Faith

Today is my sixth anniversary of getting sober. According to my app, that means I've gone 2,193 consecutive days without drinking or using drugs (unless prescribed by a doctor). At this point, it's been quite a while since I've been surprised at waking up sober in the morning. I also pretty much expect that I'm going to make it through the day and go to bed sober again. However, when these milestones come up and I get a chance to step back and look at the big picture I'm a little overwhelmed by it.

Voices

I've written about the drug-induced psychosis and the voices in my head a lot on this blog, but I've written about them from the perspective of remembering them a couple years after they stopped. I found something I wrote about the voices when I was still hearing them. It was really interesting for me to see what it was like in the middle of it. I'm going to share it here tonight. I hope y'all find it interesting too. I didn't put dates on anything I was writing at the time, but I think I wrote it just before I went to rehab. I'm not sure it is totally coherent and of course as was usual back then, it just sort of ends. Enjoy.

METHodology

I stumbled across a journal tonight with a story in it that I wrote five or six years ago. I will probably tell that story here in the next day or so, but tonight I want to write about the journals I kept back then. First off, that story I came across ends in the middle of a sentence. I'm not kidding. There are five and a half pages and then it just stops mid-thought. I have no idea why I stopped writing the story. I don't even know exactly when I wrote it because it's not dated. It's handwritten in a book that I was using in the last months of my addiction and first several months of sobriety.

Stuff

We moved in to our new apartment in Los Angeles last month. My boyfriend drove all of his belongings across the country and we moved many of my belongings from the house downstairs where I was staying to the apartment about 200 yards away. Not everything was here though. We then had to drive down to San Diego to get the stuff that I had left in the attic in the house I lived in there. This is the first time since I left Brooklyn in March of 2010 that none of my stuff is in storage. I lived in one (pretty large) room in San Diego. My friend already had a fully equipped house when I got there so a lot my stuff wasn't necessary. Then I moved to LA to go to school and from January to July, it was pretty much the same deal only I had room for even less stuff.

Miracle

There is something that people “in recovery” say to other people in recovery on the anniversary of their sobriety date. Yes, congratulations and happy birthday. Not those. I haven't heard it quite as much recently, but as my life has gotten bigger and more busy I suppose I spend less time around people in recovery as I used to. I say it as well. “You're a miracle.”

Anonymous

A friend on Facebook shared a link to an interesting article today. The article is a month old now, but since I just saw it today it's new to me. It's from The New York Times Television section. It's written by Kristen Johnson, who apparently is starring in a series on TV Land these days. I remember her from 3rd Rock from the Sun, a television show so old that it's from a time when I didn't realize Joseph Gordon Levitt was hot. I'll summarize, but in case you want to read it for yourself, here's the link:Turning Addiction into a Sideshow.

Doubt

When I started writing this blog in November of 2009, I had a couple of goals. One was just to start writing again. I had this notion that I couldn't write unless I was high, so for the first two years of sobriety I barely even tried to write. Every once in a while I would post something on my old blog, but in two years I think I put up five posts. Then Friendster, where my old blog was hosted (god that sounds ridiculous now – I had a blog on Friendster), changed its server or something and my entire blog got erased because I hadn't paid the $2.95 a month to keep it active. Just about everything was gone.

Remarkable

For as many times as I tried to smoke meth under a blanket to avoid detection by “them”, it's actually a miracle I never set anything (or anyone) on fire. Of course there was the last time I did it, which was the last time I used almost six years ago. But that was not even close to the only time. In fact, by the time that happened I was getting pretty good at it. I'd figured out that two chairs was better for draping the blanket over rather than one chair and my head. Actually, I might have just realized that now. I'm fairly certain that never occurred to me when it would have been a useful thing to know.

Sloth

Tonight's post looks to be mostly just a placeholder so I don't fall off the writing-every-day wagon two days in. To be fair, I am writing today. It's just that I'm writing a report on the time capsule survey I fielded a few weeks ago. You may remember an earlier post where I asked you all to complete it. Much to my surprise and delight, 243 people responded.

Purpose

Since so many people are at least partially responsible for me having the guts and the ability to apply for grad school, I thought I would share my statement of purpose with y'all.

I agonized over how to do this for weeks before I finally sat down Thursday afternoon to start writing it. Six hours (and 600 breaks and distractions) later, I had 800 dreadful words written. On the advice of a friend, I decided to just start writing it like it was just another blog post. In two hours I cranked out 2100 words. Success. Ish.

I turned it over to a couple of friends whose opinions I respect totally and asked them each to edit it. Here's the thing. I have almost never been edited in my entire writing life. When I worked at the newspaper I was the editor and the only one with a journalism background, so I had to edit my own stuff. At the HR website, I was the editor and did very little writing. And of course no one edits the stuff I write for my blog.

So when suggestions came back that required me to rethink parts of what I'd written, to say I was freaked out would be an understatement on par with “Lindsay Lohan is a bit spoiled.” I spent about two hours needing to be emailed and talked off the ledge. Ultimately, I took the suggestions (because they were good) and the end result is probably 30-50 percent better than the original. So here's what I submitted. It's basically my whole blog in 2000 words.

Always a Place

I hardly know what to say. I know that tonight I'm going to sleep sober for the 1827th night in a row; I also know that's a friggin' miracle. Oh, and I know I didn't come close to doing this myself. ADD alert – I just noticed that my sobriety date is 8-27 and today is the 1827th day. Cool, huh?

