Drugs - The Good Kind

This is not what I thought it would feel like to be 35, I told Linsey. She asked what I meant: Did I think I'd be the Composer in Residence for some college orchestra? More successful, career-wise? A better dad?

Not really more of anything, actually. The only way I knew to say it was, I thought I would be less lost.

The weeks after a relapse, even a quickly aborted one, are inevitably brutal. I've screwed up my brain chemistry: things that should feel good feel bland, things that should feel bad feel excruciatingly painful. Food for thought next time I get a “bright idea.”

But this one goes deeper. In this chapter of my life I find myself haunted by some of my more tenacious demons. Sometimes my sobriety feels like a game of Jenga. I think all of the pieces are there, that my stability is secure, and by a mistake of omission I pull a cornerstone. Each time the tower falls, I relearn the importance of vigilance.

I can learn much during this post-relapse period, as I tear away the band-aids that my addiction has plastered over my wounds. When I manage these hurts in healthy ways, I am prone to forget they are there. (I guess that's called healing.) But when I wake up from my addiction, there's a unique opportunity to look at whatever I was running from. What void was I filling with all the wrong things?

So I'm realizing that I've been a little sloppy in treating my depression. First, the usual caveats: depression is not an excuse for my relapse. And I'm not suggesting psychiatric treatment as a substitute for a rigorous 12-step program - depression and addiction are not the same thing. But, in my life at least, they feed into each other, in a wickedly symbiotic manner that leaves me no option but to face them both down, unflinchingly and relentlessly.

A week after I used, I left one of my regular meetings feeling supported and encouraged. I don't know what happened on the way home that night, but the bottom dropped out of my world. I took off my seat belt and took my van past 110 mph, praying to be killed in an accident. I'm either too chicken-shit or too grounded to ever follow through, so I talked myself down from the ledge and went home and called someone. I'm proud that I picked up the phone that night. People came over, we talked, I felt loved. After they left I carved myself up with a razor blade. I've been doing this for years and I never talk about it, because to talk about it seems self-important, like a “cry for help.” The silence has not served me well, so I'm ending it.

Obviously there are pieces of my relapse in that night, shards of guilt and shame and self-loathing that are achingly familiar. There is also a kind of narcissism in any self-destructive act. But I know that there is also a component of under-treated major depressive disorder-recurrent that I cannot afford to minimize. I know this for a fact. I know it because I've been on and off medication for all of my adult life, and I know what the “brain chemistry” part of depression feels like. I know what if feels like to be properly medicated, and this isn't it.

Towards the end of my college years, I gave a composition recital. I also tried to kill myself. My acceptance at that point of the inescapable roll of prescribed psychotropic medications in my life was tinged with sadness. I feared that if I medicated the blackest parts of my mind, the colors would fade as well. They did not. During this time, I fell in love with a child and lost her, and every shade of compassion and heartbreak I experienced was vivid, sharp, saturated. I composed the most honest and moving pieces of my career, all while under the treatment of a psychiatrist.

I guess the “recurrent” in my depression diagnosis was true. I guess it's time to put in some more work on that front.

[Photo by size8jeans under C.C.License]

This post is also at The Second Road.

Restore Me To Sanity

What is your definition of “sanity”?

Last night's step study ended before we got to this question in our Celebrate Recovery workbooks. I didn't get to share my answer. So here ya go...

Sanity is stopping this relapse before the demon in my head possessed me again. Thank God I'm not in my addiction today.

Sanity is having friends like you, that I've never met, who encourage me and pour out heartfelt empathy and solid advice when I'm at my worst. I appreciated every one of your comments last week.

Sanity is leaving the most uncomfortable counseling appointment I've ever had, and knowing what to do next. I talked about it with people I trust. He's a therapist, but he's also a human. Some of his advice was good, some of it wasn't.

Sanity is looking at my depression and seeing it for what it is. I don't have to decide whether an upswing in my depression contributed to (not excused!) my relapse, or my relapse agitated my depression. There's a false dichotomy in that chicken-and-egg question. I'll keep working with my (wonderful) rehab psychiatrist on the depression, and I'll keep working my program for my addiction. It's all for the same goal.

