Red Like Tango

Tag: drugs

  • For Friends of Bill W

    I’ll remember for the rest of my life the first time I said it. I wonder sometimes about starting my testimony that way, but I choose not to because it’s a little too obvious. I have quietly observed as people who have never attended a meeting laughingly role-play introducing themselves like they’ve seen it done in the movies.

    It was a really powerful moment for me. I’d arrived at an outpatient clinic in Minneapolis and walked into the room I was supposed to be in and sat down in one of a large circle of chairs, glancing quickly around the room to see if my suspicions were correct – they’d all be people off the streets, surely, because that’s what drug addicts are and I’m still not sure I am one – and seeing C and A and J and M, and nervously looking down at the ground again.

    The facilitator – I don’t remember her name now, but she was kind of harsh and older – the facilitator had us all introduce ourselves. I don’t remember who started, but they were using that same structure – inserting their names and addictions where necessary – and as each one of them spoke it out, a kind of warm, golden energy mounted up inside the words, barreling into the next person to speak, setting each of them free as they spoke truthfully about who they were in their innermost beings, and suddenly it was upon me and I said, “Hi. My name’s Ian, and I’m a heroin addict…”

    And I stopped.

    I think we were supposed to say something else about who we were but I forgot in this moment, and said instead-

    “…and that’s the first time I’ve ever said that.”

    And then I said something like, “And I’m really surprised to see that you are all normal people, nay, lawyers, doctors, college dropouts like me, because I thought you’d all be homeless and I would continue to feel totally alone because I’m not homeless, never have been, and yet I have this thing eating me up inside…”

    I don’t remember what I said. That probably all happened in my head. It was a volatile time.

    And that’s what was – is – so powerful about Alcoholics Anonymous meetings. Suddenly, you’re a part of a community. In fact, you’re a part of a community of people who know they’re broken, which is way more powerful because we all know we’re broken but most of us don’t know how to admit it. Or don’t want to. But then you get into this community of people who knows, they really know, they’re messed up – nobody’s putting on airs, nobody’s self-righteous – and it’s powerful.

    I remember the first time I heard the phrase “terminally unique” and how it just opened me right up. That’s what I thought about myself. It seems insane now (and I was, at the time), but I really thought I was living something that no one else had ever lived, and those two words summed up that whole feeling and suddenly I realized no one could have verbalized them without understanding the feeling behind it which means… I’m not alone. That’s it. I’m not alone.

    I heard a story once – I think it came from the Big Book – about an alcoholic in an airport. She was in recovery, traveling alone, walked past a bar, and started having that craving. Somehow, she got a person on the intercom to ask for “friends of Bill W” (one of AA’s founders) to meet in such-and-such room, and a whole bunch of her fellow alcoholics and addicts showed up and they had themselves a meeting. That’s community. That’s what I live for. That kind of I’m-gonna-be-there-for-you-no-matter-what brother-and-sisterhood.

    I thank God for C and A and J and M and D and S and B and all the rest who were in that room the first time and then took me to my first meeting afterwards. I miss you guys.

  • Reflections on Being Clean for Four Years, Part One

    Today I celebrate, by the grace of God, four years clean. Prepare yourself for lots of CAPS, boldness, BOLD CAPS, suave italics, and exclamations, ’cause I am one excited dude today! Also I’ve had lots of chocolate. Anyway. This is my first think in a series of thinks about it. (Being clean, that is. Not the chocolate.)

    Why I Did It (Got High, that is)

    This is a doozy. People ask, you know? They wanna know why. As you might imagine, I did, too, but it’s not an easy question to answer.

    For a while, I thought it had to do with a few concrete things in my past. To some degree, I’m sure they played a role, and there’s no doubt in my mind that facing such things was a very important step in my recovery. That being said, a piece of advice: face yer demons but keep the train a’chuggin’. After spending too many years in the tangled thought-maze of Cause and Effect, I found no escape but the obvious one, namely, that the maze wasn’t real, that it had at some point become a false construct to mask my inability to face myself. Deep, I know.

