shydawg
01-10-2009, 07:52 PM
Complete surrender
Like most addicts' stories, mine is a war story, where the many battles I fought all blended into one indefinable mass that I simply refer to nowadays as "my active addiction." Once I start, I tend to get caught up in trying to impress you with how hardcore I was, the drugs I did, and how tough and slick I was, but I've been trying not to do that anymore. Suffice it to say that where drugs were concerned, I used whatever I could, in whatever hole I could. If I didn't have an appropriate hole for a drug, I created one. I did whatever I could to put anything in my body that would buy me one more day of survival in a world I didn't understand, yet sought to control. I wasn't tough, slick, or even hardcore. Mostly, I was lost, confused, and lonely.*
One thing I know today is that the First Step didn't get me clean and it doesn't keep me clean. I've had the First Step down since the first three or four years of my using. I knew I was an addict. I was powerless. My life was a mess, and I knew it was going to stay a mess. It was simply the lifestyle that was to be expected for people like me. I lived it, knowing it would never change. Once an addict, always an addict. I know you who are reading this know the feeling.*
Like so many addicts, I experienced jails, institutions, and being close to death. I was pulled back from ODs many times by well-meaning professionals, only to curse them for messing up my nod. Many times I believed death would be a good alternative to the degradation, the knives, the guns, the rapes and beatings, the panic, the blood, the tortures, the bodies, the terror, the paranoia, the narrow escapes, the people-pleasing, the frozen vacant smiles, the empty eyes, the staggering through dark streets, the familiar lonely sidewalks, sleeping in urine-soaked hallways, day after endless day, in many different cities—but death never came, and it all just continued.
I didn't get clean because it was something I wanted to do. The very idea scared me like nothing ever had before. I would look at people squeezing tomatoes in a grocery store and wonder how they did it, how they were able to be so concerned with tomatoes when we were all going to die anyway. How could a person sitting at a traffic light, picking his nose, believe that where he was going and what he was doing mattered? Didn't he know the truth? I knew I wasn't like them, and I knew I couldn't live like that. I couldn't verbalize the way I felt, but whatever it was, it hurt like hell, and I knew that if the rest of the world knew what I knew, they'd all be using, too.*
I once stood at the edge of a cliff holding my daughter, who was three, in my arms. I thought of dropping her, of letting her crash into the rocks below and ending it for her. I thought it was better than letting her grow up to find out the truth as I knew it. I didn't want her to feel the pain I felt, to have to go through what I had gone through. I thought it would be an act of love to end it for her then, while she was still naive and innocent. I stepped back and put her back in the car, a sweat breaking over me.*
By 1979, I had been on the methadone program, had traipsed all over, been divorced, lost a home, been evicted more than once, given up my children, and had no self-respect or any of the things that most people struggle all their lives to achieve. All I had were my drugs and the lonely, vacant life that goes with them. In early 1983, I married my using partner. A short time later, I almost lost a foot when I tried to create a hole to force some drugs into it. I was on crutches, and sleeping twenty-two hours a day. My husband was stealing my pain pills, and I was in pain physically, emotionally, and spiritually. I had witnessed a murder by OD, and had told what I'd seen. Friends of the dealer who did it kept coming to my door. I didn't answer, and they pounded so hard I was afraid they'd break the door in and find me. I lived in the closet. I was paranoid, delusional, and suicidal.*
Right around that time, an old using friend took me to my first NA meeting. When I slithered through the door, you were there and you welcomed me as if I was someone who mattered. I was loaded. I nodded and drooled. I don't remember much, except that when I behaved and spoke inappropriately, you didn't throw me out like everyone else had. You simply hugged me even harder and told me to keep coming back.*
A relative suggested treatment for me and my husband. Of course, we had our conditions: must share a room, must have a TV and a pool, must be out of state. He went one place; I went another. Mine was a psychiatric institution, another of many I had been in throughout my life. He left early and stayed clean. I left early and used on the plane home.*
We had sold our furniture, and we moved in with his parents. I went through treatment again and again. I went to halfway houses and three-quarter houses. I continued to use. I also continued, when I could summon up the courage, to go to meetings. Although you continued to welcome me, I felt painfully out of place because I knew that I'd never be able to stay clean for long. After all, I was an addict, and addicts never change. Still, I managed, mostly by white-knuckling it, to stay clean for thirty-sixty-ninety-thirty-thirty days and so on. Each relapse has its story. Once it was a medicine cabinet, once a quack doctor, another time a bottle of cough syrup, and then a bottle of wine. Despite the darkening pit of failure into which I sank, deeper and deeper, I kept coming back to these rooms. I had no place else to go.
