Signs of Life

There eventually comes a point in an alcoholic & addicts career, where they begin to show evidence of their hobby becoming a crutch. Even early on before any real problems arise, there are always the tell tale signs that let your family, friends, relatives, teachers, co-workers, law enforcement, significant others know that something is askew.

Having bloodshot eyes or dilated pupils; using eye drops to try to mask these signs  Skipping class; declining grades; suddenly getting into trouble at school  Missing money, valuables, or prescriptions  Acting uncharacteristically isolated, withdrawn, angry, or depressed  Dropping one group of friends for another; being secretive about the new peer group  Loss of interest in old hobbies; lying about new interests and activities  Demanding more privacy; locking doors; avoiding eye contact; sneaking around

There may also come a point where your drug of choice consumes your every day existence, where it is not the exception to be fucked up, but the rule. It really seems that you cannot operate without your fix. By now you either don't care if people know that you use, or are so delusional & isolated that you still think your secret life is safe. 

Escape from the worries, escape from the stress, escape from the relationships..
Escape the days, the nights, escape your life.

Towards the end, you're either down in the attic or up in the basement with it. The kitchen & living room have been off limits for some time, and even the bedrooms, bathrooms, and closets can't be trusted at this point. There is no place to hide from it anymore. There is no middle ground anymore, as it can only operate on extreme ends of the spectrum. Yeah, it could be a psychological metaphor you have managed to turn into reality even after you've lost all sense of what that is . . .

You find yourself in that dark, lonely crawl space again, wrestling around with it. Your chosen addiction... or maybe your addiction chose you. Either way, you're stuck. Stuck battling with it day in & day out, night after night hoping for once to come out on top, victorious, smelling like a rose. 

More often than not, you just end up lower than the last time you said never again. Coming down with cold sweats, dry heaves, psychosis.... trying to coax yourself into a bathtub of ice water in hopes of lowering your core temperature as you could fry eggs on the frontal lobe of your brain. You begin to recite a "Fox Hole prayer" to any Deity that may or may not be there watching over you, that if you can just survive it this time you will kick the dope habit for good.

"There comes a time, in a short life, 
Turn it around, get a rewrite
Call it a dark, night of the soul
Ticking of clocks, gravity’s pull
First you get close, then you get worried....."
-Cold War Kids

R.I.P. Whitney

I ended up going from a human being dabbling in drugs & alcohol to a druggie & Alcoholic dabbling in being human...

How do you change? How do I recover from a hopeless state of mind, body, & spirit? 

The way out is through...

The same scenario can be applied to my recovery, and while some people dive head first into the program and never look back, that has not quite been my story.
I didn't take my first drink of beer or drag off of a joint and then immediately hit the crack pipe... I dabbled for awhile... testing the waters so to speak.

When I came to my first 12 step meeting (willfully, without the aid of a treatment program, court order, nagging parents or significant other) I was a little skeptical of drinking the recovery kool-aid. I assumed it was a cult and there would be tithing and arranged marriages involved at some point. There was no doubt that I did not belong with these people, I was terminally unique in every way. I figured I would visit the rooms of recovery for awhile, hang out with sober people, while I figured out another way. 

I didn't want to be an alcoholic... my father was an alcoholic, I swore when I grew up, I would manage my own demons or at least have the common decency to hide them from friends, family and society. When I came around the meetings, I didn't want it to be a long term solution, I just needed to quit for awhile, so I started dabbling in meetings as a newcomer. I didn't introduce myself to many people, I sat near the back & kept to myself. I didn't scream from the rooftops that I had found a cure for my disease. I certainly wasn't going to admit to anyone I knew that I had been visiting a cult , while trying to stay sober. Until I knew for certain it worked.

I wasn't a glorified pothead in high school until I knew for certain it worked for me.

I wasn't an avid everyday drinker of alcohol until I knew that it worked for me.

I wasn't a dignified cocaine addicted professional until I knew that it worked for me.

Once I experienced the escape & relief provided by drugs & alcohol while applying them to my everyday life as a solution to anything I faced... I knew it worked.

.... Until many years later it just didn't.

Is there life after drugs?...

The only way to know if the 12 steps of Alcoholics Anonymous / Cocaine Anonymous, Anything Anonymous works, isn't by tip-toeing around it. Applying your own bookends to the program by doing the first step & the thirteenth step over & over again wondering if "sexually transmitted recovery" is really a thing or if you should actually open up a big book with a sponsor. "It only works if you work it."