    Well, so I moved on to accusing my upbringing. Life is easier when you don’t have to take responsibility for it, and since I decided those few concrete instances in my past, while terrible, couldn’t be blamed for it all, my parents were the next likely target. But my parents, you see, are human, and as humans are known for making mistakes from time to time, I decided this, too, wasn’t going to provide the answer I sought.

    But what about the Church! There’s a place FULL of bad, hypocritical people entrusted with teaching Sunday School just begging to be maligned! I did this for a while, and with gusto. Unfortunately, while I don’t hold to every piece of the Southern Baptist doctrine in which I was brought up, the Church, too, is full of humans, and as humans are known for making mistakes from time to time… yeah.

    It was me, folks. I was the problem. More accurately, what I didn’t do was the problem. Jesus gives this caveat at the end of his revolutionary Sermon on the Mount: “Listen, y’all. If you do what I’ve told you to, you know what you’ll be like? You’ll be like wise and discerning men who build their houses on FOUNDATIONS (Does anyone else hear an awful lot of irony in this statement?), so that when hard times come – storms and floods and wind and whatnot – their houses don’t fall down. If you don’t, however, you’ll be like the unthinkably foolish, who decide it’d be fun to have a house right there on the beach…”

    Here’s the thing: his words are so good! They’re for our good, not to put up some unnecessary red tape. They’re words for flourishing, for health, for life. From beginning to end, the Bible talks about people choosing either life or death. EDEN: all kinds of awesome fruit to eat, but Adam and Eve have to have the forbidden stuff (in other words they choose death) and they die for it. THE JEWS: sometimes they choose life (following Moses out of Egypt), sometimes they choose death (makin’ cows outta gold in the desert and then worshiping them, because that makes sense), and God’s always telling ’em stuff like, “I have set before you life and death, blessing and curse… so choose LIFE that you might LIVE!” I wanna LIVE! Don’t you? DAVID: gets off to an incredible start killing a giant, for God’s sake, but ends up choosing death – the death of his first, precious, baby son – all because he can’t keep it in his pants. SOLOMON: super smart, total disaster. ETC.

    And then Jesus comes along and says, “You guys! I really want you to get this! I want you to have what I intended you to have from before Time began, and I want you to have it SO BAD I’ll die for you to have it.” And he did. He chose death for our life.

    But then he got up! Can I get a Hallelujah?! But that’s another sermon.

    In short, I heard the words of Jesus and I didn’t do them and my house fell down. And GREAT was the destruction of it. And LONG-LASTING the pain it caused, to me, to my family, to everyone I loved, and to lots of people I didn’t. I know it’s not in vogue to talk, in moments like these, of the danger of hell, but whatever. Heed my warning: The same destruction, the same growing, gnawing emptiness which ended with me and a needle full of heroin in my arm stares you in the face even now if you neglect Jesus’ words.

    Those who have ears to hear, let them hear.

  • A Sacrifice of Vulnerability

    I got on here to publicly shame the movie The Perks of Being a Wallflower. (If you haven’t seen it, know that there are spoilers in this post.) I planned it throughout the entire movie because I thought it was going to be like every other movie. I thought this poor kid was gonna fall in love with this poor girl and she was going to totally miss it and treat him badly and then realize it toward the end and that would be that – requited love, which is rare and frustrating to watch – and I was going to ask insightful questions about what that movie says about what our culture is telling us about love, and then the end happened.

    You wanna know why I watch movies? I watch movies for the moments that open me up. You are wrong: I could not be doing better things with my time. I live to feel raw and awake and alive to the Story – the story of brokenness and redemption.

    Like the part when this kid’s parents find out what his aunt did to him, and his dad walks in to his son’s room in the psychiatric ward and walks up to him and takes his head in his hands and kisses his forehead. You just have to see the movie because the whole time his dad is this disinterested non-person, and then this, this understanding! This gentle. encompassing. closeness.

    The big questions now are not for you or for our culture. They’re for me. Like: What happened to me that makes me seek out sickness? Why is it I want to be like that kid? I was way too young when I was introduced to sexuality, but I wasn’t abused like he was.

