Answer Addiction

Tag: faith

  • Return to Sender: What an Unsent Postcard Taught Me About Addiction

    A timely message from my much younger, unsober self.

    Summer, 2020

    The Unsent Postcard

    I have a stack of unwritten postcards, collected from my travels, purchased with the intent of sending them to those back home. In recent months, I have taken to writing out these postcards to friends and family, both to cheer them with sunny images as they shelter in, and to support the United States Postal System.

    Not long ago, I came across a card featuring a hand-colored photograph of a windmill in East Hampton, New York. To my surprise, it was not blank. Tightly scrawled sentences, in rudimentary French, it was meant for a friend in Paris.

    No postage, never mailed.

    17 Septembre, 1991

    Chère Delphine,

    Salut! I am at the beach with my mother. My God! My poor back! I am ready for a big change in my life. We must talk. I’m going to write you a real letter soon.

    Ton Amie, Maria.

    Here I was, standing at the edge of big change, poised to plunge into some grand announcement, too large for the 4” x 6” space given. These words never crossed the Atlantic. Instead, I held them now, between my fingertips, twenty-nine years later.

    What are the chances of this? I thought. Of all these blank cards, only one has writing, and not just any writing, but words that speak to my alcoholic “bottom” — the physical, mental and spiritual low-point of my young life.

    My back hasn’t bothered me for years, thank heaven. I take it for granted. I walk with ease everywhere today. Until this moment, I’d forgotten just how bad things were with my lower lumbar at age twenty-four, that hell year when I couldn’t stand up straight without sciatica shackling my ankles, seizing my spine, and clamping down hard at the cervical vertebrae. This physical agony — an exclamation point to my mental and spiritual state — had literally brought me to my knees.

    I spent weeks in bed self-medicating on whiskey sours and muscle relaxants. Somehow I’d convinced the corner pharmacist to dispense refills beyond the legal limit.

    I‘m skeptical when people make meaning from random events. It feels self-indulgent to interpret every rainbow as a reference to my personal recovery. Yet finding this card, all these years later, didn’t feel like coincidence. It felt intentionally planted to remind me of why I’d sobered up.

    It also felt like something I had to share with others.

    September, 1991

    Watching waves

    In those mellow days following Labor Day, when the water is warmer than the salt air, I was with my mother in a rented bungalow at the tip of Long Island, now emptied of humans. I was twenty-five, unemployed, and reeling from a bad break-up.

    I remember the lunch mom served on or about the day I’d written that postcard: linguine with shrimp and mussels, and flutes of rosé wine. Mom was a faithful clipper of the Wednesday food section of The New York Times. Maybe she’d sourced this seafood pasta recipe there, or maybe she’d been inspired by one of the influencers of Hamptons entertaining at the time: Martha Stewart or The Barefoot Contessa.

    However it came to be, it was a memorable meal presented with panache, from a bare-bones rental kitchen. And it was a meal where my mother enjoyed alcohol as she always did, in moderation. More often than not in my childhood home, there was an appropriate wine, served in stemware, to compliment every dish.

    My mother drank the way Jacques Pépin did on public television, and the way I always wanted to, but never could — with class. At the end of an episode of making something like, say, classic Beef Bourguignon, he would raise his glass of Cabernet Sauvignon in a toast: “Aah-pee Coo-keeeng!” and tilt it lightly to his lips.

    But that’s not the way I drank this glass of blush wine. I downed it.

    Plagued by sciatica, a still larger pain loomed; it had been moving in slowly for years, like a cold front, now dipping as an arctic depression over this lovely lunch.

    I remember craving more flutes of Zinfandel than that one bottle held, but I was checked at two because mom was watching. Two drinks were the limit if you were female, and raised right — and you cared about appearances — which we did. But I couldn’t comply.

