Red Like Tango

Tag: rehab

  • 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.

  • Living

    So I moved into that house in Batavia.

    I got anxious while moving, because even though I’d spent a solid month or more in deliberation, it still felt like things were happening too quickly, like I hadn’t been patient enough. Maybe it’s just something that happens when big decisions are made.

    And now I live here. All of my stuff is here. It’s not at Wayside anymore. None of it. Between Teen Challenge and Wayside, I spent eleven months living with forty to ninety other guys. Now, I live with four, and it’s so quiet.

    That reminds me, I haven’t explained the situation into which I’ve moved. The house is for Wayside graduates, providing another, higher level of transition into The Real World. Rent starts out very affordable at zero dollars for the first month, and then increases over the next eleven months to five hundred, at which amount it stays. There are five bedrooms. Mine is the only room, presently, that has two beds, but that’ll be changing shortly.

    Oh yes. Another tidbit: I’ve been made the house manager, effective 7 January 2011. The guys who live here are all fifteen-plus years my senior and have been living here from one to four years (set in their ways, they are) which makes things somewhat difficult, but – and this has been my cry for the last eleven months – nothing worth doing is easy! As the new sheriff in town, I’ll be doing things like making more of the rooms doubles (which I believe fosters community), instituting a regular cleaning schedule (which I believe is a necessary part of mental and emotional health, as well as physical), replacing the cushiony toilet seat (gross) with a normal toilet seat, and maybe even repainting (spice it up a little, you know? It’s a boring pale yellow which could totally be replaced with, oh I don’t know, emerald green).

    So back to what I was saying: It was – is – an odd transition, living with so many guys for so long to living with so few. I mean, I have my own room (until Joe moves in), a place to put my toiletries (other than my toiletry bag), a place to hang my towels (other than on the front of a locker), a door to shut when I’m ready to sleep. I have a refrigerator, a stove/oven, a dining room table. It’s incredible. I’m still giddy about it.
    But it was hard moving out of Wayside, which phrase I never thought I’d utter. It was hard moving away from the guys. There was a lot of emotion in the move. After all the rush of packing things and then taking them over to the new place, it hit me: I’m leaving. And praise God for that! But I invested all this time and energy and emotion into that place – and from that place so much was invested into me – that I’m a part of it and it of me. And now I’m leaving.

    It was heavy.

    I don’t know. Maybe as humans we’re just really, deeply averse to change. (Maybe I shouldn’t make blanket statements like that, should talk about myself and not include you.) I used to be that guy who just loved spontaneity and flying by the seat of his pants, and I’m not anymore because it’s so damn exhausting. I like a schedule. I like to know what’s going to happen tomorrow and the next day. Of course, I can’t really know these things, but you know what I mean. And people who live that way – “spontaneously” – are extra-defensive of their way of life, which just makes me think they don’t want change, either, would hate to make a plan for lunch.

    I don’t think it’s just change, though. I think what’s behind all the heaviness is just that: heaviness. Brilliant, I know. It’s the same old saying-goodbye-pain that everyone’s been dealing with since God breathed life into us, and it still hurts.

    Anyway:
    -Pray for me, and let me know how I can pray for you.
    -Sorry for the parenthetical overload.
    -A good winter’s day to you.

  • Moving

    I finally made a decision, you’ll be happy to know. Well, maybe you didn’t know I was facing one, but I was.
    I really wanted to move into the city, to be closer to my friends and family there, to live in community with them. Before this last few months, I was unable to give anything to them, only to take from. And I wanted desperately – still do – to give back, now that I’m able. On the face of things, great reason to move into the city, right? But something interesting kept happening: every time I talked to someone about it, they would ask immediately, “Oh so you’ll be leaving the Oasis (church)?” To which I’d respond, “Noooo. I can make it out there on the weekends!” I’d then lay out my plans, how I was going to move the students I teach out here in the suburbs from Thursdays to Saturdays so I could come out here Saturday, teach, spend the night, and then be here for Sunday morning.

    A conversation with Alex was perhaps the most helpful. He said, “You know, Ian, the city is a lot different from the suburbs.”

    “You don’t say,” said I.

    He went on to explain, after that sarcastic remark I didn’t really make but added because I like to think I’m witty, that in the city, one can find a church service at any time of any day, that it would be a monster inconvenience for anyone to travel out to the suburbs every weekend. Of course, there are people who do – Hannah, for instance – but on the whole it’s just not practical.

    This was the last of several conversations I had about moving, and, as I said, every last one of these people took it for granted that I’d not be continuing at the Oasis. Even after I laid out my plans for them, they would stare off into the middle-distance, trying but unable to make my plans make sense.

    So what do you do when everyone around you (including yourself, though you don’t readily admit it) is apprehensive about a particular choice you’re considering? You don’t make that choice! At least, this seems the sane response. Mark you, it wouldn’t have stopped me before – several times it hasn’t – but God is changing my heart. (This is happening by such infinitesimal gradations that, to me, it has gone almost unnoticed, would have but for my dad, who directed my attention thereto.)

    So, I’ll be moving to Batavia, which is a mere fifteen minutes from Aurora. The house is in a great location – walking distance from downtown Batavia, which is quaint, and right up the hill from the bike path, which I can follow along the Fox River straight into downtown Aurora. Also, I’ll have, as my mom so delicately and hilariously put it, quiet neighbors, as the house abuts a cemetery.

    That reminds me: I’m going to commit right here and now to use this new location next to the cemetery as a reminder to think much, in the words of Jonathan Edwards, on all occasions, of my dying, and of the common circumstances which attend death.

    Next year in Jerusalem!