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Get Grounded >> Addiction

The story below was sent to us by a GroundWire listener...


My ladened mind slunk into existence like cold air sneaks under a front door, as if one night I had fallen asleep in a house still warmed by the ghost-heat of day, only to be awakened, aching with cold, having no idea how things had gotten this way. I had a substance abuse problem. My smugness gave irony to its inexorable arrival. I won’t let that happen to me, I thought, typically. The warning signs flew right by me. Nervousness evolved into sweaty, agitated panic attacks in grocery store lines. Despite my best efforts, work suffered, too. Promotions drifted to people who could maintain their composure. A growing obsession with the end of life began overtaking my interest in living life. It is difficult for me to understand that part clearly now, because something unanticipated happened that changed my perception of death, even as I was in the grasp of full-fledged addiction. When forced to decide whether to keep on trucking right at it, or stop and live, I balked. I freaked out – even as I crept toward death with daily doses of self destruction. But I still couldn't stop lighting cigarette after cigarette after bong-load cigarette, couldn't stop watering down my parched throat with six-pack after six-pack of Lowenbrau beer. The table was set, at this point, for what I believe was a bona fide miracle, but I had yet to be seated. It would take the hand of divinity to scoop me up, to put the tools I so desperately needed within reach, and it was the divine hand of God, I believe, that brought me back from the brink.


Most people struggle to understand the chain of decisions that brings a person to this point, but the truth is as tired as it is true: Rock and Roll stars were my Pied Pipers. I even moved to Hollywood, with girlfriend in tow. I was a musician, you see. Not a great musician, but a musician, nonetheless, and one with at least some discernible talent. Everybody knew Jimi Hendrix wasn't anybody until he slipped acid tabs between headband and forehead while he played. The Beatles sang vapid love songs about holding hands and loving me do until Bob Dylan gave them pot; then they wrote "The White Album."; John Bonham, thunder-fisted drummer of Led Zeppelin, died in his own puke, for God's sake. The depth of the drugged-out musician versus that of the sober one was as plain as day, it seemed quite clear to me. So I smoked and I drank and I snorted and I fooled around with my music. And I had huge amounts of fun doing it, initially, which also didn’t help. I had grown up in the Nancy Reagan era of just saying No. Drugs were bad. Drugs got you addicted to them and then drugs killed you. And I believed that, until I tried them. No one ever even hinted at how great they made you feel. How much fun they were.


This led me to the extraordinary miscalculation that because of this omission, the whole of the Just Say No message must have been a lie, further evidence of the vast conspiracy against all young people, to which so many of us subscribed. So I began voraciously using every drug I could find, fortunately unable to locate any heroin during this period of time, and quickly settling into a regimen of heavy pot smoking, drinking, and amphetamine and hallucinogenic consumption. I was only in my mid teens by the time I had struck out upon this path; my appointment with divinity was difficult to foresee.


Inevitably, I approached the much-rumored “rock bottom” – the place where addicts go to meet their makers, one way or another. The beginning of the end, for me, came with the loss of the girl. She called me at work one day to tell me she was leaving that day to move back to Colorado, instead of waiting until nightfall, as had been previously planned. I had known it was coming – known she was leaving – having fought against it desperately for six months, still unwilling to stop destroying myself, slowly but surely, before her until then concerned eyes. Unable to get myself on track socially, professionally, or musically and instead, finding myself in a near vegetative state spent mostly entranced by television and the streams of drugs and alcohol weaving their way through my neurological system, even this girl, whom I loved, couldn’t reach me in my catatonia. After six years, no ultimatum and no second chance, she left – knowing me well enough to understand the futility of offering me either one. Like a movie, it poured rain as I gave her a lame, red rose in front of the building I worked in, kissing her goodbye before she drove away. She didn't come back. I wonder if she thought she was saving me. Of the many other agonies I brought upon myself through my affliction, none so much as this paved my road to the bottom.


Consequence led to my appointment with divinity on the balcony of my Hollywood apartment over a year later, the night of the miracle - drunk, stoned, and dragging foot. Overwhelmed, I started to cry while I smoked my cigarette. It was early fall, and chilly, and I knew I wanted out. I was looking it right in the eye, right from its edge, and I wanted off of it. Choosing words from my childhood, and reassembling them for this special occasion, I prayed. "God... Oh, God, please help me. I don't want to do this anymore. You know I can't do this anymore. I don't know what You are, if You are. Just please, God, help me. In Jesus' Name," I added with consideration, "amen." I held my breath, and listened. Magically, a deep, unhesitant shiver touched the tip of my head, and pushed its way down through my skull, neck, spine, and body. It was all I needed. Some might say this was psycho-somatic - some physiological reaction generated by my own body. If I hadn't have been the one who'd been there, I likely would have agreed. But I was there, and I know exactly what had happened - that the force of God itself had just swept through me, and the prospect that no one would believe me mattered absolutely not at all. I stood dumbfounded in its wake.


From that moment on my addictions began falling away like a space shuttle's used booster rockets. One day I decided not to buy another bag of pot, so I didn't. My roommate at the time was dumbfounded. One morning a few months later, I woke up with the thought that any man should be able to go one full day without a cigarette. It's been four years now without a cigarette since that day. A six-year, two-pack-a-day habit fell away from me in an instant. The urge to inebriate myself each night with alcohol soon gave way to rediscovered hobbies like reading and hiking. I even quit biting my nails, if you can believe that, at the age of 24. As it turned out, none of my impulses proved too large or small to be conquered by this newly delivered strength of will.


Since that night on the balcony, now seven years ago, I sometimes feel smaller versions of that unmistakable shiver whispering to me. Go to school, it confirmed when the thought crossed my mind a year ago. Your job is safe, it whispered recently, as layoffs rained down all around me, just before I was told that my job was indeed safe. It’s almost faint enough to explain away, but I know better. I am bound by firsthand knowledge to call this as it is. You can call me crazy. I'm not afraid of that. It is the hand of God that scooped me up. It is the hand I never thought existed but am now certain it does. And I am also certain that, without its intervention, this joining of authorship and readership would not have occurred, as my life would now either have been choked down to a trickle of its intended width, or would have reached a small, unfortunate, and premature conclusion. Perhaps through this telling of my story, someone else's life can be likewise spared. And for this I pray as well.