You didn't get fucked off enough to land in hospitals, institutions, jails, and treatment centers by  merely"Dabbling" with substances. You surely won't get un-fucked by merely dabbling in recovery either. "Half measure availed us nothing."

Where there once was a bottle opener on my keychain is now a sobriety chip.

Instead of paraphernalia, open containers, or baggies of substances, you will most likely find more sobriety tokens of various lengths of time littering my car, my jacket pockets, my home.

Instead of pictures on my social media accounts of keg parties, thrashed Las Vegas hotels, and countertops of empty bottles, you will see sober friends together at New Years, Halloween, Recovery in the Rockies, etc.

Dropping one group of friends (using buddies) for another; being secretive about the new peer group (recovery meetings, friends, activities)

For awhile I kept the details of my recovery behind closed doors, I now realize this mirrors my path of addiction on my way back out of the dark.. I need to embrace recovery with all I have.

alcoholish

Which came first? The alcohol or the alcoholic?

My old friend Fear

The Great Escape Artist

I vaguely recall being in the Garrett Memorial Hospital chapel room, while my grieving parents were taken down to the morgue to identify my brothers body. I didn't want to exist, I wanted to crawl out of my own skin. Not in that room, not in that hospital, not in that small town, definetly not in my own head. I just didn't want to be me. Hospital staff, family members, friends of mine, friends of my brothers, etc shuffled in and out. I was just there, hazily existing, the conversation around me sounding like Charlie Browns teacher.. 

I finally had a reaction to the news I had heard an hour earlier, but prohibited myself from accepting. I ran outside to the parking lot and threw up the greasy El Lobo's meal I had eaten a couple hours earlier. About the same time my brother was being ejected from the car he was a passenger of, exhaling his last breath, left lying lifeless on a grassy bank, I was sitting in a grimy dive joint inhaling pizza.

Call me crazy, but somehow pizza is still my favorite food group

After I finished dry heaving, I noticed someone smoking, so I bummed a cigarrette. At less than a week away from my 16th birthday I decided to start chain smoking in the parking lot outside the entrance to the hospital. I didn't really care who saw me, as adults, my parents, everyone witnessed it and didn't seem to care either. At that point I think it made them & more importantly myself realize I was alive & breathing as each exhalation of smoke dissipated into the cool air of that April evening 19 years ago.

Upon leaving the hospital & arriving back at our house on Pennington street, I didn't believe anything could ever change this feeling, this all consuming pit in my stomach. A doctor had apparently offered my parents something to help them sleep... any kind of rest was out of the question of even being a possibilty as my mind was spinning out of control. My mom then handed me one, and just like that cigarette I put it in my mouth & swallowed without hesitation. 

I woke up sometime the next morning to the sounds of Spring, robins singing in our yard, the sun shining softly through the blinds of my second story room. I had apparently slept. Was it all just a bad dream? I didn't want to open the door or walk downstairs to find out.. If this nightmare was our reality, I wanted more of those pills. I wanted all the pills and to fall into a coma until the second coming of my older brother could happen.

Elias Black #85 after catching the game winning touchdown. Circa 1995

If reality is the iron shackles that bind us like prisoners being force fed the truth, then I was about to become Houdini. I would liberate myself from any pain, discomfort, & the truth. I remember the wave hitting me as I looked out the window and saw a row of visitors cars parked outside of our house. My mind trying to bend so it could wrap around this concept of death in our immediate family. I wanted to break out. I wound up searching for escape in many forms, but the freedom I found in mind altering substances always worked best. It delivered relief as promised & it was usually instant gratification. 

I have always thought of death to be the ultimate escape. I didn't even believe in a heavenly after life, I just assumed that when you died, it was all over, the pain of living was alleviated. I have been so selfish in my own pain, struggle, & existence, that I began to idolize his death. Not always to the point of being suicidal, but always to the point of being reckless in my escape to where I wouldn't have minded if I had "an accidental overdose" that would allow me to fade into oblivion.

 This being the 19th anniversary since Elias' passing & marks a point at which he has now been dead longer than he was alive at 18 years 7 months young. It is still as surreal today as it was back when I heard the news and the world turned a few shades greyer.

