The question of how I ended up sticking that first needle into my arm is kind of irrelevant. It doesn't really matter, and I can barely remember it. It's as if you've been on a collision course with it for who knows how long... (a decade? Two decades?)... and it was only a matter of time. So what put me on that course is an interesting question, and one that I've thought about a lot... but it beats me if I know what it was.
So I don't know. Addicts become addicts long before they become addicts... iffin' ya know what I mean.
How'd I beat it? I beat it daily. That's not to say that I think about drugs or miss drugs or get the odd craving for drugs because I do not. It just means that I have to live a certain way, each day, in order for those thoughts/feelings not to come back.
I did detox for a week, and lived in a drug treatment center for 3 months. It was excellent. But I was well aware of the grim recovery statistics and knew that a large majority of the people in there were going to be on the wrong side of that dividing line; I was detrmined not to join them.
When I got out, I moved to a new city where I didn't know anyone. This was March of last year.
When I get hungry, I eat. When I'm tired I sleep. These may seem like trivial things, but they aren't to me. I eat 3+ meals a day, and sometimes me and lazs have breakfast together.
I bought a weight bench for excercise. I read a lot of books on spirituality... budhism, tao, and just general you name it spirituality stuff. I try to meditate... but that's still very hard. All that stuff was a huge void in my life... gigantic... and it's hilarious to me now that I didn't even recognize that.
Uhm... I don't try and make anything happen. I just let things happen. Forgiveness is an automatic reflex.
I try for healthy hobbies like fishing, and this summer I'm adding golf to the list. Gonna try to figure cooking out too if the appliances will relent and allow it.
There's a sort of obsessive compulsive element to addiction, which needs to be replaced with something healthy. So when I say fishing, I mean I am making all the lures and flies myself, and reading everything I can on it. I'll play eighteen holes of golf at the driving range, picking irons depending on how far I hit the last ball.
I suspect Lazs' dissembling, cleaning, reassembling and shooting guns falls into this category somehow. Heck, we all share it to some degree.
Uhm... I appreciate things.... everything.... now. The sun
and the rain.
Basically, it's all really simple stuff... just normal, decent living. But you have no idea how alien it all is to the average addict.
