Running Into An Old Friend
Yesterday, I ran into an old friend. Him and I got sober together at the same rehab some three years ago. He was one of the older people there, the people that I looked up to due to having much more life experience. Granted, that was everybody there, for I arrived just a few months before my twenty-third birthday. It’s weird, really. I have seemed to maintain the same naivety that I was told to have when I was there. For someone that had spent the better half of the past two years, at that point, alone in my parents basement sniffing cocaine while they couldn’t spend much time in the same house as me, and so bounced between their home and their camp, the social interaction, and the acceptance of being utterly dependent upon drugs to get through life, I had the sneaking suspicion that these people would grow into people that would be in my life for some years. Of course, this is one of the reasons why I was called naïve by my fellow early sobriety friends.
Let’s call this man that I ran into John. I ran into John on my way back to Maine from South Carolina at a rest stop in Lexington Massachusetts. I was with my girlfriend, and she was going to run into the bathroom real quick while I waited in the car. Right when we pulled up, there he was, walking in front of the car. I couldn’t tell at first if it was him or not. John is a big man, about six foot six, and weighing in around three hundred pounds. Even when I first met John, when he was coming off a viscous three year relapse of drinking near every day, just shortly after he got out of the hospital during his intense detox where he was being closely monitored, he was a happy man that had a lot of spiritual knowledge. As they do say in the halls of alcoholics anonymous, personal knowledge comes to no avail. Or, more often stated, “Faith without works is dead”. John was one of those men that had all the intellectual knowledge one could ask for of ones condition, and of one’s place in the world, as being a human being, but just couldn’t seem to put any of it into practice.
When I saw this man that looked awfully like John coming out of the rest stop, there was only one thing that looked mighty different. That sunny disposition that I had known John to have, was not present on this John look alike. He continued to walk by the car, now on the passenger side, about to go in between the two cars, and disappear out of view forever. I rolled down the window and yelled his name, just to see if I could get a reaction out of him, to confirm, mainly, that it was just a John look-a-like. The man, however, peered into the car, said “Charlie!”, and so I got out of the car and spoke with him while my girlfriend ran inside.
The last I had seen John, we had been volunteering down at the local homeless shelter together some two years prior. I had heard through the community that he wasn’t doing so well, and that he wasn’t seeming to get any better, but that didn’t stop me from being friendly with him, of course, he was a very smart guy, and we always had fantastic conversations any time we spoke. Then, like so many others, he just disappeared from my life. Because of the sheer volume of people that have, it went unnoted, that was, until yesterday.
He spoke to me of what had happened in the past two years since we last saw each other. He told me of how he had relapsed out of the sober living community the treatment facility had sent us to when we finished our seventh step, and how he then went to live with his sister. He told me of how he didn’t like the hypocrisy of the entire establishment as a whole, and how when living there, he felt as if he was under this microscope where every little thing was being judged six different ways by twelve different people. He told me that he then went to live with his sister for a year, where, when he had strung together a couple months sobriety, he went in for surgery, just before the pandemic, and relapsed again. He lasted there another ten months before getting kicked out. He told me about living out of his car, and how he learned more there than he ever did at the treatment facility. Told me about how he is now living with his parents, how he plans to go live with a buddy of his out in Minnesota because the rent is free, then to San Diego for his other friend owns and operates a successful company out there, and how he plans to hike a bit of the Appalachian trail here in the Northeast in the meantime.
He told me a lot, but what he had really told me in that time, while saying all these other things, was that he was directionless with his life, that he was still struggling with his place in this world, and that he didn’t want to be who he is. He told me that he is still fighting with the world, the world as a whole, and that he thinks that he can figure out some way to outsmart himself by not accepting the predicament that he is in, and thinking that if he turns a blind eye to it and figures enough other stuff out in his life, that it will all just go away. What he told me, an what I hear from a lot of the people that do end up relapsing is, is that I am scared shitless, life is just too difficult to grasp, and I cannot be who I am if I want to be happy in this world. At least not here, maybe I’ll find it in Minnesota, or maybe I will find it in San Diego, or, as some other people put it, maybe I’ll find it in the office job, with the big pension, or in the fancy car, or with the smoking hot girlfriend, or maybe I need to get rid of this girlfriend and find another. What I heard from John was unaddressed grief and despair, self-pity, and most of all, shame. All of the other things that he told me, that was all a further way of him hiding these truths from himself. If he had told me that he was scared, and didn’t know where he fit into this world, it would have been more open and honest.
I get like that too, more often than I like to admit. I tell myself that I am born to be a writer, that if I do not become a writer, than I will never be happy with myself, but is that true? That is something outside of me that I know will not make me feel any different. On the ride home, the remaining hours, and especially once I picked up my car and had an hour and a half to myself in the car, John was all that I could think about. Or, well, the difference of where we are at today, primarily. I couldn’t help but being sad. And, I was able to welcome the sadness in. I couldn’t help being sad because of who I was when I got there, and how I looked up to all of these people. They all seemed so brave and honest, so real. They were the most refreshing people I had met in my entire life. Being honest and real in rehab, and being honest and real in the rest of the world, though, are two very different things.
What is it that separated us from each other? Why was it that he was still in denial about everything his life had told him, and still actively using, while I was just coming back from a brilliant vacation with my beautiful girlfriend, a woman who loves me, truly, for who I am, and not who I pretend to be? Is it because I wanted it more? I don’t believe that for one second. When we first started out, he did want it, and I did not. Was it because I worked harder than he did, I can’t say one way or another who it was that worked harder than the other. There is no way of telling what drove our two paths apart, but it did serve as a gentle reminder of just how sneaky the delusion which is a precursor to that first drink can be. It reminded me of why I had continued the further exploration of what it is that has made me the way that I am, and why I choose to further the traumas of my past through carrying them forward into today. Of why I then choose to veg out of those re-instigated traumas by blacking out everything in my life.
It’s funny, here I’ve been, coasting through my life, not putting anything towards my practice, other than maintenance through a daily morning ritual, and I run into John. John’s downfall is what is calling me out on mine. If I do not continue with the further awakening of my own journey, then I too will be just like John. It may not be tomorrow, it may not be next month, and it may not be for another ten years, but the outcome will be the same. This publication, heck, even this website in its entirety, was meant to be a way for me to further my ability to speak my truth, and to no longer hide from speaking that truth to the world around me, and here I have been, just like John, giving all these thoughts of delusion weight in my mind and in my life so as to justify my “stepping away” from all that which has blessed me in this life. What this is, then, is another re-committing to not only this publication, but to myself, and to my journey. I hope to become more of an active member, and tomorrow, I will state just why I stepped away.
Yesterday, I ran into an old friend. Today, I am reminded of just why I get to have friends that I can call “old”.
