fish tales than their actual positive impact. You can never fully trust this person and you cannot respect anyone based on trumped-up stories of watered down successes.  They feel the need to generate manic energy (both positive and negative) and it is off of this energy that they feed. As long as your attention is on them, no claim is too fantastic or far-fetched. Their reality is their krytponite. We must craft a life for ourselves that is too fantastic to either escape or lie about.

There are proper times and places for being in the spotlight, but it takes the appropriate amount of humility and grace to ensure that the spotlight isn't your constant aim. Work hard at living your life according to your values and beliefs and that will garner you attention enough; additionally, that attention will be the right kind for the right reason. If you have to constantly seek the spotlight you may want to consider what is missing from your life. It has created the void you are trying to fill and you must stop trying to fill it with something so hollow as attention. That’s a round peg that you’re trying to fit into a heart-shaped hole. 

Honesty, Open-Mindedness and Willingness

All around the rooms of recovery are located signs with sayings that to the uninitiated seem simultaneously simple, kitschy and opaque.

“One Day at a Time”

Twenty-four Hours in a Day”

“Surrender to Win”

“Take it Easy”

“Honesty, Open-Mindedness and Willingness”

While all of these can be universally applicable, I‘d like to focus on that last like sliver of gold. I have found those three words and the concepts they represent to be central to my recovery and to my ability to live this life successfully with serenity.

Honesty: the quality of being honest. How does a person “be honest?” It seems simple enough; tell the truth, without fail or compromise. However, when the time comes to practice this in all our affairs, the vision of what honesty is becomes a bit clouded and half-truths, exaggerations, white lies and all-out fabrications are the norm. Honestly, honesty is the exception to the rule in today’s society. Deceit seems to be a required corporate character trait and “what they don’t know won’t hurt them” is a rule of day-to-day operations.

Rigorous honesty is an across the board application of s virtue all should possess. Being rigorously honest is not the same as practicing brutal honesty, and at times can be more difficult. Those that profess brutal honesty are often doing so as a function of projecting insecurities, while those that practice rigorous honesty are honest, forthright and trustworthy in all their interactions, big or small. At no point does going out of your way to hurt the feelings of another or offend come to be a requirement.

Open-Mindedness: the state of having a mind that is open to all truths and possibilities, no matter how far-fetched or illogical they may seem on the surface. An open mind often requires a closed mouth, at least initially, and that can be a huge stopping point in a person’s growth. Having an open mind asks of you to be more ready to listen than you are to speak, more intent on understanding than being understood. It means being more interested in seeking and finding truth than you are hell-bent on disproving or disparaging possible untruth. It requires a measure of acceptance and the ability to extend faith. You cannot be open-minded only within certain contexts or under the auspices of restriction. You must open the doors of your perception fully and without restraint. You cannot be open-minded about only the things with which you agree; this is in fact closed-mindedness and counter to the ultimate goal of real freedom.

Willingness: the state of being willing. Willing to make changes, to live outside of your normal comfort, to sacrifice and to sometimes struggle, to accept that your way isn’t the best way all in the name of growth. You must become willing to try things you have never given a real shot in the past. You must become willing to accept responsibility for your thoughts, words and actions without reservation or qualification. Most of all, you must be willing to change.

For an addict at rock bottom, the willingness to change may seem like low-hanging fruit. In reality it is often horribly difficult, as you must deprogram years of learned, diseased thinking and behaviors. You must become deconstructed in order to rebuild what life you have left and if you are to ever have any hope of growth. You must be willing to change, sacrifice, or abandon EVERYTHING if it means it will keep you sober. You simply must become willing and have faith in the idea that at some point you will become able with the help of humility and your Higher Power.

These principles have served to help guide my actions, and while I am not always as honest, as open-minded or as willing as I would like to be I am nowhere near as dishonest, closed-minded and unwilling as I used to be. I’m not where I want to be but I am so thankful that I am not where I once was. That my friends is progress, not perfection. 

Setting Boundaries

We all know the person (or are the person) who can never tell anyone no. This is rooted in the desire to make others happy or to be the one “Go-To Guy” upon whom everyone can count. We all have those friends and they are beloved and appreciated more than we can ever say.