Lots and lots of stuff in the last week. My head is spinning. I thought it couldn't get much worse, but yesterday the shit hit the fan at work. We're going through some growing pains, and the pastor and I have hit a pretty fundamental disagreement. But again, here's sanity: I have been (mostly) calm and appropriate, and I know that things will be okay. We respect each other. He's the boss, and while I'm here, I'll work within that framework. Heck, give it a couple days to settle, and I'll work with that framework and whistle while I do it. I just know in my heart that it's time to start looking around. There's probably something else on the horizon for me. Again, that's okay. I find good friends and good advice in the program and in my family, and I haven't really felt tempted to use over this.

I'm beginning to know who I am, and what I have to offer. As I face this dissonance at work, I'm discovering new boundaries that I didn't even know were there. I think that's sanity.

[Photo by Mark Grealish under C.C.License]

Awake

Day 46

I'm awake.

Not buzzy awake – Monster drinks and nicotine, porn and adrenaline. Handfuls of meds and empty bottles of cough syrup. Midnight hammock with the porch light off. Euphoric cognitive dissonance: “I will write the most beautiful poem” when I can't even string together words.

I mean sure, I had my triple-venti-nonfat-no-whip-mocha. My friend said that Starbucks is too strong for her – she drank it yesterday and it made her sick. Well, duh silly. It's like heroin: you can't shoot up right out of the gate. We have to build to that.

But I'm awake and alert and picking up the pieces in my den, one book or cable or CD at a time. These sediment layers are an archaeological record of the last several years of my life, and my spectacular failure to follow through on all the projects I started. I tried to explain to my nine-year-old: I'm not just untangling cables, I'm having to look at all the things that I wanted to do, but never finished. Ashley responded, “Why don't you just do them now?”

And that's what each day is like right now. I'm feeling the warming rays of the sun after days and months of rain.

Part of it's familiar. When I make that excruciating call, “Mom, I'm using again” and the cycle breaks – and I feel the freedom from the tyranny of my addict. I don't have to stockpile internet porn or hide chemicals under the bathroom sink during every free moment. That much I've been thankful for, many times. Until it starts again.

Part of it is unfamiliar. And terrifyingly real. Because this time in sobriety, I'm not curled up under the covers. I added to the endless list of recovery slogans my own little mantra: “Get out of bed, stupid.” Because once I'm up, I can think about my goals and spend time with the people I love. I can even dig through my shit when I'm feeling brave, exposing it to the healing light of my program friends, my therapists, my sponsor, you.

It's not that I haven't wanted to be awake before now, but that I simply couldn't. I know that “change in sleeping patterns” is on that check list for clinical depression. How many times have I sat and answered those questions: Change in appetite? Yes. Loss of interest in daily activities? Yes. Feelings of hopelessness? Yes. Thoughts of suicide? Yes.

Yes, yes, yes...

If you're on meds, don't get me wrong. They've saved my life, more than once. And I'm still on them now. But last summer (three relapses ago) I asked my shrink for less, not more. I was tired of being numb all the time. Because life isn't just about not feeling awful all the time, but about feeling warmth and joy and excitement, and maybe even crying when I'm watching Wall-e with my kids.

The recovery lesson for me is this: I didn't wake up because I found the right meds. I didn't wake up because I exercised or juiced carrots and apples and parsley. It's the step work. Answering questions about the shadowy parts of my landscape, and sharing with other people. Coming out of isolation and answering my phone.

It isn't all ecstacy. (The feeling not the drug.) I spent so many years trying desperately every day to top the previous day. I'm and addict; that's how we roll. I'm still learning and struggling with the concept that every day isn't Christmas morning. (This last December 25th, Ashley burst through the door and asked, “Do you know how hard it was to wait 'til 7:09 to wake you up?” We asked what time she had woken up. Answer: “7:06.”) But this moment, I can look out my window, and see the silhouettes of the trees across the street against the blue and gray of the sunset, and I can experience it. In the moment, with a deep breath of oxygen. And my neck hurts a little, and James keeps asking me Nintendo questions, but it's all OK, because I'm here.

And tomorrow, I'll “get out of bed, stupid” and I'll call my sponsor and read my Big Book. These banal things that stave off the nightmare for one more day, and allow me to take in all the beauty and grace that have been poured into my life, before I even knew to ask for them, before I ever deserved them.

And I won't be dreaming, but awake.