“The ‘Death’ Part of Jails, Institution, and Death”

The disease kills. Period.

Different fellowships and different meetings focus to different degrees on this undeniably true fact. We can overdose. We can be so loaded that we do something that gets ourselves killed. We can kill others while loaded. We can kill ourselves while struggling with sobriety. It is this form of death from the disease, this particular shape of it, that is the one I have the most experience with.

I’ve struggled with suicide at numerous times in my life. It’s a very dark place to be in, to make a gross understatement. And it seems to be an issue that keeps coming up. In a way, it’s like a small town I grew up in that I never seem to get entirely away from. My first sponsee committed suicide. I've heard others in Recovery talk about their attempts and their ongoing struggles. It boggles my mind to think that there are people out there who not only have never contemplated killing themselves, but haven’t ever had a conversation about it with someone who has.

Given my job situation lately, I’ve been feeling plenty of despair and I admit those thoughts of ending it all have been circling, like vultures waiting for a starving creature to die. But the more I focus on what I am feeling, the more it strikes me not so much as despair, but a feeling of powerlessness. Specifically, the inability to accept my powerlessness. Hmm . . . I seem to be one-stepping all over the place today ;-)

That’s what I remember most from being in the mental place of suicide contemplation, the feeling of being powerless. The thing with possibly losing my job is about how I’d thought the endless starting over would be at an end, thanks to my Recovery. The darkness tells me that, no matter what I do, I will always be starting over, that nothing in life is certain, and that there’s really no point in trying anyway. This just so happens to not be true, but when the clouds gather and when the rain pours, it can be so easy to lose sight of that.

Feeling so powerless is a difficult thing to accept. Committing suicide is like the last desperate attempt to control—I may not have any control over my life, but I can control whether or not I choose to end it.

Turn the wheel . . .

The flipside is that I can choose to keep it going as well. A good friend of mine in Recovery talks a lot about doing the Step 1-2-3 waltz, and I’ve heard it said before how the first three steps can be simply broken down: I can’t do it; maybe God can; I think I’ll let him.

As addicts, we have an inherent difficulty in accepting the things we are powerless over, the things we cannot change. It is when we try to control the uncontrollable that our lives become unmanageable. Acceptance is key, the beginning—the honest admission that we can’t do it by ourselves. From there we find hope that something greater than ourselves can help. And from there we move to action; we make the decision to have the faith to let that which is greater than us help.

If you are ever in that dark place, where it seems like there will be no way out, get to a meeting. If you can’t do that, pick up the phone. Call someone else in Recovery. If they don’t answer, hang up and dial again. Keep dialing until you reach someone. If you get off the phone with them and don’t feel better, call someone else. That’s what Recovery means: that we don’t have to suffer alone ever again.