One day, after you helped me stay clean for six months—longer than ever before—I found myself again in the parking lot of a drugstore with a bottle of codeine syrup in my hand. In a smooth move I had perfected over my lifetime, I stuck the bottle to my lips and drained it. But unlike before, this time it wouldn't stay down. I vomited it up. I was dying to get loaded and the drugs were all over my shoes. I had no veins left, and now I couldn't even keep drugs in my stomach. I knew then that I was not only a failure at recovery, but at using as well. I cried when I thought about the fate I had in store: a limbo, a purgatory, a middle world between active addiction and recovery. I sat in the parking lot, stared through my tears at the mess on my shoes, and knew that drugs had lost their power to help me survive. I knew that without drugs to numb the pain, my life would be a lonely, vacuous existence of meaningless movement through time and space—and I knew I couldn't live like that. I believed I had only one thing left to do: drive my car into a pole and end it all.*
However, there was something else going on that day, something that kept nagging at me, something I couldn't shrug off. I had gone to meetings and listened to you addicts—with a lot of suspicion, skepticism, and doubts, but I listened. I found that each of you had your own truth, and it wasn't a whole lot different than mine; that each of you had your own pain, and we shared that, too. These were things I thought that no one could understand, yet somehow I believed that maybe you could, maybe you knew what it was like to live the way I'd been living, maybe you had been there, too. For the first time in my life, while in the middle of pain that drugs couldn't numb, I thought that maybe, just maybe, there was hope, and maybe, just maybe, that hope lay with you.
So it was there in that parking lot that I finally moved beyond my long-term First Step, gave up the struggle, and surrendered body and soul. I truly came to believe that only a power greater than myself could restore me to sanity. I consciously made a decision to turn my will and life over to that power, and as I did, hope began to glow in the dark, empty cavern that was me. I didn't drive my car into a pole that day. Instead, I walked through the doors of NA again, but this time I gave myself completely to God, you, and the spiritual principles of the NA program. The next day was 4 May 1984.*
I have thirteen years clean today. Thank you.*
Maimu A, Ohio
Like most addicts' stories, mine is a war story, where the many battles I fought all blended into one indefinable mass that I simply refer to nowadays as "my active addiction." Once I start, I tend to get caught up in trying to impress you with how hardcore I was, the drugs I did, and how tough and slick I was, but I've been trying not to do that anymore. Suffice it to say that where drugs were concerned, I used whatever I could, in whatever hole I could. If I didn't have an appropriate hole for a drug, I created one. I did whatever I could to put anything in my body that would buy me one more day of survival in a world I didn't understand, yet sought to control. I wasn't tough, slick, or even hardcore. Mostly, I was lost, confused, and lonely.*
One thing I know today is that the First Step didn't get me clean and it doesn't keep me clean. I've had the First Step down since the first three or four years of my using. I knew I was an addict. I was powerless. My life was a mess, and I knew it was going to stay a mess. It was simply the lifestyle that was to be expected for people like me. I lived it, knowing it would never change. Once an addict, always an addict. I know you who are reading this know the feeling.*
Like so many addicts, I experienced jails, institutions, and being close to death. I was pulled back from ODs many times by well-meaning professionals, only to curse them for messing up my nod. Many times I believed death would be a good alternative to the degradation, the knives, the guns, the rapes and beatings, the panic, the blood, the tortures, the bodies, the terror, the paranoia, the narrow escapes, the people-pleasing, the frozen vacant smiles, the empty eyes, the staggering through dark streets, the familiar lonely sidewalks, sleeping in urine-soaked hallways, day after endless day, in many different cities—but death never came, and it all just continued.