    I found myself watching the waves from that deck all afternoon. I watched them crest and crash, one after the other, in rhythmic indifference to my pain. Then it hit me. It felt big. Big like the feeling I get reading an inspirational poem from an anthology with a daffodil or seagull on the cover. Though the feeling was big I, myself, suddenly felt small. And weirdly enough, I was okay with that.

    It was a relief. The waves kept rolling in, oblivious to my situation. It was freeing to see that my pain — sharp and ugly — couldn’t stand up to the beauty of light and dark scattering the water’s surface.

    Scared, self-involved me was no match for the folding waves. For hours I watched them flatten at the shore and return to the sea, gradually eroding the moat I’d dug around myself. Yes, my experience of this landscape could be captured in a bad sonnet in a book with a hokey cover — the kind you’d find in a hospital gift shop.

    It was neither subtle nor original, my “white light” oceanfront awakening, but it was genuine.

    The next day, a masseuse with strong hands and a soft voice got me to open up about my drinking on a massage table in Amagansett. A recovering alcoholic himself, Sean R. is much of the reason I made it to my first Alcoholics Anonymous meeting when I returned to Brooklyn that next week.

    1991–2013

    A Bridge Back to a Good Life, Then Some Slippery Turns

    As the postcard predicted, big change followed. “A.A. is a bridge back to life.” That’s true. I did cross over to a full life with marriage, kids, and a semi-detached house. But it was a life further into Brooklyn, and further from my home group, the A.A. group where I had first gotten sober and stayed that way.

    Yes, I was still not drinking, but I can’t claim I was emotionally sober. Somewhere along the way I stopped going to meetings. Lost touch with my sponsor. Quit working with other recovering alcoholics. You know where this is going. Eventually, I drank.

    It started small: communion wine on Sundays, the occasional “non-alcoholic” beer, and the argument with my dentist. He wanted to give me local anesthesia for minor dental work, but I pushed for hit after hit of nitrous oxide on top of that. I wanted to numb my brain, not just my molar.

    “The idea that somehow, someday he(she/they) will control and enjoy his (her/their) drinking is the great obsession of every abnormal drinker.” — from Alcoholics Anonymous, Chapter 3, ‘More About Alcoholism’

    I went along like this for years, skating on the edge of my sobriety, doing figure-eights on April ice, until seven years ago I found myself sitting in the sun porch of my friend Samantha’s historic, center hall colonial home.

    Our kids were playing together somewhere on the periphery. I always found my way here, to this snug room off the parlor, with floor-to-ceiling bookcases and a loveseat. I’d marked it as my space, where I could step away, sink into the cushions and watch the cardinal at the feeder.

    On this day I was thinking about my marriage. It had been a good run, but after fourteen years, two sons and a poodle, it was over. During the past months, this reality had settled over me like snowfall hitting pavement at the freezing mark, melting first, before catching hold, white landing on grey, gradually building, til nothing remained of the sidewalk below. I was scared as hell now.

    Samantha stood over me with finger sandwiches and two flutes filled with golden bubbles on a silver tray. It had been so long since I’d been to a meeting, so long since I’d said out loud to a roomful of people: “I’m an alcoholic.” So long that I had a new circle of friends that never knew I had a problem and older friends who had forgotten that I didn’t drink.

    In that moment, I forgot I didn’t drink.

    Alcohol, catching sunlight, was presented to me on a slender stem, the way it had been twenty-two years earlier at the beach.

    Why not? If ever I deserved a mimosa, it’s now.

    I took a sip.

    Holy shit, what the hell am I doing?

    I ran to the powder room and poured the rest down a sink with a swan head faucet.

    “The alcoholic, at certain times, has no effective mental defense against the first drink. Except in a few rare cases, neither he (she/they) nor any other human being can provide such a defense. His (her/their) defense must come from a Higher Power.” — from Alcoholics Anonymous, Chapter 3, “More About Alcoholism”

    It had happened —I had drunk again. I never thought I would. It had been more than two decades since my last real drunk, and I had good reason never to drink again — actually two very good reasons, their names were Leo and Liam. Sure I could rationalize the Sunday morning communion wine and the occasional hit of laughing gas — after all, I was accountable to no one for my behavior now— but when I let that bubbly pass my teeth and slide down my throat, I recognized that for what it was —a slip.