I must have cried a half dozen times today. Thank god I'm not one of those queens that wears makeup. I would have looked all Tammy Fay Baker and shit – because a couple of them were on the verge of being ugly cries. But in a good way. I'm really overwhelmed with gratitude by this. I think I'm supposed to be saying things like, “It's just another day.” And “We all only have today.” But what I feel like, “CAN YOU BELIEVE THIS SHIT?? I'M FIVE!”

August 26, 2007

I’m in San Francisco this weekend, for the very first time sober. Lots of strange things happened whenever I was here back in the day. One time I smoked and drank so much on the first day here I lost my voice for the rest of the weekend. That was an interesting visit. So this trip is not really like any of the ones before.

What did happen tonight was I ended up at a meeting in a room that was strikingly similar to the studio apartment I was staying in the last time I used crystal meth, five years ago this weekend. I was sitting there tonight looking around as the memory of that last night came back vividly – not in a bad way though. In fact, I was really grateful to be having the flashback (which was good because the topic of the meeting was gratitude).

ReTox

When I got out of detox (see The Crucible, Part III – Reality Check for the story story of how I got there -- strangely enough, I still have never written the story of what happened there), I was high again within 24-36 hours. I knew I needed to get sober (for a while), but I also knew that there was no way it was going to happen without something way more structured than a four-day stint in detox. I was still in Philly that first day, so I went downtown to meet with some counselor or something. I don't really remember the details, but there was some place the people at the detox hospital told me I had to go within 24 hours of getting out of detox.

PvD, PvD, PvD!!

Tonight's post is all about the song. Five years ago tomorrow marks the infamous “PvD in Central Park” debacle. If you read my blog regularly, you know the story of what happened when I decided to go to the Paul van Dyk concert in Central Park in August, 2007. If you're new to the blog or just don't remember, you can read about it here: Phree or here: Saturday in the Park. Yep, that's right. There are two separate blog posts about it (August 26, 2010 and August 14, 2011). That's the awesome part of having ADD. I just keep doing things over and over because I don't remember I've already done them.

It Takes a Village, Part Two

Last night I wrote about my first two sponsors. Tonight, as promised, I'll tell you about the other three. It's amazing (and a little magical) to me how incredibly different all of the guys are and still each of them was exactly what I needed at that point in time.

When B told me he was moving, I became pretty frustrated. I was feeling like the universe was really trying to make my recovery difficult. In three months' time, I had lost two sponsors and had a potential sponsor snatched away before I even got the chance to ask him. Clearly, I just wasn't supposed to have a sponsor. This is the way addicts think. Oh, it's hard. I must not be supposed to do it. And they was my outlook on life for all the years before I got sober. I had this notion that the easiest thing was always the thing that was “meant to be”.

It Takes a Village, Part One

I was planning on writing this post later in the month, but since I gave my sponsor his 15-year cake tonight, I think it's appropriate to do it tonight. In the just under five years I've been sober, I've actually had five sponsors. I know people who have had the same sponsor for eight, nine, ten years. I also know people who have gone through sponsors like Kleenex. I guess I'm somewhere in between. But I feel really blessed to have had (and still have) each of these relationships. So, tonight is dedicated to thanking them and letting you know a little bit about what each one of them gave me. In the interest of anonymity (and because I don't feel like coming up with five suitable pseudonyms), I'm just going to call them by their first initials (with a number to distinguish between the three Cs) – C1, B, C2, C3 and T.

Illogic Model

You would think that if you heard voices all the time, in the most impossible places and situations, your brain would figure out that it was a delusion and you'd be able to move on from it. Wouldn't you? Somehow that wasn't my experience with drug-induced auditory hallucinations. The more far-fetched they became, the more I found shreds of logic to convince me they were real.

Moments of Clarity

People in recovery often talk about their moment of clarity – that moment when they knew it was over and they couldn't keep going on the way they were going. I had one final moment of clarity the morning of August 27, 2007 and it was pretty simple, almost mundane. It was something along the lines of “OK. If this wasn't fun on Sunday night, how the hell is it ever going to be fun on Monday morning.” And with that, I took my stuff and headed off to my outpatient program to really start trying to be sober.

But that was just the final moment. I had several other moments along the way – both small and large – that culminated in that moment. And they were things that may or may not seem like they would have been significant, but I held on to them. And I continued to think about them as I spiraled downward. These moments I believe were the universe laying the groundwork for what was to come. The way I always describe it in meetings is, “God speaks to us where we are, in the language we understand.”

Drinking Like a Gentleman*

When I first got sober, I was certain that the only substance I ever abused was crystal meth. Even when I finally started listening to the counselors in my outpatient program and agreed to stop all of it – the beer, the pot, the pills – I was only doing it to placate them. In those early months, I vowed that one day I would drink again because I had no problem with alcohol. Maybe I would smoke pot occasionally as well, because again, I had that under control.

Don't Stop Me Now (or Ever)

Fortunately for me, my idea of writing every day just means that I post it on my blog before I go to bed. Good thing, because there's little chance this will be written and posted before midnight tonight (**actually, I'm posting this at 11:50 pm so I guess I made it). It's only day three and I'm already fighting myself to actually sit here and type words. Plus, I wasn't all that pleased with yesterday's post and now I'm certain I'll never write anything good ever again.

I'm also going to do it a little backward tonight. Instead of picking the song and then writing about the memory or ideas it invokes, I'm choosing my topic first and with any luck I'll find a suitable song to attach to it by the end of the post. The reason for that is I have a list of almost 30 songs selected for this month (almost 30 because I figured more would come to me during the month) and not one of them struck my fancy tonight.