    I just want to be understood, you know? Yeah. I want to walk next to be people who get it. This kid finds a group of people who get it, and that rings this big bell of longing inside of me.

    But the sickness… you wanna know something? I was relieved, six years ago, when a psychiatrist told me there was a strong possibility I was developing schizoaffective disorder, but it’s not for the reasons I used to think. I used to think I just wanted to be sick, to be lazy, to have excuses. I mean those could be part of it, but the real, deep undercurrent was that I could maybe, now, be free to be me. I thought schizoaffective disorder would provide a lens through which I could finally see myself clearly. I thought it could explain the darkness inside me.

    But I don’t think that’s all of it, either. When I came home from that appointment, my sister was the first person I told – I didn’t want Mom and Dad in the room with me when that psychiatrist told me because I didn’t know what her diagnosis would be (or maybe I didn’t want them to hear that I wasn’t ADD, that I didn’t have an excuse for totally failing at college) – and when I did, when I told my sister, she just hugged me and said, “I knew there was something else going on.”

    But what was it? What else was going on? It wasn’t schizoaffective disorder. I always felt different, but I know now that I’m not.

    That’s the point here: We’ve all got the same story. We’re all trying to fill the big impossible holes inside of us. I’ve always felt different but I’m not. I am seriously – but not fatally, oh no, thank you, Jesus – narcissistic. Or I was.

    The Gospel really is wonderful.

    I was led to pray recently that God would restore the innocence I had when I was three, because when I was four, it was gone. I was that young. (That would certainly qualify as an answer to those questions.) I didn’t understand it at the time. I understood that I had to hide it from Mom and Dad, and as I grew older, I became so. ashamed. so full of guilt.

    You know what opened me up? Another person’s honesty. Michael’s honesty. He told me what happened to him, and I thanked God at that moment that at least my offender was only a little bit older than me and that she was a she.

    What is going on in the quiet?

    I’m not trying to scare you, really, but we have to be serious from time to time. We have to ask ourselves these questions. And if I’m not vulnerable about all of this like Michael was, you might not ever see it in yourself. You might not ever come out and ask the questions which are eating you alive because you don’t even know they exist. You might not ever talk to someone about it.

    And if that’s you, you have to. You have to talk to someone about it.

  • Rock Bottom

    You know, I thought, when I put it out there for people to pick my brains, that I’d get easy questions like, “What’s acid like?” and I could give easy responses like, “Every last person who has ever tripped will tell you that they have this experience of ‘one-ness’ with a capital ‘O’ and ‘we’re all connected, man’ and it’s all bullshit,” which would be a true and accurate response. But y’all are not taking it easy on me.

    Anonymous writes:
    Every addict has a rock bottom. What was yours?

    Deep breath.

    Rock bottom, for me, didn’t happen once. The first bottom I hit was breaking into my friend’s house (whom we shall call Fred) to get at his stash of Oxycontin. My other friend (whom we shall call…Thomas) and I were on the withdrawal end of the spectrum, not feeling good, and we were trying to figure out what to do about it. It was, oh, five in the morning.

    In the car:
    “Well,” said I, “I know where Fred keeps his Oxycontin.”
    Said Thomas, “…”
    “And he keeps his back door unlocked.”
    “…”
    “Ugh. I mean. He wouldn’t mind, right? I’ll leave him the money.”
    “Yeah! No problem. He won’t even be angry.”
    “I don’t know, man. Maybe we should just wait til he wakes up.”
    “I don’t want to wait.”
    “Me either.”

    We drove over to Fred’s. Not a creature was stirring, etc. The problem I knew I’d have was the dog. He would be loud. But, I thought, he knows me. I was a regular at Fred’s. If I could just get through the door silently, it’d be alright.

    Long story short, I got past the dog, I got the pills, I left the money, Thomas and I got high, and a few hours later, after I’d woken up from the sleep/daze, I had some pretty heated messages from Fred. Go figure.