    I remember the taste of it clearly — that citrus effervescence in my mouth — and I remember my conscious decision to swallow. Like countless alcoholics before me, I had now proven what the Big Book drives home in the conclusion of Chapter 3.

    I had had “no effective mental defense against the first drink.”

    September, 2013

    The Room Above the Fish Store

    Thankfully, at the same moment, I realized my problem when I took that sip of spiked o.j. , I also remembered the solution.

    Alcoholics Anonymous had worked for me, for as long as I had shown up for myself and others. What became obvious to me with this slip was that I’d do well to return to a community of recovering alcoholics if I wanted to get sober again, and stay that way. I needed to plug back into a sober support network.

    So on the heels of my slip in late September, 2013, I climbed a staircase to a room above a fish store filled with retired seniors and flies circling overhead. I’d stepped into an A.A. Big Book meeting, already in progress. They were reading one of the personal stories from the back of the book, round-robin style. Right away I could see myself in ‘The Housewife Who Drank at Home.’ When she described herself as a ‘Jekyll-and-Hyde’ PTA mom, I lost it. That was me. Someone passed me a box of Kleenex. I will never forget that kindness.

    September, 2020

    Today

    Willpower and the passage of time are no guarantees against the first drink. I was humbled by this realization when I slipped.

    I like my life today; some days I love it. I don’t live in unreasonable fear, but I accept this fact: on any ordinary day, my alcoholic mind could observe the oven clock turn five and think: A snifter of eighteen-year-old single malt whiskey, served neat, alongside a bowl of salted cashews, would be a fine idea!

    And today I understand, right down to the jelly marrow of my bones, that this is typical alcoholic wishful thinking.

    I also recognize — and appreciate — other approaches to solving problem drinking, or at least to blunting the devastating effects of alcohol and other addictive substances and habits. Some of these solutions have developed in my lifetime, and some have been there all along.

    I have a friend who threw herself back into her childhood faith in earnest, and another who found help in Buddhist-inspired Refuge Recovery. I am happy for these friends, and for everyone who finds lasting recovery, however and whenever. And for those who have chosen the A.A. path, I am especially gratified to welcome back those like me — humbled humans who have returned to the fellowship later in life.

    On the last day of this month, I’ll have seven years back in the rooms. Once again, Alcoholics Anonymous has been a bridge back to a good life. I’ve got a sunny apartment, two sturdy teens, and an Australian lizard. The ex and I have each other’s back in the co-parenting game. I’ve got a day job where I feel purposeful, and my writing at night, which lights a votive in my soul.

    I was lucky to find my way back to A.A. at forty-seven, and lucky to turn up this picture-postcard now — this four-by-six inch card stock talisman, a reminder of who I was at twenty-five, and who I am now, twenty-nine years later — sandwiched between sunbathers on the Jersey shore and Niagara Falls at night. To me this is no coincidence: this postcard, lost then miraculously recovered, does parallel my own recovery, lost for twenty-two years, then found again in a new group, above an Italian fishmonger.

    And so, my dear friend Delphine, here is the full story, the real letter I promised you, delivered now, almost thirty years later. You are not an alcoholic, but maybe some of this makes sense. I hope so. We must talk soon.
     

     

    This piece originally appeared on Medium on September 13, 2020.

    View the original article at thefix.com

  • The Koran in the Synagogue: When Jews and Muslims Fight Together for Recovery

    The Koran in the Synagogue: When Jews and Muslims Fight Together for Recovery

    When people are hurting and struggling with addiction, the normal barriers that separate us fall away, and we are able to connect on a very deep, human level.