The place where it gets dicey is where other, more important priorities end up having to take a back seat to that “Open 24 Hours a Day” accommodation of everyone else. This is the time that boundaries must be set; it’s also the time that it may be too late to do so. In some cases you just can’t un-spill that milk.

In the case of an addict in recovery, it’s natural for us to feel like we owe the universe some unresolved and eternal debt. No matter how far we have come, we cannot escape the feeling that we have screwed so many things up that we’ll never be able to get the balance back even. We go above and beyond the logical limits of personal accessibility in an effort to be all things to all people and to try to dig ourselves out of this never-ending hole of spiritual debt.

This is almost without fail a horrible disservice to our own needs for self-care and the true working of our respective program of recovery. Our recovery has to become and remain one of the top priorities in our lives bar none, along with growing our spiritual life in whatever way works best for us. Without those things, nothing else matters because nothing else will really work.

It is such a delicate balance, as service is a necessity of recovery. Overdoing it is kinda our M.O., so we have a tendency to neglect the most important things while chasing this ghost of reparation we can never catch. We can never do enough to feel as though we have reconciled fully with our past.

This is yet another instance where our Higher Power can come in and make all the difference. If we can believe in and truly accept forgiveness from our chosen deity, we can forgive ourselves long enough to not subconsciously sabotage our recovery and sanity by stretching our efforts too thin in any direction.

You have to put first things first, and that without a doubt includes your sobriety if you want to keep it intact. You also must remember that you can find value in taking inventory of more than just your deeds; inventory your life to ensure that your priorities remain in their rightful place. You must be willing to toss away the chaff and give the right attention to that which most requires and deserves it.

Check your motives

Sometimes even when doing the right thing we are doing it for the wrong reason. It is important to understand that your motivation is often more important than the action you take. In the case of an addict, constant checking of our motives is a necessity. Per our hardwired instincts, we could potentially take the most benevolent act and turn it into a manipulation for our own sake.

Our motives must remain pure and fully transparent. We have to do the right thing for the sake of doing the right thing and nothing more, no matter the result. There must be a detachment from the notion of expecting anything in return outside of the peace of having done the right thing. This can go as far as turning down an available “side benefit” that may be associated with a charitable or kind act. Truthfully, that really comes down to your own conscience in the moment.

For instance, I don’t by any means think that something like claiming a deduction on your taxes for making a donation has to be avoided, but you and only you can judge whether or not you made the donation simply because it was what you felt led to do and not due to the gainful side-effect. If that write-off was the only thing that kept you from throwing it in the trash, you probably need to inventory your heart. If you are an addict, this is not actually just a suggestion. While the result may be preferable regardless of the motive, your conscience is always keeping a tally.

I do my best to make honest recommendations borne out of my personal experience. If you are reading this, you quite possibly believe that I possess some validity and am writing from a place of love and the desire to help other addicts, still-suffering or in recovery. Believe me when I tell you that your mind and heart will carry around the baggage of a seemingly harmless decision long after you have forgotten the act itself. You’ll find yourself cursing, screaming and spitting at the wind without even knowing why you’re so angry and by then it may be too late.

This idea of checking your motives is an area where the concept of personal accountability really shines through. You must hold yourself in check; there is literally no other human who can truly know what is on your mind and fuels your motivation. The first check is on the front end as you decide to do something; this isn’t always doable as at times immediate action is the only choice. In that case, you must defer to the option that is always available.

The second check is reflective: the after action review, as it were. This option is virtually always available and must be undertaken as often as possible when the action is of any consequence. If there is any doubt, you must take the time to deconstruct the act and anything that led to it. You must measure it against a rigorous standard of honesty and only you can evaluate the score.

Don’t cheat yourself and don’t give yourself extra credit or a waiver. Get real, be honest and preserve your serenity. The value of that asset cannot be accurately expressed, so defend it vigorously. There may come a time when it is all you have, and if you are an addict that may be enough to keep you alive.

