The First Days Are the Hardest Days

Don’t you worry any more.

“Well the first days are the hardest days

Don’t you worry any more”

- Uncle John’s Band

— — — — — — — — — — — — — — — -

“Sometimes the light’s all shining on me

Other times I can barely see

Lately it occurs to me

What a long strange trip it’s been”

• Truckin’

— — — — — — — — — — — — — — — —

Both quotes from songs by Robert Hunter, written for the Grateful Dead

— — — — — — — — — — — — — — — —

“Out on the road today

I saw a Deadhead sticker on a cadillac

A little voice inside my head said

Don’t look back, you can never look back

I thought I knew what love was

What did I know?

Those days are gone forever

I should just let ’em go, but ….”

Don Henley, from “Boys of Summer”

— — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — -

The first days are the hardest days. Boy, are they ever! I still remember how hard those days were. I’ll never forget it. The first 90 days, especially.

After I came back from that last relapse, I knew I had to cut my losses and move on, or I was going to go down quickly. I’d been on that downhill slide before, and I knew how that ride ended.

Two and a half years before, I’d spent the better part of six months in a suicidal depression, after I’d surrendered the drinking and drugging, altogether. I’d spent every last ounce of my resistance and given myself over, totally, to the addiction, and it had taken me down, quickly. It left me with nothing to live for, and I barely made it through those six months of just wanting to die, every day. Every night, I felt like a failure, because I had failed to end my life that day.

Having eventually gotten back on my feet, gotten a good job, moved up quickly in it, had my own apartment, a decent car, recently having some luck with the ladies, everything seemed to be going my way, but inside, I knew. I was on a rollercoaster ride that was careening more and more out of control, and I was rapidly giving myself over, more and more, to the addiction again. A big part of me didn’t care, but something inside must have. In a moment of clarity, high as a kite after smoking a couple of joints in my apartment alone, playing strat-o-matic baseball all by myself, as I had that whole winter, I cried out, “God, I am so alone!” I had an ache, deep inside, that would not go away.

I reached over to pick up a book that was sitting on my kitchen counter. It was a book I’d had for a couple of years, but never opened up to read, before. I wasn’t big into reading in those days. I was more into numbers and counting — life was like a mathematical equation to me, and as long as I kept all the numbers straight and lined up, everything would add up in my favor. I was proving this theory to be true.

But, I couldn’t escape the dreaded premonitions I was feeling inside — I’d felt them before. During the days and weeks leading up to my last, 7 month cruise on my ship in the navy, I had felt it. That cruise would prove to be my unraveling. My rage had taken on a life of its own, and I had done things that make me shutter, even now, when I look back.

Then, again, I felt those premonitions after I got my good discharge from the Navy. I was free! Everything seemed to be going my way, then. I had my whole future laid out before me, with big plans for what I would do with all of that unlimited freedom, now that I was out of the chains that had bound me (the Navy). But that sickening sense of doom had slowly enveloped me, and it didn’t take long for it to bring me down to the depths, where I found myself unable to function, in any way, without the aid of alcohol and drugs.

At age 22, I’d found myself in a walking zombie mode of existence, certain that I was losing, or maybe had already lost, my mind.

In baseball, after three strikes, you’re out. I wasn’t ready to be out, just yet. I picked up that Big Book of AA, and started reading. The hope and sense of life that permeates my entire being, today, first entered my psyche in the moment that I started reading that book. It was one of those moments when you suddenly can see your future laid out before you, and you know where you must go. Or, at least, in that moment, I thought I knew. Thus began the long, strange trip that has led me to this moment, 37 years and a lifetime later.

I followed that vision to AA, where I was quickly led to N.A. Since I had quit drinking 2 ½ years before, and never gone back to it, I knew the drinking was no longer my issue. It was the dope-smoking, the opium smoke inhaling, the cocaine and meth that were beginning to enter the scene. I was doing any and every thing BUT drink — and it was taking me over. My behavior was becoming more and more bizarre at work, and I was skating on thinner ice there than I even realized. At N.A., I learned about addiction, and that the same things that applied to my alcohol use — I couldn’t afford to have even one drink — also applied to any mind- or mood-altering substances. I was an addict, and had to abstain from all of it.

I was all in. Just like in my active addiction, I gave myself over completely to that program. When I went back up to my friends in Connecticut to tell them about my exciting news, I chickened out, and got high instead. 37 years ago, today, I made the long drive back to Pennsylvania, now utterly convinced that I could no longer live like I had been living. Those kids in N.A. would have to be my salvation, and I dove all the way in. I threw myself onto the mercy of that program, and hoped to God it would save me.

It did. The trip had only just begun, and those first 90 days — God, they were brutal. I was having obsessions to get high every single day, sometimes multiple obsessions every hour. I just wanted to escape reality — but I knew I could no longer afford to do so. I wanted to crawl out of my skin. I doubled down on meetings, began going to two or three a day. I was drinking a ton of coffee, and eating nothing but fast food, and was a complete mess, healthwise. I lost my good job, two months in, which had been inevitable, and began scrambling for work. I’d go through 17 jobs in the next four years.

They were the hardest four years of my life. But, looking back, I wouldn’t trade them for anything. I got to be part of writing a book that has helped millions find a way out of addiction. I got to watch a fellowship spring up around me, and spread to places like New York, New England, Washington, D.C., where it hadn’t existed when I first got there. There was an energy, not of my own creation, that I latched onto, and let carry me forward until I finally found recovery for myself.

Then, I lost that fellowship. I got thrown out, along with my group, for supposed tradition violations. But, they couldn’t take my recovery away from me. When I realized they’d done me a favor, I never looked back. I moved forward into my future, and I lived a life that led me far beyond my wildest dreams, and landed somewhere over the rainbow. None of it made sense, none of it added up, I just knew that it worked, and I lived it. Life continued to get better, just like that book had said that it would. It had nothing to do with going to meetings, everything to do with living by spiritual principles, as best I could.

It took 30 years, but I was eventually led back to where it all began for me — AA. There, I found things had changed. I was very welcome there, and I could talk about anything — alcohol, drugs, life in recovery. I found fellowship, something I had missed out on all those years. I found where I belonged.

And, I’m not looking back. I’ll follow this road to wherever it leads, but on the way, I will enjoy every moment of the ride. It’s a hell of a ride!