Last Call
When I Discovered I Could Not Trust Myself
There’s nothing easy about getting clean if you are an addict. It does become much more doable once you lose your denial, and admit that you are, indeed, an addict. I was extremely fortunate to get that sure knowledge and understanding at my very first N.A. meeting, thanks to George reaching out to me on the break, and just the seriousness with which those kids took the concept of addiction, once the meeting began.
Before and after the meeting, they were just kind of wild, a little crazy, and very free, it seemed like to me. The combination of the seriousness and that freedom of spirit they demonstrated, had me hooked from the start.
The difficulty came in living my life, between the meetings and the times I got to spend with my new, younger friends. I was used to getting high to deal with many of life’s day-to-day difficulties, to stem my anger when it began to boil up, to soothe my frustrations, of which I had many, and to mask my insecurities. I didn’t know that’s what I was doing, until I stopped doing it.
That’s when I realized how much anger I had inside of me. It began to boil up and explode in rage. I quickly began to lose my cool with frequency at work. I was like a raw, walking nerve. I also began to apply the brutal honesty I was finding in the rooms to my life. Yeah, I quickly discovered that it didn’t work quite as well in the workplace as it did in the meetings. In fact, I began to piss a lot of people off with my brutal honesty.
Whereas before, I kept things pretty cool by being high most of the time, now I definitely was not cool. I managed to piss the management off enough that they took advantage of the first opportunity they had to fire me for cause. They canned me within two months of my getting clean. There were people there who thought I had only recently started having a problem with drugs — after I got clean! I hadn’t acted crazy when I was still getting high, but once clean, I was all over the place.
Thus began my journey through 17 jobs over my first 4 years clean, after having enjoyed the stability of the same job for the 2 years since I’d stopped drinking. The important thing, though, was that I managed to stay clean through it all — after my one and only relapse, that is.
That happened a few weeks after I’d started going to NA. I’d made my monthly trip up to visit my friends in Connecticut — up until finding N.A., they had been my only real friends in the world. They had been my island of sanity when things got rough in the navy, and we had pulled each other through a long, difficult fall and winter, grieving the loss of our friend, Reed. 24 was much too young an age to die, and it had happened less than a month before he and Peg were to marry.
That shared grief had brought us all so close together. While these new N.A. friends were great, and how I thought I would manage to stay clean, I had just begun to get to know them. My friends in Connecticut had known me for years. I trusted them with my life. They had, indeed, brought me back when I’d almost lost mine. We’d “bled inside each other’s wounds”, borrowing a favorite line from a song (“Lay Down — Candles in the Rain”, by Melanie)
Now, I wanted to let them all know what was going on with me. I was excited to let them know I was an addict, and that I’d discovered a way out of my addiction, through this group of crazy kids in NA. It was a 4 hour drive up there from my place in Bucks County, Pa, and I thought about how they would handle my news, on the drive up. By the time I got there, I had talked myself out of telling them anything. I can’t tell you why I did — maybe I was afraid they’d laugh at me, or not believe me and try to talk me out of it. I don’t know why — I just know I lost my nerve.
Getting high together was what we did. I never thought they had a problem with it, like I now knew that I did. All I knew was, when we got together, we almost always got high. So, before too long after I arrived at my friend David’s place, I was getting high. I showed no resistance to it, at all. In fact, I might even have been the one who suggested firing up that first joint.
I never enjoyed being high less than I did that weekend. There I was, hanging out with my truest friends in the world, and I was doing something I now knew would eventually kill me, or lead me to insanity or imprisonment. I knew this, but I couldn’t tell them about it. I had to keep it to myself. I simply didn’t know how to bridge that gap. It was a very sad, hopeless-feeling weekend for me.
Driving back down to Pennsylvania that Monday, which happened to be St. Patrick’s day, the 17th of March, I was really devastated by how the weekend had turned out. That’s when I realized, in the depths of my being, how truly powerless I was over my addiction. Armed with the self-knowledge that I now had, I could not manage to tell my closest friends in the world the truth about who I was. I couldn’t trust myself to do what I knew was right. It was a terrible feeling, and I wallowed in it all the way back home.
When I went to the Tuesday meeting the next night, I told my new friends what had happened. I laid it all out on the line, like I had learned from them how to do. Even though I barely knew them, I trusted them to help me figure out what I had to do from there. Someone suggested that I not go back up to Connecticut until I was more sure of myself. Mostly, though, they just welcomed me back, and I felt nothing but complete acceptance and compassion from those crazy kids.
My journey had begun, but it would not, nor would it ever have to be, a journey alone, ever again. That was the only reason I was able to get and stay clean. I would find myself lonely, and alone through my own doing, many times through the years– but I always knew I could reach out, and someone would always be there for me.