    The tension along the border of Israel and Gaza has almost become old news. Every day we hear about more rockets fired and ceasefires that never seem to last. The Israeli-Palestinian conflict has been an ongoing struggle with seemingly no end in sight. Each side has their own view that will not be altered. Palestinian and Israeli people fighting each other for more than one hundred years.

    But in Givat Shemesh, a small village in the hills of central Israel, we see a different battle going on. A very real struggle of life and death that has nothing to do with nationalism, religion, or land. A struggle in which people of differing backgrounds and faiths share and fight together, side by side.

    Retorno, an addiction prevention and rehab center based on Jewish values, is a strictly kosher facility with daily prayer services, Torah learning, and Shabbat (the Jewish Sabbath) observance. At the same time, the treatment center welcomes all nationalities and religions. Anyone dealing with addiction receives the help they need with openness and respect for all belief systems.

    Although Retorno’s goals have nothing to do with peaceful coexistence, the rehab center has become a place where Jews and Muslims can interact in a safe and accepting environment. When a person is struggling with a serious addiction, the struggle to hold onto life is very real. This camaraderie of struggle offers an opportunity for the opposing groups to get to know each other and interact on a human level. They understand that underneath everything, we are all essentially the same people with the same needs and fears. In order to heal, we all require connections with others. In order to grow, we all struggle with the same fears and weaknesses.

    A few years ago a judge called me and asked me if our center accepts religious youth. I said, “Of course!” So he told me he would send me a nice, religious youth. A few days later a 16-year-old Muslim boy arrived. We welcomed him as we would any other client.

    The boy did not have a Koran, so one of our counselors bought him one. The boy brought it into the synagogue; he prayed from his prayer book while everyone else prayed from their own. As his colleagues prayed the morning Shacharit prayer, he prayed the morning Fajr prayer. In the evening, the Islamic Maghrib prayer accompanied the Jewish Maariv prayer in our synagogue.

    The boy went through the full treatment program at Retorno. Three months after he left the facility, the boy called me and said, “Rabbi Eckstein, you will be happy to know that I am well and have started to go with my father on Fridays to the Mosque.”

    From Addict to Counselor

    There are many reasons why a person in recovery makes a good rehab counselor. They have firsthand experience of what it’s like to struggle with addiction and how hard it is to recover. Put simply, they can relate on a level that only one who has traveled the same path can. This type of empathy and understanding is extremely valuable in addiction treatment.

    This is how we met Yusef, an Israeli Arab who first came to us for treatment and then returned to work as a counselor. Yusef is an exceptional human being. He also holds special assets that are unique to his background. For example, Yusef had not been raised in a religious family and for this reason, many of our Jewish youth who grew up in strict religious homes felt comfortable opening up to him. They knew he would not intimidate or judge them. Over the years, Yusef has participated in the recovery of many young Israelis.

    A Dangerous Situation

    Just before Shabbat, I received a call from a panicked counselor. “It’s close to Shabbat and I want to let you know what’s going on. It’s Miriam, she’s sitting on the ground with a sharp piece of glass and she won’t listen to any of us. If anyone gets close, she threatens to cut herself, and has already cut herself. Each time she cuts deeper. It’s a very dangerous situation.”

    I told her I would send an expert. I sent Yusef.

    After Shabbat, the counselor called me to relate what had happened.

    “I’ve never seen anything like it,” she said. “Yusef got close to her, sat down, rolled up his sleeve, and said, ‘Listen, I know you have all the best reasons in the world to cut yourself. I’m sure you’ve gone through some terrible ordeals. I have, too. Listen to me. I’m not telling you not to cut. But every time you cut yourself, cut me as well.”

    Within a few minutes, she handed him the glass, and the two went off to have a cup of tea together. “I’ve never seen anything like it!” she repeated.

    Touring Together

    I travel and lecture all over Israel about addiction and prevention. I always bring an alumnus with me to tell his own story of recovery. During one of these trips, I brought one of our Arab counselors, Amin, along. Since he has a driver’s license that allows access to the Arab territories, he drove and I dozed in the passenger seat.