Anger

From an early age I have had issues with anger. As an over-emotional tyke, my reactions ran the gamut. In the case of some sort of pain or emotional hurt, my mind immediately flashed with white-hot anger and I started to cry shortly thereafter. As a teen, that anger turned into punching doors or walls and throwing telephones. While there were pretty typical things that triggered my anger it was always boiling just under the surface, waiting for an excuse to be turned loose on an inanimate object.

I remember my father punching a hole in a wall in the hallway of the home in which we grew up as a reaction to hitting his head on the corner of an open cabinet door. This stuck with me as a way that a man might express his anger when things got tough and served as all the excuse that I needed for acting out on the anger I often felt.

While my childhood and teen years were relatively great in a big-picture sense, I had a lot of deep-seated insecurity and hurt. I was an overweight, nerdy white kid and until eighth grade I went to schools where I was surrounded by people that were NOT LIKE ME. I unspectacularly tried to play sports or find some other non-nerdy niche without a heck of a lot of success so I eventually just tried to be the funny guy. That at least seemed to help bridge the gap between my “Revenge of the Nerds” existence and the Michael Jordan/James Dean/Miles Davis super cool kids by which I seemed to be surrounded.

This didn’t always work and I spent more time feeling hurt and angry than I did feeling liked (although I never lacked for familial love). My desire was simple: I just wanted EVERYONE to like me. One or two other guys thinking I was cool weren’t enough; to be honest twenty or more people probably wouldn’t have been enough to overcome the horrendous self-perception I held. As a natural-born fixator I couldn’t see the friends but could always remember the insults and as a result I stayed angry even when I seemed happy.

When alcohol was added to the mix in my late teens my temper went from volatile to full-blown explosion in 0.2 seconds. I was a wild card, and to be honest I thoroughly enjoyed it. It was attention that I viewed as respect or admiration; in truth I was a train wreck in the making so people often couldn’t look away. What would I say this time? How would I react? Who would I cuss out or threaten? What would I smash?

That edginess was my way of insulating from my insecurities, which had honestly only been magnified by the injuries from my wreck. I knew I’d never feel physically whole again and much worse than that my mind, so long the defense upon which I could always rely, would never again be such a capable ally.

Much of the anger I felt was dissipated when I was forced in treatment to come out from behind the mask of alcohol, drugs and rage to which I was so accustomed and to get honest with myself and everyone else. I was humbled and broken, mentally and spiritually beaten and humiliated and I was tired of lying and living out of my emotions.

Another factor in my life has had what some who don’t really understand it might find to be a counterintuitive effect: my time training in mixed martial arts. While I don’t get into the training room at SSF very often right now, my mind is never far from it and I certainly haven’t forgotten the constant ego-checks and the lesson that anger doesn’t often (if ever) serve to do anything besides make you tired.

I do still get angry. At times I get very angry. I get angry with the people of this world with closed minds or hearts. I find moments of rage when rejected or slighted.  I hate myself each and every time I fail or fall short in the least way. I am a man of faith who gets angry with my Higher Power when things happen that I don’t understand.

The difference is that now I neither have to dwell in it nor run from it. I can and will acknowledge it and seek out its’ roots. I know that most often my anger is a direct reflection of something that I dislike within myself. As with most everything negative that exists in my world my issue begins with me, whether it’s a matter of ego or insecurity (or both. If you’ve hung on with me this long you already know the addict’s persona is that of an egomaniac without an ounce of self-esteem).

A horrible picture of a man is that which is painted while he is controlled by his emotions. That doesn’t have to be me today. I hope it won’t be again, but if it does I know how to get right back to the place where I belong. That path is always clear and will exist no matter the collateral damage I perpetrate. 

Validating My Struggle, Part 2

My own struggle with addiction came to life when alcohol went from being an add-on to the fun to a coping mechanism whenever things got uncomfortable. This really hit home when my father passed. I have surely had my share of difficulties, but at some point things changed from seeking healthy forms of relief to always trying to find solace in the bottle or the gram bag. I made a conscious choice to stop even trying to deal with life on life’s terms, instead running far and fast from the crucial moment of confrontation when things got tough. I was a coward in the truest sense.