    This, as I said, was the first bottom. I’d been stealing from my parents for years – starting with a $20 here and a $20 there and ending with hundreds at a time – but this was the first time I’d stolen outside the family. (Wow. That’s the first time I’m seeing that in writing, and I can’t tell you for the life of me why the two were different. That’s plain crazy, and no mistake.)

    So. I dealt with the storm of Fred’s anger – which mostly involved telling him that Thomas pushed me into it, Thomas, don’t you see, was the bad guy – and had a big moment of “What. in the world. am I doing.” except the coarse version. The whole debacle ended with a phone call to my sister. She hadn’t known, I don’t think, the severity of my drug use, and without prodding from me, decided to drive down from Chicago the following day. As soon as she walked through the door at my parents’ (I hadn’t known she was coming), I told her I was coming back with her, and she said, “I know. That’s why I’m here.”

    Makes me weep every time.

    That launched the long road to rehab, and there are plenty of stories surrounding that journey, but I don’t have time for them now. The next and lower bottoms I hit were in between rehabs. I kept convincing my parents to allow me to come home after I’d finished one or was on my way to another. I stole from my parents every time, got high. every time. At the last, I was in Chicago preparing to attend Teen Challenge after a brief visit home, and I received a call from my mom. She’d just found out about a check I’d cashed for something like $500, and I was at the theater with my girlfriend when my pocket buzzed.

    “I know about the check, Ian.”
    “Mom…I’m so sorry.”
    “It’s like you’re two different people! You say you want to get clean and then you come home and steal from us again and I just don’t know what to think. Do you even want to get clean?”
    “Yes. I really do. I’m sorry.”

    But my sorries didn’t mean anything anymore. Not at that point. Words, my friend, are useless at that point. I was so tired of it, but I didn’t know how to tell anyone so that they really believed me because that’s the thing, right? It’s TOTAL insanity! What are they supposed to think? You want to do one thing, you do the opposite. You love people, you really do, and you despise them with your actions. I can’t explain that. I can point to a letter a guy named Paul wrote to his friends in Rome, though. “I do not understand my own actions,” he wrote. “For I do not do what I want, but I do the very thing I hate…Wretched man that I am!” (Romans 7:15, 24)

    So. That was what bottom looked like for me, that conversation with my mom. I felt so empty when I hung up because I was standing there looking at myself from the outside for just a second, and I LOOKED. so. empty. I mean, all my promises…

    All I wanted to do after that phone call was get high. By God’s grace, I didn’t (read: wasn’t able to).

    I’ve said before, and I’ll say again: I didn’t go through what so many others have. I was never on the streets. I never sold my body. My dad was AROUND, for pete’s sake, unlike so many others’. I thank God for that. And I thank God my mom and I were still close enough that such a conversation made me so ashamed and provided an impetus for change.

    I should stop here, though it doesn’t feel complete, probably because that’s the beginning and end of a story fraught with many evils committed, each worse than the last. I can talk about those, too, at some point, but I’m going to let this ride, for now.

    Blessings.

  • Narcotics

    The first question’s in, and it is a tough one. It’s been a long time since I’ve thought about these things, and for good reason: It isn’t good to dwell on them, especially when you’ve not been sober/clean for long. That said, I want to strongly discourage you from continuing to read if you’re in recovery, which here I’ll qualify as less than a year since you last used.

    Just to be clear: If you haven’t been clean for at least a year – and even then, check your conscience – go watch a movie or read a book.

    Gustavo/Dad writes:
    Every time I have been treated with a narcotic pain med, in addition to the (variable) pain control, I have felt either nothing, or nausea and/or an intense malaise.
    Question: Did your first doses of narcotics feel good? If not, what made you take the second dose?

    Deep breath.

    Here we go.

    Did your first doses of narcotics feel good?

    Yes, but my first doses were small and I wasn’t in any pain. I’m no doctor, but I wonder if this made a difference.

    A few things are important to understand here:

    1) My first experiences were with the little cousins of heroin – hydro- and oxycodones like Lortab and Percocet. Still narcotics, but nowhere near as strong.