There have been two people close to me in life that have passed away before their time, that I have always looked up to, always admired.... though recently to the point of being jealous that they escaped before life had a chance to chew them up and spit them back out over & over again like it has in my cycles of 

addiction.

I do not have the need to run away today. I can rely on something greater than myself, and I like to think my brother Elias has had a hand in "assisting me" on my path to spiritual enlightenment so to speak. I just have to walk, wade, & sometimes swim through this pain & not escape one day at a time. This is the second anniversary of his death that I have been able to stay clean & sober. I have surrounded myself with friends, my daughter, my mom, and most importantly my recovery. 

Your Loving mother, niece, and brother on this day 4-27-2015

Innards

TUNE IN TO KFUC FM RADIO

There are times when being in my head is like driving through an infinite desert in the middle of the night while searching for decent radio stations to listen to. All you seem to pick up is dead air, then a crackling noise, some static, inevitably followed by a Christian talk Radio show telling you to repent or burn in Hell.

KFUC radio can be tuned in from seemingly anywhere on the planet, I have the worlds most powerful antenna right between my ears... Voices that are constantly fucking with me, berating & belittling my self worth. Telling me that I only deserve to be in agony, pain, confusion & chaos. I am not good enough to have that healthy relationship, to keep that job with a steady pay check, let alone have luxuries like health insurance, a  house of my own, or a car manufactured in this decade. I feel I will always struggle in the lower class of society but never qualify for welfare, food stamps, medicaid, or an EBT card because I essentially suffer from the disease of ignoring reality.

On the flip side of the AM/FM dial, I occasionally hear that I am doing well in life, even though I can't seem to see my life as they do. I have a close group of people that I have let into my world of recovery. From the outside, these people are supportive. On the outside these people are compassionate of my struggles. On the outside I may seem ok on the surface. On the inside, I am doing all I can do to progress and keep my demons at bay.  my outsides do not match my Insides. . . 

I am realizing that when people tell me "You are doing fine, why do you need 12 step meetings?" or "You have everything going for you, a thriving business, split custody of your beautiful daughter, and everyone who knows you, loves you!" that they probably have good intentions.  The problem I face is, that is the exact same crock of shit that my internal addict tells me when it tries to sell me that lie. The one where it says I don't have a problem anymore, and that things are good enough to go out & party again.

I am tired of hiding that my insides don't fucking match my outsides, and that is why I am vulnerable enough to write it. I have to wake up everyday  and surrender to that fact, then lay my head on my pillow sober every night after thanking a power greater than me for getting me through one more day.

I am becoming more and more aware that I can't run from myself. It wasn't that I was born with the gift of ignorance, I was cursed with the character defect of ignoring. I knew better, but it seemed much easier to check out, effectively escaping the reality of problems. Which also means that you don't have to come up with any immediate solutions. .. even if I intended to eventually.

I chose instead to escape with sex, drugs, & Rock n' Roll as the solution to numb my insides enough that it never fuckin mattered what the outside looked like. No matter the situation, the geographical location, whether it was out of joy or frustration, escape in any form fucking worked.

I use to say stupid shit like "Patience is a virtue, that I don't have time for." and "Ignoring is Bliss" while I stacked failed relationships, lost loves, unfinished plans, unpaid bills, unfilfilled promises until they all couldn't fit under that industrial sized rug I swept them under.

This is why I need endless hours of recovery, therapy, yoga, meditation, self reflection, long walks on the beach. while having limited social life & spilling my guts on this blog. In the faith that one day my insides will match my outsides and both will have progressed to a level that surpasses my wildest intentions.

Touch of Grey

Truth Serum

I am guilty of having a perspective problem. What I take in, the way my brain processess events, the way I experience them is different (however, I am not unique) My first though is wrong. My ideas get me in trouble. To get closer to the illusive truth I have been searching for, I first must be open to the idea that I am not actually in control of situations.

 Can I do anything about the russian military flying over Alaskan airspace?

Could I stop ISIS from filling massive graves with bodies?

All I can really control is my actions... including not putting a drink or drug in or around my body.

For the past two months I have managed to do just that.

All You need to Know.

The truth is, I am sober today. The truth is all we really have is today. Yesterday is history, tomorrow is a mystery. Today I choose to be present. That is enough for everything else to fall in place as my higher power has intended.

What is your truth today?