Somewhere along the line, the difficulties that came into my life became the currency with which I bought legitimacy. I couldn’t point to any tragic abuse or abandonment in my childhood or any destitute poverty. I had to find something to leverage into my admission to the select, sordid company of addiction. I allowed and even promoted the few hardships I’d endured to be in the position of identifying me. They became who I was rather than points of inspiration or lessons about perseverance.

When your difficulties are your identity, wallowing in them consumes your life. They become all that you are. Instead of focusing on the overcoming of these things you become enraptured with living smack-dab in the middle of the misery. “Nobody knows the trouble I’ve seen,” becomes the tagline of every picture you view when looking at your life and you begin to figure that no one has suffered as you have; this gives you the right and high privilege of living out of all of that pain every day. Pain is all we allow ourselves to know and by extension all we allow ourselves to be.

This self-imposed limitation is manifest every time we drink, snort, smoke or swallow. It signifies our surrender to the abyss of negativity that has engulfed us. At some point in the future, there’s typically a transition whereupon we begin to compare our struggle to those of other people in an effort to validate ourselves.

There comes a point where we must all learn to respect the struggles of others and/or recognize that those struggles aren’t even our business unless we make them so. Money or reputation does not equate to happiness or success and we cannot allow ourselves to feel as though people with money or visible privilege can’t or don’t have very real, very toxic problems.

If anyone spends too much time living comparatively they lose sight of that which must be the true focus of their mental effort: improving their own life and by extension improving the lives of those in their spiritual vicinity. As a recovering addict (or just a human, honestly) you must be too concerned with becoming better for your own sake to spend time tearing down anyone else. It is not your business. Your own side of the street no doubt needs constant care in order to be anything like clean, so be concerned with that.

Stay in your lane.

If you must break from that to concern yourself with anyone else’s life or struggles, do it only in a constructive, helpful manner. Do not waste one scant smidgen of energy on negative pursuit, and if you find yourself heading down that path you must stop immediately and break away.

You’ve torn down so much in your own life (and while in recovery that can begin to translate to a good thing) that it is time to focus solely on building things up. Leave that destruction in your past life and refuse to look back unless you decide to head that direction. You must put it down and LEAVE IT THERE. You’ll be a much happier person once you do. 

Validating my struggle, Part 1

I have often been put in situations that make me feel guilty for being where I am in life right now. Contrary to how I may occasionally portray it in casual conversation, my childhood was pretty freaking great. My parents loved my sister and I deeply and supported us wholeheartedly. I never wanted for anything I needed and was rarely if ever denied the chance to experience things like school trips or cool, not-inexpensive things on the weekends.

I was blessed to go to college right out of high school. My parents paid my tuition for my first year and allowed me to live at home for free. I only moved out when I determined that I had to (wanted to) live on my own. The support didn’t end at that point. Through all of my ups and downs, self-generated or otherwise my family and friends never gave up on me and never abandoned me.

These factors coupled with a few others feed into my desire to continuously legitimize my struggles with life and/or addiction in my own mind. You can imagine how it felt inside my mind to be the only “college boy” in the program during my month in treatment. I wasn’t coming from or going directly to lockup around my stint and I’d never lived on the street. I never had a gun held to my head, nor had I ever done the same to anyone else (I’ve never even carried or fired a pistol). I wasn’t a gangster or anyone with much of a reputation outside of that of being a guy that drank and used a LOT, had a pretty bad temper and didn’t seem to be afraid of much.

Let’s look at this objectively: my rock bottom came after losing a $39,000 a year salaried office job as an administrative departmental director at a technical college. I wasn’t stuck living under a bridge and I wasn’t wondering where I would find my next meal. I hadn’t destroyed a marriage or alienated my children. I didn’t OD and wake up in the hospital.

I haven’t relapsed and at no point have I ever lost everything. Even the people who I alienated in my active addiction never got so pushed away that they didn’t remain in my life. All of these seemingly “not so bad” factors have led me to struggle with the legitimacy of my story. In a world where each time in jail is another notch on the gunbelt mine is relatively unscathed. I often shy away from speaking at meetings because of it; how can people fresh out of the gutter relate to a guy who had a pretty good life even at the point I hit my rock bottom?