    2) By the time I was experimenting with narcotics – probably late summer ’07 – I’d been through marijuana, cocaine, methamphetamines, ecstasy, and hallucinogens (LSD as well as experimental designer drugs like the 2C family). The significance of this is that I’d already watched the effects of a variety of drugs on my body – I was experimental in my use to the nth degree – and was very practiced in, quite literally, controlling my body in the event of negative effects. I’m not sure how to relate this except in terms of the stomach flu: Have you ever been sick, or felt as though you were about to be, and “steeled” yourself, perhaps until you were closer to the toilet? It’s like that.
    3) I wanted it to feel good. I wanted it very badly. This begins to answer the second question, but I’m not ready to go there, yet.
    More to the point, I think, are my first few experiences with the drug Oxycontin, which led to my heroin addiction in early 2009. These experiences would have been anti-climactic if I’d been expecting anything. I snorted the crushed-up pill and it made me sickly, lazy, and cloudy. Very similar to the symptoms you described, Dad. It wasn’t until one of my friends showed me how to use it intravenously that I fell in love. And oh man did it make me sick.
    What made you take the second dose?


    As I said above, what made me take the second dose is, well, wanting to. At that point in my life, drugs had been my way of escape for a few years and I was committed to them. It wasn’t all peaches and cream, but when it came down to it, I got results (apathy, dumb happiness, rootless pleasure). I was buying the lie.

    What’s crazy is I knew it was a lie and I kept going. I could put you in touch with the people with whom I used to shoot up or smoke or whatever and every one of them will tell you about how I would talk about Jesus and how I wanted to quit, much to their chagrin. It wasn’t every time, but Jesus came up a lot when I was high. I wrote things in my journal like this, pleading with God to deliver me, make it better, anything. But another part of me was all in.
    I got sick almost every time. I didn’t throw up, but I felt awful. The initial rush was followed by an incredible wave of nausea, but I was addicted to it as much as I was addicted to the needle and the drug itself. I cherished it, to some degree, because it meant I’d just shot up.
    (Soap box: I hope you see that these are not cut-and-dry, black-and-white feelings. Feelings rarely are, but these are twisted and dark – are they not? – and I can’t make sense of them outside of Christianity. How else do you explain this infatuation with what is incontrovertibly evil than to say I am evil? And if evil, at odds with God. And if at odds with God, in need of a Savior!)

    Beyond that, I’d already gone so far even before the Oxycontin and heroin that, even though I knew I’d be sick, it was all I had. I mean, I know that’s not true, but it felt true. I’m here to tell you: when you’re sticking a needle in your vein, there doesn’t seem to be any way out.

    This doesn’t feel complete, but I hope it’s the beginning of an answer. Follow-up questions are welcome, as are completely different ones.
    (If you’re a recovering addict and you didn’t take my advice to quit reading and now you’re feeling crazy, do the following: a) Pray earnestly for deliverance, picturing Jesus on the cross paying for it, and know that I’ve been praying for you while writing this. b) Call me, Gary, or someone you trust, stat.)

  • Give Me Your Tired, Your Poor…

    …your huddled masses yearning to breathe free, / The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.

    I have a hard time writing most of the time. This is why I post monthly-ish and not more often.

    Yes, yes, I know: so do you so does everyone who writes get over it and write you just have to do it suck it up yadda yadda YADDA!

    But I had an idea.

    You know, when I started this blog, it was before heroin. Now, it’s mostly about heroin or rehab or whatever, and the more I talk with people, the more I realize how many questions y’all have. And here I am – white, male, upper-middle-class, lover of Jesus since I was eight, great family, ex-junkie. (That is to say, NOT minority, male, poverty-level, no father, projects, ex-junkie.) I come from where you come from (which is perhaps why there are so many questions).

    So. Help me. Help me help you. You have questions? I have answers. (And I want prompts.)

    I should qualify that. I’ll have experiential answers about particular drugs. Everything but peyote, anyway. I probably won’t have answers about why people do what they do – alternatively, I’ll have answers you won’t like – but it might make you feel better to have asked and to have been answered by someone who was there, even if what you receive is subjective and inconclusive.