    At some point, I felt Amin shaking my shoulder.

    “Rabbi, Rabbi, wake up!” I sat up to find us surrounded by several IDF soldiers, all pointing rifles at his head. It seems they thought an Arab had abducted a rabbi and was trying to take him to his village. It took some convincing, but they finally believed that Amin and I were working together and that he was helping me on a mission to give a prevention lecture in Beit-El.

    The Rebellion

    I remember we had an Arab youth counselor during the Intifada. During this time, even at Retorno, there were heightened levels of distrust and anger due to the increased violence in Israel. At some point, some of the youth in treatment held a rebellion. They insisted they would not tolerate working with an Arab. I will not have hostilities among my clients and counselors. Retorno is a place of healing and connection no matter what your background, religion, or national affiliation.

    I spoke to the youth in recovery and related a personal story to them.

    “Around 50 years ago when my parents were living in the U.S., my mother had a catheter placed in her foot. Subsequently, her vein collapsed and the doctor told her she needed to have an amputation. My father adamantly refused and sought additional help. He found another doctor, this one a world-renowned transplant surgeon from Israel. He agreed to treat my mother, and by inserting an artificial vein in her leg, saved her from amputation.

    “This is a nice story, but it gets better. When my father went to settle the bill, the doctor would not accept payment. He considered my father a colleague since he was also considered a doctor (not a medical doctor but a PhD) and what’s more, they were both Israeli. But the doctor was not Jewish, he was an Israeli Arab from Lebanon.”

    I looked at the faces of my rebelling youth.

    “It was an Arab that saved my mother. If any of you want to leave because we have Arabs at Retorno you are welcome to leave now, the door is open.”

    No one left.

    Our struggles as a nation do not impact our healing at Retorno. When people are hurting and struggling with addiction, the normal barriers that separate us fall away, and we are able to connect on a very deep, human level. In a center for addiction, it is essential that clients feel they are in a safe, welcoming space. When this happens, we all learn something about ourselves and each other. Any organization that accepts all equally is a force for good in this world. 


    Together at Retorno (PC: Shoshana)

    Rabbi Eitan Eckstein is the CEO and Founder of Retorno, the largest Jewish organization in the world for the prevention and treatment of addictions.

    View the original article at thefix.com

  • How Harm Reductionists Keep the Faith

    How Harm Reductionists Keep the Faith

    Morning to evening, nearly seven days a week, Karen and Michelle endure taxing commutes to bring harm reduction services to drug users in North Carolina’s hard-hit, rural areas.

    It’s a bitterly cold afternoon in early March as Karen Lowe and I pick our way down the broken sidewalks of a semi-abandoned neighborhood in Statesville, North Carolina. All around us, squatter houses stretch for blocks. Every window is busted or boarded up. Thin, dirty mattresses lie on sunken porches and feral dogs scrounge in the trash-strewn yards for scraps. Some residents are huddled inside for warmth, though in most of these homes, there is no electricity.

    The neighborhood is a depressing sight, but it’s hard to feel blue when you’re on outreach with Karen Lowe. Co-founder of the Olive Branch Ministry, a faith-based non-profit that brings harm reduction services to the seven foothill counties of North Carolina, Karen is the embodiment of love.

    Harm Reduction in the Deep South

    As I burrow into my thin jacket, Karen strolls down the middle of the street extending warm greetings to the few brave souls who venture outside. Though the pockets of her cargo pants are bursting with clean syringes, naloxone, and other supplies to prevent death and disease among people who use drugs, she doesn’t flaunt her wares.

    “I just want people to see me,” she explains. “It’s about building trust. They know why I’m here. If they need something, they’ll come to me.”

    As we walk, the 52-year-old fills me in on the colorful cast of characters who call this neighborhood home, including a man who claims he hasn’t bathed in a year and an old woman who pees on the sidewalk. Karen describes everyone with great affection.