This also leads me to belittling the struggle of others or to “hating on” people with “unearned” money or what I deem to be undeserved fame or notoriety. You see just like anyone else, the easiest way I can refocus my mind from fixating on how relatively “soft” my life history is has been to ridicule someone else for the same thing. Seriously? Am I in the third grade all over again? I despise the mindset that says: “I’ll bring myself up by tearing other people down,” yet within recovery or life in general I revert to this exact line of thinking far too often. 

Pocket Translation Guide: What Do I Really Mean?

In this day and age the idea of expressing yourself authentically is a fairly common and adopted modus operandi. For the addict, we’ve made our method of communicating be what it must in order to get what we want, authenticity being a secondary priority (if it is one at all).  You morph into whatever form will best appeal to your audience and away you go.

In order that you may better understand my meaning, I want to offer up for you a sort of translation guide to Addict Speak. Bear in mind that the addicted mind works in the same fashion no matter the manifestation of the actual addiction (alcoholic, drug addict, sex addict, food addict, etc). In that spirit, understand that some of the verbiage may need to be slightly adjusted to fit a different set of circumstances but the spirit will remain universally applicable.

-       “Thank you so much for this compliment/award/gift/ pat on the back!”

Translation: ”Awesome. Something else I don’t think I deserve that I can’t really afford to accept or acknowledge, lest I get lazy and start sucking at life again. How fast can I make you forget about this?”

-       “Things are good for/with me. Thanks for asking.”

Translation: “I’m not drunk/stoned/laid up with a hooker, right? Stuff is going well enough I’d say.”

-       “ _______________ (Insert witty or philosophical Facebook/Twitter/LinkedIn  

quote/quip)”

Translation: “This is exactly what is on my mind that I am struggling with this very moment. It doesn’t actually matter if it applies to you, but FOR THE LOVE OF GOD TELL ME YOU LIKE IT/LOVE IT/WANT SOME MORE OF IT!!! I’m saying it both to get attention and to validate my thought process by testing it in front of a jury of my virtual peers. PLEASE PAY ATTENTION TO ME!!!”

-       “I’m just taking things one day at a time.”

Translation: “I really think my life sucks right now. I’m stuck inside my own head and wallowing in the aforementioned suckiness. Don’t give me advice; just tell me you love me and that you’re proud of me even when you aren’t. If you really want to know how things are, take a seat and get ready to stay a while.”

-       “Sorry about that. I’ll do better next time, man.’

Translation: “Look jerk, get off my back. I know I messed up and I’m already totally shredding myself over it on the inside. Go back to whatever you were doing and leave me to my own torment. I feel bad enough anyway.”

-       “Nah man, I’m not nervous.”

Translation: “Of course I’m anxious, but I always am. I constantly second-guess and doubt myself, and this is no different than that. Unlike a normal human, I live in mental discomfort. This is no big deal. Now leave me alone.”

This is a raw, mostly unedited (read: minus all the cussing) glimpse into the mind of an addict. There’s no better therapy for me than to be transparent with you and to make myself vulnerable and less shiny. Like any other addict I am relieved to finally be “real” with people. If it makes me feel bad or guilty, even better; those are the mindsets to which I am the most accustomed.

We all just want to be a bit more understood, right? This is another opportunity to process some of the addict's insanity. 

Paranoid much?

For most of my life I feel as though I have generally been well liked. People don’t seem to mind carrying on conversations with me or being in my company, at least for reasonable amounts of time.  Let’s face it: if you’re reading this, you probably think I’m at least good for a laugh now and then. There’s just one problem with all of that, and that is the fact that I don’t believe you.

Even if we’ve hung out since the first grade on one level or another, I second-guess your sincerity each and every time we talk, text, exchange emails or pleasantries. I have to spend at least a half an hour’s worth of inner monologue convincing myself that you at least probably like me more often than I get on your nerves. Even at this very moment mid-paragraph, my thought is that I’m probably about 50/50 concerning the accuracy of those daily prognostications about the regard in which you really hold me.