    Maybe someone you know is going through it. (Me, circa 1998.) Maybe you’re toying with some taboos with which you never thought you’d be toying. (Me, circa 2002.) Maybe you’re in the middle of it, up to your neck in it, can’t stop it, scared shitless. (Me, circa 2007.)  Maybe you’re a wet-behind-the-ears homeschooler who just has no clue and you’d like to. (Well…)

    Ask.

    Oh, and that’s the great thing about the intranets and about Blogger in particular: you can ask anonymously! Or not, which would be even sweeter.

    Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me,
    I lift my lamp beside the golden door!

  • I Am SO GLAD I’m Clean

    I was going through old journals yesterday and found this entry from June 20th, 2007, which was at The Start Of It All. It’s good to look back and see out of what depths God has brought me. (Psalm 30)

    (Begin: journal entry.)
    I can’t sleep. Things are weighing down on me. I never consider suicide, but I always want relief. I am ever in search of it, some way to kill the pain.
    I can’t hold a job. I don’t want to work but I also don’t want to sit around.
    I feel most of the time like no one wants to be around me. This is a dark time, and the light at the end of the tunnel winked out. Where is hope? I hope in everlasting life and I know I have it now, but the time from now until I am perfected is too much to bear.
    I don’t really mean that because I’ve made it this far. I just want to be okay. I just want to feel good about my life.
    There are ways to accomplish this – exercise and eat right, read the Bible – but every time I consider these, I think it’s no use starting because I never follow through.
    And I’d love to believe that if I just found the right woman, things would shape up, but I’d love to believe a lot of things.
    I’d love to believe life gets easier, for instance, that this is simply a depressed slump that has an end.
    But it’s times like these that I can’t remember beautiful things and everything seems worthless and irrelevant.
    What can drive me out of this place? People drive me, but most people don’t like me. Music can drive me but I don’t have the discipline. God can and does drive me, but I feel so sinful so much of the time that it’s hard to approach him. This isn’t a crisis of belief. I believe God exists, I just can’t see him. I feel him pursuing me – the Hound of Heaven – and I’d give up my life except that it’s hard to see, in times like these, that the life he offers is actually better. I know it somewhere in my soul, but it’s hard to see.
    I want to taste the Divine Nature so I can more easily turn my back on sin and folly (O, taste and see that the Lord is good!), but I don’t believe I’ll get it because he’s already given me more than enough reason to believe he is good and wants the best for me.
    When does it end? He is the only one who can pull me out.
    Oh God! Where are you now?
    (End: journal entry.)

    Now this.

    If you’re feeling any of that, there is a Light. I still feel some of these things sometimes, but mostly I’m healthy – mentally, spiritually, emotionally.

    One thing I know: I was blind, but now I see.

  • One.Five Years

    I’ve been clean for a year and a half today. That’s 547 days without using. 548 days ago, I didn’t think I’d be able to go for 1, but 545 days ago, I checked into Teen Challenge Chicago anyway. After 56 days at Teen Challenge (and 2 days of hanging out with Caroline and Alex and Paul), I spent 165 days in the Master’s Touch program at Wayside. I stayed there for another 99 days before I moved out and became house manager at Wayside’s transitional house in Batavia, where I’ve been for 223 days.

    Those big numbers make it seem like a long time, but sometimes when I look at my veins, my heart starts beating and it could’ve been yesterday. It’s close and far away at the same time, which I don’t quite understand. I go weeks without even thinking about it, but when I do, I start feeling crazy again.

    I’m not trying to make anyone worry. What I want to say is this: there, but for the grace of God, go I. I need Jesus very much. Actually, I suspect sometimes that my past is a grace given to me because it enables me to see my neediness so clearly.

    I was relating my story to some friends yesterday and was reminded of the day and time that God just picked my addiction up out of me. For 56 days at Teen Challenge, I wanted to get high. In fact, a couple hours before I left on the 56th day, I was scheming with another guy in the program about how to get some dope. Then I heard about Wayside and I left TC and I spent the night of the 56th day in a homeless shelter. When I got up on the 57th day, I walked past a group of guys who were selling pain pills with money in my pockets. I was blocks away before I realized what had happened.