    “There is a certain kind of love that goes with being an untouchable,” she says. “And [the people of this community] have it. But it’s not allowed to grow.”

    There certainly isn’t much growing in this neighborhood. Judging by the columned porches on every house and what looks like abandoned flower gardens, this was probably once a desirable place to live. But shifting economic winds have devastated entire cities in the South and Statesville is no exception. 

    A small inland city—population 26,000—Statesville boasts neither North Carolina’s green mountain range nor its sparkling coastline. It’s stranded in the flatland area of the state, mostly buried under strip malls and fast food restaurants. But despite so few bragging rights, Statesville embraces its Southern pride, describing itself on its website as “a city where fish is fried (as our Lord intended they be) and a bottle of Kraft French Dressing is good enough for anybody — so get over yourself.” Also true to its Southern roots, while Statesville has recently invested in a splash park and a $330,000 home for veterans (more than double the average price of a house in the area), the city has allowed this particular neighborhood, in which residents are almost all black, to fall into ruin. The only people who venture into this place are the churches who occasionally come evangelizing and of course, the police, who make neighborhoods like this one their second home.

    But Karen brings cheer to this desolate area. Twelve years ago, she was homeless herself, struggling with mental illness and depression, and searching for both a literal and metaphorical place to set down roots. She found a surrogate family and a calling in a faith-based organization in Greensboro that provides services to people living with HIV. The community welcomed Karen with open arms and she became a regular at meetings, outreach events, and retreats, which she describes as “mad love and dealing with yourself, everybody crying and snotting.”

    Not Your Typical Faith-Based Outreach Organization

    Karen says she knew then that her life was about to change in remarkable ways. And was it ever. A couple years into her involvement with the faith community she met the love of her life, Michelle Mathis, a woman who shared her passion for helping people in need. Though they have the same heart for harm reduction, the pair is about as opposite as two people can be. Michelle exudes elegance with a powdered face and coiffed hair that somehow survive even in the god-awfullest North Carolina humidity. Her partner is more salt-of-the-earth.

    “I did the make-up and heels thing when I was young…somebody should have stopped me,” Karen laughs.

    The yin to the other’s yang, the two married in a private ceremony in 2009 where they exchanged olive branches instead of rings, thus creating what would become their joint life’s work, The Olive Branch Ministry.

    Olive Branch is not your typical faith-based outreach organization—and not just because its founders are an interracial queer couple spreading the word of Jesus in the Deep South. True to the tenets of harm reduction, whose guiding philosophy is “meet people where they are at,” Karen and Michelle serve without pretense or expectation.

    “We say faith is why we do [this work], but it’s not what we do,” Michelle explains to me over the phone. “If someone asks us to pray for them, we will pray for people…We take the message of harm reduction to faith communities…but we don’t evangelize.”

    During afternoon outreach with Karen, she utters not a whisper about faith. And yet, if God’s love for others were perfume, you’d smell her coming from blocks away. Helping others comes as naturally to her as breathing. Several times during our conversation she offers to assist me personally with everything from community partnerships to my writing career, and after I mention casually I’ll be traveling abroad soon, she offers me money to buy a goat or chicken for a family in need.

    Morning to evening, nearly seven days a week, Karen and Michelle endure taxing commutes to bring harm reduction services to drug users in North Carolina’s hard-hit, rural areas. They ask nothing in return for their services. In fact, they seem critical of faith-based groups who use community outreach programs as a carrot to boost membership.

    “It’s hard to be trusted in a neighborhood like this [because people think] everyone wants to take them to church,” Karen explains, adding that this is why she maintains such a low-key presence on outreach. Instead of rolling up in a van stashed with free giveaways, she roams the streets where people can see her, offering nothing but a greeting unless she is asked.

