Sobriety

Once you’re past the first step, once your past needing or even wanting drugs or alcohol, then comes life. And it comes like a motherfucker.

When I was high or drunk, I didn’t have to worry so much about what I did or what I was going to do. In that lifetime I just clung to my weed or my alcohol. (At certain times in my life I cling to other things like coke and crack. Or acid. Or heroin. Or ephedrine.

Good times. 😑

For quite some time, those things worked quite well. They were like a sanctity where the noise of my mind could be crowded out by the experience of being fucked up, by fumbling my way through being fucked up + managing my daily shit. That was enough to create a life to live. It satisfied me and if I was lucky I had some fun along the way. Of course the “moments sublime” became fewer and farther between, as I got older and that way of life was no longer a normal part of being young and dumb.

I don’t remember how old I was when it happened. That departure from the right to have fun carelessly.

Eventually the only choice was to either let my spirit die on the basement floor of my parents’ house or stop carrying alcohol and drugs around like a security blanket.

The prospect of putting that blanket away was so scary that I fled to an AA meeting. They offered me an option. I slowly yet almost immediately started feeling better. I slowly get almost immediately understood I could not drink or use any substances again at all, let alone pick my blanket back up. I looked AA dead in the eye and said resolutely, “Godammit” and looked around at the wreckage of my past and present around me – and a complete blank when I looked toward my future – and tipped my head back to drink the koolaid. I new I was taking a chance, I was risking an unbearable life for a life I could not conceive of (how exactly does one not ever drink alcohol or use any substances…like, ever?). I stopped thinking and with blind faith and trust in the universe – kind of like when I stuck a tiny square of paper on my tounge in the 90s – made a decision and followed through on it immediately.

10 years later I am still hanging out with these crazy fuckers and wondering how I ever got along without them. Think how I waited so long for them and suffered in my sadness and isolation, thinking that’s just what it meant to be alive (my mom used to say she believed THIS – human life on this planet and in this existence – was perfutory….that’s quite a dark thought to tell your preteen).

It’s a “road of happy destiny”, for sure. And it’s hard.

Now I continue to work the steps – it’s a new way of life and will stop when my last breaths escapes my lips – and decide and seek over and over. I decide to let the 12 steps work for me, and I seek something other than my ego. Rinse and repeat.

It works. And it’s hard. Life is hard, not the steps.

Life is hard.

Let me be clear: I do not say this flippantly. Life. Is. Hard.

“It’s hard.” This is a statement I say often, in recognition and respect for all the living beings working so hard every day to make it one more day. Any good mental health clinician will admit that sometimes this is the only actually validating thing to say to a client.

Now all I have to keep me busy is that life of regular daily things, and the noise of my mind. And within that noise is all this shit. You can call the shit facts, shortcomings, old ways, old ideas, patterns. The bottom line is, they cost me more struggle and pain and difficulty and heartache and exhaustion than being fucked up and getting through the day ever did. (But with a lot more dignity)

And I once again make a decision to let the program work for me like in step three this is the time when I ask for help over and over and over again. This is the time when I say that all this shit in my head.….

I’m exhausted and I can’t do it in my life has become unmanageable.