Hi my name is Sam and I'm an addict.
Before coming into treatment I'd say these words as a way to make myself feel better about myself, much like assholes like to tell people they're assholes, so all the cards are on the table, hopefully minimizing destruction.
Writing this now I have reached my one year milestone. A year ago I spent nearly every day crying over the realization that I was stuck and I just couldn't seem to put the drugs down or release the ties I had chained myself to my demons with.
This is some of the things I've learnt along my journey so far. Treatment centres are spaces for self care and should be monopolized upon. Doing step work and working the program are completely different when you have to take life into consideration as well. Use your treatment time to the best of your ability, trust that the addicts that have clawed their way out of hell have a better road map than you and if you listen to them you'll have a much easier time getting out of there yourself. If you're in a treatment centre you have won the addict lottery and out of the 3 places you're likely to go it's really the best. Jail will stay with you forever and you're not coming back from death.
Complete your program, do your 12 steps and then get excited about doing them all over again for the rest of your life because the spiritual experience you get from working the steps properly is far better than any high you'll ever chase and a bonus onto of that is you'll probably end up saving someone else's life as well.
The serenity prayer was something I said because I was in the circles and that's what you say. After I experienced that serenity for myself it was like learning how to use life for the first time and now someone known as psycho Sam because she was that fucked up crazy friend is often the calmest and happiest person in most of the circles I'm in.
If sobriety is boring you are doing it wrong.
Magical things happen when you chose sobriety but the price for that magic is sobriety and it's a circle and it never stops. Life is inherently magical but you're far to self absorbed to notice it when your life is consumed by the getting and using of drugs.
Life is also fucking hard, there is so much shit out here and it will crush you, that doesn't go away when you get clean and sober. Life and the people in it continue to shit on you and probably will till the day you die, but it's like being stuck on the side of the road with a flat tyre. It's shit but it's less shit if you have a jack a spare wheel and a spanner. That's what this program and sobriety is its the spare, being in active you've probably lost or sold or neglected your spare and you'll just stay stuck there until someone can come and save you but by this point nobody really wants to come and save you and if they do its not without a grudge, sometimes you'll just have to walk or sometimes you'll stay on the side of the road and eventually just die.
No matter what once you've gotten clean and sober hold onto it above everything else if you put it down for one second you might never find your way back. I've seen this and it's more painful than death, death has finality suffering slows time and eventually lands up at death anyway.
If you're an addict you're an addict accept it, it's not going to change but like with most life long illnesses lifestyle is your best shot at survival
Your choices define you, only 3% of addicts make it and life can really be an interesting experience. Stick with the winners, take your medicine literally but your program is your medicine, help people and let people help you. You can't always but WE always can.
In my one year there has only been one thing that I've learnt that I can never ever do, only ONE thing and if I never do that one thing there will always be hope. There are a million things I can do in my sobriety and just one don't that I can’t. That one thing is pick up.
You can never pick up and in my experience not one person I know who has picked up is having a good time, no one not one person who I've met along my journey that is an addict has learnt how to use successfully, all their lives are shit and getting shittier by the second. That is a guarantee.
I wish I could tell you with sobriety comes sunshine and roses and unicorns and peace but that would be a lie, those things come with work and work is a lot easier to get through when you’re not shit faced or planning on getting shit faced all the time. But, sunshine, roses, unicorns and peace are awesome, you should try it sometime, it’s called NA and it’s a new way of life.
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