It starts with a prayer. Calmly, I sit in front of this computer, in a strange place feeling familiar, listening to music whisp through my ears like the smoke from my cigarette as I think about what got me here. Around me, through the papers, the ashtrays, the stale cups of coffee, I am reminded of who am I am and how I got here- why I am here.
I am an addict. I am an alcoholic. I am the bottom of the barrel people that scares the world. Am I a bad person? I don't feel like I am, but some like to think I am. Have I done bad things- yes. The truth is, yes- through the disease of addiction, I have done terrible things, but it is a disease, not an excuse. All I can do now is try to remedy those actions. Sometimes, I do wonder why some people are able to put down the bottle, the pipe, the needle by themselves and I'm not, but other times, I'm just grateful to be alive. Sometimes, I wonder why I had to see the things I had to see, and other times, I am grateful for the experience to help others.
What has happened is as follows. When I was nineteen years old, I left the University of Michigan and returned to College Station, Texas in the peak of my heroin addiction to seek help. After two rehabs, I stayed clean for about a year, and thinking that I was too young to be an alcoholic, I started drinking. The truth to anybody who knows anything about the nature of this disease is that You cannot replace one addiction for another. If you are a heroin addict, you are an alcoholic. One beer led a bottle of whiskey very quickly which led to the shakes very quickly. In order to combat the shakes, very deceitfully to many friends of mine that cared for me, I quickly found meth, and began using again. For two years plus, I used until certain circumstances found me in rehab in Center Point, Texas.
Here's where my life changed. I have been to rehab twice before. In the previous two rehabs, externally, i was in a worse condition- my life was broken apart and there was nothing left for me, but I wasn't ready to quit drugs. My internal condition, in a sense, still had some space to be destroyed, which is odd because it took quite a beating in Ann Arbor and Detroit- a lot more than in did in College Station during the subsequent years, but God's plan has a funny way of working.
I arrived at the rehab weighing 114 pounds (I'm 5'10'') and since I weighed so little, the doctor said that I could only have detox meds for one day (Librium). So, for about six days or so, I was going through a living hell of the shakes, blood pressure problems, and overall just feeling like shit. One thing that started coming out also was an untreated Bipolar disorder of mine. On the eighth day in rehab, I broke down- I hit a state known as hypomania. I started hallucinating, hearing voices and in the end, I tried to hang myself. A counselor there saved my life and immediately diagnosed me himself with bipolar disorder (he himself had it- i've been diagnosed with it for a long time), and they sent me to a psych ward to be stabilized on meds. At that psych ward, not only was rediagnosed with Bipolar I disorder, but I was also diagnosed with Schizoaffective Disorder. There, at that hospital, I began to realize things were very wrong for me.
When I returned to the rehab, I was still in a depression, but I was desperate. I was a drowning, broken man. I was ready for anything. For the first week in the there though, something was not clicking in there with me. I just could not really seem to find the answer- I could not begin to heal, I was bleeding everywhere. I was a bundle of hurt. One night, I was laying on a bench under a tree. As i stared up through a clearing in the branches of this tree, where I could see where the clouds were illuminated opaquely orange by a streetlight, I started thinking about my life since I started doing drugs when I was twelve with a stunning clarity. I thought about every moment, good and bad, and I went through every range of emotion with a dynamic intensity that I elmost felt as if I went through a Euripidean purging. And, when it was done, I felt this sudden calm, this peace, serenity sweep over my body. I felt the hand of God touch me. I felt, in essence, the holy spirit. I felt something I haven't felt in so long. Then, i realized what I wasn't getting- it isn't that God took anything away from me in life, but he put all those things there in the first place that really mattered. From that moment on, I have felt peace like no other. I have been out of rehab for about two weeks, and I pray every day that it was my last one. But I can't guarantee tomorrow, but I can guarantee today.
I can't say I have been cured of my disease, because that is impossible. I will die with this disease, but i don't have do die from it. The second I pick up that first drink, or take that first hit, I'm done for until i seek treatment again. I am recovered though, as long as I keep working this program of recovery and I keep my faith in God. What this is here is my chronicle. It is life through my eyes. It is my metamorphosis. I am still a heroin addict. I am still a cocaine addict. I am still a meth addict. I still a pill head. I am still an alcoholic. I am still an addict/ alcoholic, but I am finding a life without the things that made my life for the last ten years. This is my story. And this is how it starts.