    The Intersection Between Faith Communities and Harm Reduction

    The Olive Branch Ministry’s approach could serve as an example for how faith-based communities and harm reduction can work together. The relationship is not always harmonious: some in the faith community accuse harm reductionists of enabling drug use or not doing enough to discourage problematic behavior. Conversely, many harm reductionists criticize faith groups for the hypocrisy of claiming to serve “the least of these” while refusing to help drug users, who belong to one of the most stigmatized and marginalized of all groups. Even when faith-based organizations do offer assistance, some peddle a strict, abstinence-only agenda or approach outreach with an attitude that appears to place more importance on gathering lost souls into the flock than on addressing people’s immediate needs.

    But despite the tenuous history between the groups, there is much cause for hope. Across the country, faith-based groups like The Olive Branch Ministry, Judson Memorial Church in New York City, St. Paul’s Episcopal Church in Arkansas, the national Interfaith Criminal Justice Coalition, and many more are forming active partnerships with harm reduction groups. Other organizations, including the United Methodist Church, Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.), United Church of Christ and National Council on Jewish Women have publicly proclaimed their support for harm reduction programs.

    The relationship between the faith community and harm reduction shows promise and room for growth. Especially in the South where faith is so important and drug users have so few services, these alliances are critical to stem the tide of deaths and disease caused by an unregulated drug supply, draconian laws, lack of sterile equipment, dearth of adequate treatment, stigma, and misunderstanding about what causes drug use to become problematic for many people.

    “I feel that faith communities in general think that harm reductionists are a bunch of left wing radicals,” says Michelle. “They think that we will come in and demand that the church hold drug user union meetings and do syringe exchange, but they don’t realize that we meet the congregation where they are…we figure out where they are comfortable and [decide] how to go from there.”

    Harm reduction groups and faith communities need to work together rather than at cross-purposes in order to reach and help as many people as possible. It’s not always easy to find common ground; an olive branch is a good place to start.

    View the original article at thefix.com

  • The Joys of Being Wrong

    The Joys of Being Wrong

    I am limited when I am in my own power, convinced of its sufficiency.

    I had initially thought to write this story – the story of a person once self-presumed irreparably broken who recently completed chemotherapy turned Ivy League law student in a sensible, stable long-distance relationship – once I had received official acceptance letters from myriad top-ranked schools and the boundless adoration of a future wife, an expression forged in platinum, maybe with a tasteful emerald or cushion cut. Submitting it now, though, amid this very particular brand of uncertainty so laden with the weight of proving my worth, after many rejections and healthily parting ways with my girlfriend, seems a far more fitting representation of the point of recovery.

    What is that point?

    The wording will vary for everyone, of course, but to me:

    The point is not what you get: the point is what you do with it.

    Were I to await the above, the increased likelihood of this lesson being misconstrued as “quit drugs, win big!” would overshadow the actual essence of sobriety. Sure, the cash and prizes sometimes include overwhelming esteem, material gain and skyrocketing popularity; more often than not, though, the promises of recovery entail something less expected – something that we wouldn’t at onset necessarily identify as exceeding our wildest dreams, but that somehow does. That’s one of the most amazing things about all of this, really – that what we think is humdrum is actually fulfilling, and that what we think will be fulfilling actually sells us short.

    There’s a reconciliation of paradoxes implicit to the recovery process. When I heard of the addict mentality described as “negative ego” I didn’t fully grasp its implications until I heard the same rephrased by a young woman who said that, in her active addiction, she felt like a “piece of shit in the center of [her] own universe.” Later I heard such peculiar self-evaluation termed as “arrogant doormat” and “I didn’t think much of myself, but I was all that I thought about.”

    When I first got clean, the catalyst beyond threat of discontinued financial support was certainty that I would finally be recognized for the meteoric talent that I was – that all of the reasons for which I thought I used substances would be reinterpreted and rightly understood as unappreciated genius and, once so affirmed, I would no longer indulge that self-destructive tendency born of being “misunderstood” – no wait sorry – not just misunderstood like you are – distinctively misunderstood. Quitting drugs for me, however, has actually shown its primary benefit to be that I now get to participate in life just as other people do – like a person looking to what actually is instead of constant consumption with what is not, with how they’ve been wronged, with how they are somehow simultaneously better and worse than ____, all at the same time.

