“Just For Today”

It’s another one of those days where hope seems to have flown out the window. The mindless monotony of day-to-day life would be better. All the negativity seems to be engorged like hideous balloons, obscuring any vision of things that are good. All the usual mind tricks lose their potency, and bit by bit I find myself sinking into something of a survival mode. Don’t get loaded… don’t get loaded… don’t get loaded…

I open my toolbox. Play it through: if I get loaded, it doesn’t solve anything; it’s just an escape, and all the problems I’m facing will still be right here afterwards. Find some gratitude: think of others who are less fortunate, recognize the good things in my life, focus on what I do have, not what I don’t. Stay in the real: I haven’t lost my job yet; I might not lose it at all. Each one turns the bolt only ever so slightly before popping off because it’s the wrong size.

A memory comes to my mind: a time in my life before my active addiction was so active. There was a time when I was a casual user, before I was loaded all day long, every day. The thoughts of feeling that nothing would ever go my way were rampant. I was never going to fit in, I was never going to have stability in my life. Life was never going to give me the peace I craved that I felt I’d somehow, somewhere, long ago been promised. So I made the decision to just be loaded all the time. I felt that, if I couldn’t have any of those things that so many others seem to get so effortlessly, then I’ll just be loaded. It was the giving up point. The point of no return on the ‘fuck-it’s, and not unlike the suicidal thoughts that have plagued me over the years.

In a sick way, it was a compromise. Life was always going to give me this constant stream of bullshit, well since I can’t control that, I’ll just be loaded all the time. I couldn’t deal with life, and that was my solution—to deliberately refuse to do so. To stop trying. To alter myself and perceptions to the point that who I was became lost. The world had rejected me, I felt, and so I rejected the world.

I pray. I pray a lot. Today I’m asking for guidance. I can’t find it in me to ask for strength. I’m not sure I want strength right now. I’m not freaked out about losing my job, I’m freaked out about being unemployed and not being able to pay my rent. I feel, once again, that I have tried to play the game the way it’s supposed to be played, and once again have been cheated by life because I didn’t cheat at it. And through it all, I feel as if there is something I am missing, some crucial ‘ah-ha!’ moment that escapes me somehow. Some key bit of knowledge, or something I have been unable to accept, that if I somehow knew, if I was somehow aware of or able to work on or fold into my being, that then somehow life would go smoothly. This seemingly constant starting over would end.

I remember hearing a professional author once speak to students who were considering being writers themselves. The advice given was this: if you can find anything else, any other career, any other way to make a living, do it. Do. It. Don’t go into writing unless it’s something you absolutely have to do and can’t live any other way. Why? Because it’s hard. It starts hard, gets worse, and there’s no improvement, only the occasional brief respite where things seem like they might be okay one day before they go back to being constantly difficult.

Recovery is like that. When I hit my one-year mark, a number of folks told me, ‘now the hard part begins’. My sponsor talks about the sophomore slump. I think they’re right. Once you pass the one-year mark, there's no more parade of birthdays to aim for. The pink cloud has long-since faded. The pace of change lessens, tapers off. Life must be lived. There are no more carrots to bait you, only the stick of cold, hard reality. And you have to keep going.

I have to work to remind myself that getting loaded isn’t the way out. I have to work to remind myself of how far down I’d been, the disaster that my life was, the hollow shell of a human being that I used to be. Then I have to work to remind myself that, yes, I really go back to being like that. Maybe not instantly, maybe not even within a few months, but eventually it will happen. And I will go back to being the man I used to be--the me that hated himself, that treated others and himself so badly.

Recovery doesn’t make me not an addict, it only gives me a way to live without active addition—something I desperately needed. And I have to remind myself of that, too, of how it felt to be new to sobriety, the freedom, the power of working the steps and hearing others’ shares. It’s so easy to become wrapped up in the doldrums of the dark moments.

‘This too shall pass’ keeps coming to my mind, and I have experienced enough difficulties in this sober living thing that I do to know it to be true. I know there is an end to the tunnel, even if I can’t see it. Sometimes, it just takes a little longer to reach. Sometimes I have to take baby steps to reach it. Sometimes, I really do have to take it down to those old thoughts from the very first days, where it felt like nothing more than white-knuckling it: don’t get loaded… don’t do it… Just for today. Don’t. Get. Loaded.