I didn't get clean because it was something I wanted to do. The very idea scared me like nothing ever had before. I would look at people squeezing tomatoes in a grocery store and wonder how they did it, how they were able to be so concerned with tomatoes when we were all going to die anyway. How could a person sitting at a traffic light, picking his nose, believe that where he was going and what he was doing mattered? Didn't he know the truth? I knew I wasn't like them, and I knew I couldn't live like that. I couldn't verbalize the way I felt, but whatever it was, it hurt like hell, and I knew that if the rest of the world knew what I knew, they'd all be using, too.*
I once stood at the edge of a cliff holding my daughter, who was three, in my arms. I thought of dropping her, of letting her crash into the rocks below and ending it for her. I thought it was better than letting her grow up to find out the truth as I knew it. I didn't want her to feel the pain I felt, to have to go through what I had gone through. I thought it would be an act of love to end it for her then, while she was still naive and innocent. I stepped back and put her back in the car, a sweat breaking over me.*
By 1979, I had been on the methadone program, had traipsed all over, been divorced, lost a home, been evicted more than once, given up my children, and had no self-respect or any of the things that most people struggle all their lives to achieve. All I had were my drugs and the lonely, vacant life that goes with them. In early 1983, I married my using partner. A short time later, I almost lost a foot when I tried to create a hole to force some drugs into it. I was on crutches, and sleeping twenty-two hours a day. My husband was stealing my pain pills, and I was in pain physically, emotionally, and spiritually. I had witnessed a murder by OD, and had told what I'd seen. Friends of the dealer who did it kept coming to my door. I didn't answer, and they pounded so hard I was afraid they'd break the door in and find me. I lived in the closet. I was paranoid, delusional, and suicidal.*
Right around that time, an old using friend took me to my first NA meeting. When I slithered through the door, you were there and you welcomed me as if I was someone who mattered. I was loaded. I nodded and drooled. I don't remember much, except that when I behaved and spoke inappropriately, you didn't throw me out like everyone else had. You simply hugged me even harder and told me to keep coming back.*
A relative suggested treatment for me and my husband. Of course, we had our conditions: must share a room, must have a TV and a pool, must be out of state. He went one place; I went another. Mine was a psychiatric institution, another of many I had been in throughout my life. He left early and stayed clean. I left early and used on the plane home.*
We had sold our furniture, and we moved in with his parents. I went through treatment again and again. I went to halfway houses and three-quarter houses. I continued to use. I also continued, when I could summon up the courage, to go to meetings. Although you continued to welcome me, I felt painfully out of place because I knew that I'd never be able to stay clean for long. After all, I was an addict, and addicts never change. Still, I managed, mostly by white-knuckling it, to stay clean for thirty-sixty-ninety-thirty-thirty days and so on. Each relapse has its story. Once it was a medicine cabinet, once a quack doctor, another time a bottle of cough syrup, and then a bottle of wine. Despite the darkening pit of failure into which I sank, deeper and deeper, I kept coming back to these rooms. I had no place else to go.
One day, after you helped me stay clean for six months—longer than ever before—I found myself again in the parking lot of a drugstore with a bottle of codeine syrup in my hand. In a smooth move I had perfected over my lifetime, I stuck the bottle to my lips and drained it. But unlike before, this time it wouldn't stay down. I vomited it up. I was dying to get loaded and the drugs were all over my shoes. I had no veins left, and now I couldn't even keep drugs in my stomach. I knew then that I was not only a failure at recovery, but at using as well. I cried when I thought about the fate I had in store: a limbo, a purgatory, a middle world between active addiction and recovery. I sat in the parking lot, stared through my tears at the mess on my shoes, and knew that drugs had lost their power to help me survive. I knew that without drugs to numb the pain, my life would be a lonely, vacuous existence of meaningless movement through time and space—and I knew I couldn't live like that. I believed I had only one thing left to do: drive my car into a pole and end it all.*
However, there was something else going on that day, something that kept nagging at me, something I couldn't shrug off. I had gone to meetings and listened to you addicts—with a lot of suspicion, skepticism, and doubts, but I listened. I found that each of you had your own truth, and it wasn't a whole lot different than mine; that each of you had your own pain, and we shared that, too. These were things I thought that no one could understand, yet somehow I believed that maybe you could, maybe you knew what it was like to live the way I'd been living, maybe you had been there, too. For the first time in my life, while in the middle of pain that drugs couldn't numb, I thought that maybe, just maybe, there was hope, and maybe, just maybe, that hope lay with you.
So it was there in that parking lot that I finally moved beyond my long-term First Step, gave up the struggle, and surrendered body and soul. I truly came to believe that only a power greater than myself could restore me to sanity. I consciously made a decision to turn my will and life over to that power, and as I did, hope began to glow in the dark, empty cavern that was me. I didn't drive my car into a pole that day. Instead, I walked through the doors of NA again, but this time I gave myself completely to God, you, and the spiritual principles of the NA program. The next day was 4 May 1984.*
I have thirteen years clean today. Thank you.*
Maimu A, Ohio