    Day 56 – Trying to get high.
    Day 57 – Money in my pockets, walking past an opportunity without a second thought.

    Now tell me I had anything to do with that.

  • Processing

    Here are some things I’ve been thinking about recently.

    Using dreams

    For the last year, when I had using dreams, they would be about how I really wanted to use, but I never could. These are similar to other dreams I’ve had where I was assigned a task and couldn’t do it. One time I had a dream that my family was at church and at the end of the service, Dad asks me to go get the van, so I do, but when I get in and start driving, it’s like I’m on ice, can’t go anywhere, and I’m slipping all over the place and then there’s an old woman and her grandson in front of me and I plough over the old woman and Dad’s running up to the car and screaming at me to get outta the car and let him drive and I’m feeling so anxious it’s crazy.

    That dream was at least four years ago, and no, I don’t want to hear your analyses.

    So these using dreams. I’ve had more in the last couple weeks than I’ve had for the past nine months. I mean, every night. Not so much anymore, but it was terrible waking up every morning and thinking I’d ruined everything. And these recent ones were different, too. The way they used to be was I’d either have the drugs with me but no rig, or I’d have it all with me but people would keep walking in and I’d have to shove it in the drawer til they left. I couldn’t ever get high. Now, the dreams are about me having the opportunity – different from having the drugs – and, praise God because this is a new development, I’m praying and asking for God’s help! I don’t want to use in these recent dreams, which is huge, because that means my subconscious is falling into line with my conscious. But it still feels like I’m on one of those moving sidewalks, being pulled to this unavoidable destination at which I’ll get high and fuck everything up. The one redeeming aspect: waking up in the morning and realizing I didn’t.

    Reflections on this last year

    It’s been a year. Sometimes I hear people, after a long amount of time doing something, say things along these lines: “It feels like just yesterday, I was blah blah blah…” That’s not how it feels for me. Well, wait a second. If I think about the details of coming in – driving with Alex and Caroline, walking in to Wayside’s front office and staff telling us we can come back in a little while after we’ve eaten lunch, the elated feeling I had when they said this because it felt so different from Teen Challenge – it seems a little closer, but not much. It definitely doesn’t feel like yesterday. It feels like a long time.

    Those feelings I had

    Things were hazy for me at the beginning. I mean, the longer you’re at a place, the more definition it has. Think about the first time you sat down behind the desk at which you now sit, at your work or whatever. Things were hazy, right? You didn’t know the place yet, or the people. That’s what it was like. I wasn’t high or anything, it just felt weird. I remember odd little details, like this Native American-looking-guy with long black hair behind the desk, whom I now know to be Tom, telling me, “Yeah, no problem, go get some lunch, come back whenever,” and me in my head, thinking, “This place is different and not militaristic,” and Alex and Caroline and me going to eat at this Mexican joint up the hill that was very oddly decorated, me folding and refolding the paper wrapper from my straw and moving my wet-with-condensation glass to and fro on the wooden table, wiping the water trail I’d just made, repeating this ad infinitum, Caroline saying, “OK, well, we should get you checked in,” me feeling reluctant but knowing I had to, driving back to Wayside, Ray and me going back to his office so we could interview, me asking him, “So what is the staff like around here,” him responding, bless him, “Well to be honest wich you Ian, I don’t know that they’re all saved, but I buhleive God is sovereign and there’s a reason they’re here,” and me just thinking, “Wow, I love this place and this man Ray.” It was so different from Teen Challenge, where that question was answered thusly: “Oh, you’ll really like it here! All of the staff have been through the program! They know what you’re going through and they’re really helpful!”

    You know someone’s full of shit when they use italics and exclamation points in conjunction and unreservedly.

    Ray wasn’t like that. And soon we’re talking about how I’m reformed and he’s telling me the director of the program is reformed, that I can choose where I go to church, and man, that was really something. The rest is kind of a blur, except for this feeling: there’s grace here.

    I was staring off into space for a good while, there. Processing is strange and good.