To an addict, absurd and paralyzing paranoia is as familiar as the sting of self-loathing or the crushing weight of our perpetual failure. I spend much of my time second-guessing myself; what in the world makes you think I don’t do the same thing to you? I question everyone’s intentions, motives and sincerity on a minute-by-minute basis. I suspect you primarily because I’ve spent a lifetime being suspicious of myself.

You do the math: nothing I do is ever good enough for my liking and it seems that nearly no decision of mine is 100% solidly fool-proof. Add a constant battle to not regard myself with absolute loathing and disgust and divide that by a factor of the false bravado that somehow tells me I’m probably smarter than a lot of people walking around and you get the jumbled and messy regularity of paranoia perfected as the sum. Remember the egomaniac with a self-esteem issue? That’s just my soul on a toasted Kaiser roll.

Smile and say hi? You probably don’t remember my name. Shake my hand? It’s just for show. You don’t go out of your way to “like” my witty Facebook post or “favorite” my awesome Tweet? Our friendship must really be on the rocks if you aren’t sitting around obsessing over my every move, huh? Give me a hug and ask me how I’m doing? Well, you probably want me to do you a favor.

Remember that there is no honor amongst thieves or addicts and that my mind is dealing with a decade of programmed responses to what would qualify in certain circles as over-the-top behavior.

Making peace with this inner demon is like wrestling a greased pig. Every time I seem to get a hold on it, something in my mind slips and makes me doubt everyone all over again. It’s all a product of my own insecurity and it sometimes just comes down to a fundamental flaw of my character. All I can do is (to quote Thich Nhat Hanh) smile, breathe and go slowly. I pray, meditate and am reminded that even if it is just for today, I’m all right and you probably are too. I also remember that it isn’t actually my business whether or not you like me. All I can do is the next right thing and the way you view me is your prerogative. It’s your choice to make and I have to make the choice to simply leave it at that.

Worthiness

Addicts typically have suffered through years of mind-numbingly embarrassing behaviors, mistakes and failures. This is no great revelation. We are marked by both our amazing potential and the crippling tendency to disappoint everyone in our immediate vicinity. It is what we do and seems to become who we are. This notion doesn’t disappear when we put the bottle down; we seemingly cannot and probably will not be able to forget any of the times we came up short in our efforts.

This leads to negative and self-defeating thoughts and self-perception, and why wouldn’t it? When we were good we were pretty good, but when we were bad (which was much more often the case) it was a spectacular train wreck. Long after we’ve come to our senses we notice that we still can’t seem to escape the idea that our mistakes have lessened our worth. Our accumulated damage seems to drive our value so far down that we often don’t feel worthy of basic happiness, health and security.

I got clean and sober a shade under 44 months ago and I have long since struggled with the idea that I wasn’t worthy of happiness. I didn’t believe myself to be worthy of holding a good, rewarding job or being loved romantically. I’d run roughshod over both of those areas of my life for so long that I convinced myself I was too far gone. My best years seemed to have been spent at the bottom of a whiskey bottle and a gram bag. My time had passed and I would simply have to spend the rest of my life accepting that fact. Real happiness would lie forever beyond my grasp because I didn’t deserve it. I was not worthy of it.

This idea is completely, mercifully and absolutely wrong. You see, no matter how far off the beaten path things may have gotten, once you make the choice to live rightly all these positive things can and will be introduced to your life if you become willing to accept your worthiness of them.

I spent my first few years of sobriety in some less-than-stellar situations because I believed that they were the best for which I could hope. I subjected myself to some misery because I did not think myself worthy of anything better. I bought into that lie wholeheartedly until I came to understand that I was NOT the man I used to be inside or out and I didn't have to settle.

I am worthy of a job where I feel appreciated, valued and respected. The same goes for relationships, romantic or otherwise. I have finally found the happiness of which I felt for so long unworthy. I am not a slave to my past unless I choose to make myself one and today I choose to remain free, awake and alive. I am worthy, and so are you.