Ahoy,
It occurs to me today roughly a decade after my last shot of dope that perhaps some of the ways I stay away can be useful to others in my style shoes. A decade after I lost my best friend to the very same monster I thought would kill me. I think the only way to get to the root of the matter is to discuss it. To laugh at it a bit, even. Because life can be fucked up, but laughing is one of the most appropriate and helpful reactions.
I have lived outside the city of Baltimore my whole life. In the picturesque (though not too different) town of Columbia, Maryland. A town designed by Edward Norton’s grandfather James Rouse. My parents rarely fought, they remain together and loving towards one another. My siblings and I fought as kids as all kids do, but we also had no true animosity among us nor were ever abused in any ways.
Yet when my best friend Mark’s mother died of cancer while he and I were in high school, died on the day of her older sons graduation, while her younger son, Mark fought a battle of his own with heroin and addicted and grieving and loss, I too got lost in the mix.
I never believed in God. As a child I remember staring at the patterns on my wall feeling unmoored as I contemplated existence. From where did I come, what am I, and where will I go when I die? Conversely, dreams from which there is no waking would anchor me for seeming eternities while I died in them but remained body-bound. Eventually I would struggle awake and in those moments of clarity I felt the world of humanity fall away, never truly believing in what they said. When I extracted from adults their reasons for being, their spiritual beliefs, I found everything wanting. When I looked around at what was I was aghast so few people cared to even contemplate this. They swallowed the pill of religion, or of money, or of nihilism, or of ego-based hatred towards others who’ve allegedly wronged said ego. Or kin of mine, they escaped into substances and lost philosophies, delved into a world all their own making.
AA: Assholes Anonymous
There was no compassion. There were expectations. There was no knowledge, there was merely the surface of anything effective going on as people shared their shit stories about how they have lived a life of shame. Sponsor these nuts you fuckers. A community of people stressing God on those in need is more fucked up than it is helpful. A room full of ex-addicts chugging cups of caffeine pretending like they are cured or sober, yet can’t stay ten minutes from the table of coffee, tea, and cookies? Yeah, reallllllly fucking supporting. You traded one for another. Or one big chip for ten smaller ones, but the source of the sadness. The urge when you are in your bleakest time? It remains and it is not hard for life to send you into a spiral again. Without the analogical climbing tools and mental formulas to slowly rewire the brain, you can easily fall back into the realm of the uncaring.
I was never forced into religion, for my father was a genius and he himself subjected to post WWII Knoxville, Tennessee. A bible thumping area, aye. My mother is spiritual, but does not adhere to a creed other than Love. I was left to find my own answers and for a time, lost myself in the sadness of death and the lack of support of knowledge surrounding the experience of grief that I felt in the wake of my own losses.
A few years went on this way and I, being a highly functional addict, at times was fine and at times was devastated beyond consolation for no apparent reason.
Midway through college I was arrested and spent a year in “rehabilitation”. I was arrested in the cold of February with Mark. We were scooped up and took a trip in the paddy-wagon in which I thought I could be like Robin in Batman and get my cuff-straps in front of me for a more comfortable. I heard a voice from the other side of the wagon tell me “Don’t do that! They will think you are trying to escape!” I tried in vain to get the cuffs back into their original position and instead spent the rest of the ride with my arms even more uncomfortably cuffed behind my knees, I leaning over on the bench. I quote rehabilition, because like any other sham program, AA, NA and other “give-it-up-to-God” proselytizers, there was structure without substance. There is a lie inherent in those places, that if you just give up your will, you will feel better. What a simple and completely inapplicable thing to say to someone in the midst of a drug and potentially legal crisis.
What if you swallowed instead this placebo of sugar and used the logic of your mind and the power of your emotions? What if you talked to people about your true source of sadness and got input on that? Why bother killing yourself now if nothing matters, just live your awesome and own fucking way. If you would that you were dead, instead think about all the folks you admire and care for and wonder if they might not feel the same, and by merely conversing about the darkness, inviting it in, you become accustomed to the very little light therein?