From the depths of hell are those of us who have survived the grip of drugs and alcohol welcomed back into the world. The journey is never, ever, over.
This is a fascinating and detailed read highlighting some of the specific challenges facing addicts seeking to recovery and dealing simultaneously with a diagnosis of borderline personality disorder (BPD). Great material for anyone interested in the overlapping issues and frustrations in treatment for these two damaging illnesses.
My apologies for not getting on earlier. Everyone following and others have been so incredibly supportive of this site and my work that I feel guilty over a prolonged absence.
However, for the first time in many moons that absence is not related to horrifying events, rather the beginning of a renewed vigor for life and the culmination of some challenging work.
I am being tested at a new position in the hopes it will be come something long term – I’ve thrown myself into it beyond 100% in the attempt to do so. Happily, and with great satisfaction.
I’m finally paying child support, not as much as I would like to be giving to my kids, but everything that I can afford. Consistently and with the intention of finally becoming a consistent presence.
I talk to my children once a week, reliably, and without fail. I have 5 different alarms that go off and warm me so that if I collapse in exhaustion either the alarms, or calls from multiple people warning me, will get my ass up to be there to speak with my remarkable son and daughter. While the animosity is thick between my ex-wife and I, somewhere I’m finding the appreciation and respect for her that I should have. She’s been raising my children while I was unable to. It is my responsibility to earn my way back into the family I destroyed, not expect it handed back with a smile. I don’t think that way all the time, but as I build a better existence and confidence I find that it takes away the undercurrents that I let drag me farther from them.
I’m living in a stable location….more than 40 moves in 2-years….STABILITY would be a blessing in so many ways. It took me almost 3-weeks just to put my suitcase away because I was certain that something would go wrong…now I’m considering bringing more clothes that have somehow survived all the travel.
My squishy and delicious Mimi without who the world would have stopped so long ago. Forever and always will I be hers, and she mine.
Happiness.
I think I’m getting closer to happiness.
God damn if it didn’t take one hell of a journey to get here, and he (or she) shows that I gave up time and time again. They also know I’m terrified that the other shoe will drop at any second – usually I’m the one wearing it when it does.
I’m optimistically terrified of arriving at a new future, a start to something better, and becoming what I was intended to be.
My love to everyone who continues to support the blog. I will be trying to get more consistent again as everything balances out.
Happy 2017, merry-post “holiday insert” – and my wishes for kindness, satisfaction, joy, and contentment in the coming year.
Tonight the world is peaceful.
-S
This is my life. There is no rationality, no planning, scant expectation of success. An ego the size of this planet argues with a weakly protesting child, and the outcome is so basic that it bears minimal mention. Joy in one, anger and loathing in the other.
Note: written in 2014 following essentially a normal day with a relapse before my marriage collapsed. Not surprising I suppose considering the state that I was in.
You can be aware of it with a sense of resignation knowing that the inevitable outcome will be yet another failure of your will and the joy of just another day wiled away in discontent. There is an internal battle, naturally – who really wants to fight themselves mentally trying to prove that it’s wrong to do the thing the other part of you demands, regardless of the consequences. 1:30pm is about when it kicked in, and the fight was short, I had already been snorting buproprion despite all the fears brought on from yesterday’s clear overdose and seeming serotonin syndrome. Hallucinations, confusion, twitching, staggering, blind terror….certainly seems like something that you would want to do over and over again. I had been safely knocking off items from my to-do list, planned to tackle so much more for the day, when the fluttery thought of a cold beer dusted across my determination to continue the 48hr. streak of happiness and health I had been maintaining. So what if it was an hour walk to the liquor store and I had a pocket half filled with change.
Cut forward 8-hrs to my wheedling, intimidating, and self-righteous anger with my wife because she won’t give me the grocery money so I can get a pack of cigarettes.
This is my life. There is no rationality, no planning, scant expectation of success. An ego the size of this planet argues with a weakly protesting child, and the outcome is so basic that it bears minimal mention. Joy in one, anger and loathing in the other.
I’ve always questioned whether or not the majority of most other individuals at AA or NA meetings have experienced that same flat out smothering weakness. Non-committal and breaking at the slightest touch. I’m not sure. The “Big Book” speaks on “incomprehensible demoralization,” but there is always a touch of glamorization around each escapade that denotes in the back of my head some control. To be truly out of it, with only the smallest hint of coherency or willingness to fight against the thing destroying you – probably just my arrogant inner self bleating for sympathy because I must be just that damn bad. If the world had more people like me, I’m sure they would have popped up on my radar some time. Then again, AA preaches terminal uniqueness and loss of control as some of the basic precepts to their program. Depending on the time of day I’ll feel one way or the other about it.
To put it in perspective on a physical level, imagine yourself preparing to make dinner, say a tasty salad or some such other vegetablish item. Now picture that about halfway through, a casual thought about how tasty some meat would be in addition to the salad, but sadly you lack the funds. Before you finish, you’ve discussed the variables, the outcome, the possibilities, the pain – and you’ve come to a conclusion – your finger would make the perfect accoutrement. Down with the knife, up to the lips, and in a heartbeat, you’ve maimed yourself over a passing thought. Now that the moment is over, you can embrace the pain and relish the understanding of how sick you must be, provide yourself that information for an ongoing reference to continue justifying your actions.