    Even now, despite years of practiced right-sizing and spiritual dependence, there is a part of me that continues to sustain the myth that I am somehow so special as to be immune to the conditions that dog other people, despite a consistent undercurrent of fraudulence: that I can put in a little less effort, that I am somehow shrouded in a halo sufficient to enchant those so blessed to gaze upon my angel face.

    We do not look at the world as if it were a mirror, reflecting only ourselves and whatever lies behind us: we look at the world as through a window; we see what is ahead but can’t help also catching our own reflection. Who we are, and what we think, informs what we see. That myth I maintain is delusional, so a part of who I am is delusional, and that part collects evidence to support that delusion’s accompanying grandeur. For as much as I develop my faculties of reason and reality, I think I might always retain a degree of magical thinking where I believe that maybe more is possible than may actually be possible. Sometimes I think that gives me the courage to take actions in faith and belief that might otherwise be precluded by too much logic, or not enough magic; while I can’t parse the precise extent to which that contributes to faith-based actions, it does seem to keep my chin parallel to ground and sky.

    The other day someone asked me “How do you get from pain to faith?”

    When I am in pain I am drawn closer to God. I do not balk at those who feel that pain instead causes division, or interpret pain as an absence of God: it is an absence, if you choose it to be. God is not the cause of pain; God is the solace that might be sought within it. It is almost as easy to blame God as it is to seek God; it is almost as easy to see differently as it is to see the same. When I am disappointed, it is not because God did not respond to my commands – God is not obligated to obey me; to the contrary it is I who is afforded the choice to obey God. All people have that agency – the ability to decide whether or not to honor and uphold that which is divinely informed, however “divinely informed” may be interpreted.

    Whatever face you give to God, whatever name – that entity is with you. God is intended to comfort you in the impossible length of the dark night; God is intended to draw you closer.

    What is closer? What does it feel like? Closer is the humoring of my will, the acknowledgment of its concerns and demands without automating action upon them. Closer is the awareness that maybe someone or some thing, either vaguely understandable or wholly intangible, may know better than I know. Closer is the nearly imperceptible sense of warmth you feel when you’re in great pain but know that this will not break you, that what you feel is not fully representative of your capability, because you are not just you – you are you plus that something greater; you are you and not alone.

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    When I am charged with the full control and conduct of myself, as though my will and intention were affected within a vacuum, my ego enters stages left, right and center. When I surrender some bit of my will I am more closely actualized as who I am meant to be, rather than who I think I am meant to be, or who I project that I am. When I willingly enter into and actively sustain that relationship – severing ties to the notion that it has to be just me, that it means more if I do things on my own – then the way that I see the world, as it is and with my reflection, is limitless. I am limited when I am in my own power, convinced of its sufficiency. When I am in my own power, my options consist solely of those that I am capable of conceiving; when I am in God’s power, my options are as limitless as that to which I am intentioned.

    I do not always agree with that to which I am intentioned. I recently received another “no” from an elite law school – another from one to which I was sure I’d be admitted – and have, in the past 10 minutes alone, assigned permanent and predictive weight to that decision. I have convinced myself that both my present and future fate are tethered to those rejections. I have projected that those rejections foreshadow a coordinated stonewalling effect that will prove ever prohibitive of every ambition that I have ever had, and as such I should just learn to teach spin, because that is probably how I will end up – alone, undereducated, and teaching spin – *not even at SoulCycle* (see what I did there?) – for the rest of my life.

    When I fully inhabit my individualized agency I am downright apocalyptic. I allow no slit through which a ray of truth might shine; I do not suffer fools as I misunderstand soothsayers to be. At those times, I am in the most limited space I can occupy. And then, the break; then, the unexpected; then, that which I’d so quickly discounted, manifests.

    View the original article at thefix.com