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.