But this disease sustains, it offers glimmers of hope, of optimism among the shroud of misery that you wear over your daily interactions with the world. This last time, that was absolutely the last time. Tomorrow you’ll feel better, and you’ll be stronger for having survived another ordeal. Until the day comes that you bitterly and pathetically weep that there won’t be a tomorrow with longing and hope for your expiration. Choking on tears and gasping prayers to any god or devil that will listen to remove the pain once and for all. Prayers so rarely answered it seems.
I told my wife at counseling that I had given up, but was balancing the need to see her, my son and my unborn child set-up someplace where I would know them to be safe and housed comfortably with a cushion in front of them. Seconds earlier, our counselor, Paula, who had initially been working one on one with me, had announced that she would no longer be working with me as she felt that there was nothing she could do to help and had become discouraged.
“Well, then why haven’t you gone out full tilt?”
At my core, I’m still a coward. I know where that will take me. Not where I hope it will, but likely to an institution or a jail where that one prized aspect to my existence that I have ever embraced as the key to masking the inner turmoil; independence. I don’t want to lose my family, and I would to delude myself for a few moments longer that all is not lost. I want to feel like I did one good thing as I crashed to Earth. Even if that single action was a mere minor amelioration of the damage so unjustly caused by me on way down.
And I’m human.
I’m scared.
Insanely possible impossibilities,
Shattered and replaced with ingenuity.
Hot roach on a highway hitting nothing,
I hold all the aces and still I’m bluffing.
Smeared sneer pasted in a smile,
Choking on air – so I’ll smoke for awhile.
Ups are getting tossed ‘round the downs,
When I fall and trip I don’t hit the ground.
Show me the trail and I’ll run on through,
I may laugh at death –
-but death laughs at you
I saw the sun set in a shallow grave,
And I watched the moon twitch in its cage.
I’ve seen infinity twice,
And I’ve explored both ends of life.
I gazed on the rage in a sea of smiles,
And I studied the eyes of a man who was not beguiled.
I’ve battered my way out of the inferno,
And I’ve walked in the halls where the saintly dream to go.
I’ve left my enemies in the past,
And I’ve brought my friends with my out of the ash.
This universe has done its best to beat me,
It’s learning now that you can’t defeat me.
I play this game called life on a different board,
I hold all the aces,
And all my pawns are lords.
I’ll throw my seven,
Lay my straight,
And you can king me.
Another checkmate in a game you don’t play for free.
The landscape of hope breathes life to we Travelers.
She takes in those who walk upon her,
Brings us to the peaks of our mountains.
She shows us clipped horizons opened to infinity,
Has us inhale crisped air cleaned with freedom.
Where lights cluster above,
Their thousands of points glimmering success,
You’ve made it to join the others,
A star in your own sky,
An inspiration to the next Traveler.
Hope will lead you to become something more,
And the darkness will always give way to your light.
When your world is shattered and you’re in tatters – stand back up and keep going. NEVER give up.
Plummet describes in a word the dumb shit,
The result of a life lived from one hit –
-to the next and that second of fuck it.
As intense wash the waves,
Through your secret filled caves,
Telling memories back from where you sent them away,
Until the shores are a littler cascade of broken mirrors pelting your gaze,
Each reflection a question,
Each flash a suggestion,
Of what happened and why,
Where you broke the faith and started to cry.
Each lens is a how of what could have been,
Who you are without all the sin.
No more pills and bottles and rock,
Bags of dope, sacks of coke and the inevitable cops.
Living on streets and the pity of strangers,
Acting devil may care to numb out the danger.
When each shot you took put a pin in your son,
Blocked his love just as well as you holding a gun.
You got loaded and loaded,
Raised finger and goaded,
As your legs washed out at the thighs,
From a tide on the rise.
If not for the merciful care,
From those you punish unfair,
You’d be sunk,
Drifting drunk,
Out to a personal sea in a trunk.
Boxed up tight when you ran out of fight,
Away from the world and your right,
As a man to do your best to make it alright.
And as long as it took,
For you to confess as a crook,
Thief of dreams, hopes and beliefs you forsook.
You can’t change the past,
It’s gone while the onrushing future hits fast.
So you accept the regret,
Live learn love and refuse to forget.
Keep strong in surrender,
Committed to change,
Because in the end you’re not alone,
And are any of us really so strange?
Sit powerfully with your eyes cast low,
Shouldering sugared pillars of duty,
That the sun can rest amid glorious delights,
And the travelers roam free across their paths,
Searching always for the journey-
-not the end.
Introduction from another fine individual burrowing their way out of the maze of addiction. Check him out!
Well I guess this is where I say hi………This is going to be my new platform for experiences or situations that have happened(or are happening) during my life as an addict. This isn’t trying to glorify this lifestyle because there is nothing glorious about it. It involves a lot of pain, but I am one that tries to see the bright-side of many situations. I consider myself to be an opiate addict although, I cannot say that I did not or have not indulged in many other drugs during my time. But as far as dependency opiates take the cake. I’ll be back to post more very soon, possibly tonight or tomorrow during the Holiday. Happy Thanksgiving everyone! Many nod’s to you all.
Source: There is nothing romantic about addiction.
To Ink - a blog from Melting Neurons 