junkienomore

10:08 am: Just for Today
Just for Today: I will take care to lay a secure foundation for my recovery. Upon such a foundation I can build for a lifetime in recovery.

Well, for someone who isn't starting from scratch on the external factors, this is much easier said than done. I can't just blow away my existing pre-recovery life because there is much there that is good. I need to work at my job, I need to take care of my domestic life - I can't just become 100% involved in my recovery to the exclusion of these other things, Still, I get the idea - anything which blocks spiritual growth should be discarded, anything which is neutral with regards to spiritual growth should take a back seat.

I went to a Walnut Creek meeting last night, my regular Wednesday Night. It was alright - I was a little uncomfortable because I had convinced my sponsor and a couple of other people from my home group to show up so I was caught in that feeling of seeing it from there eyes and being unsure as to whether they were digging it but the discussion was good and ultimately meetings are meetings.

I need to do some step-work today so maybe I will spend some time while the laundry is going doing that. We move in two days - after that, my life should be a little more relaxed although there are a lot of mundane details of routine to work out - do I try to keep all the same meetings etc. etc.

Since its thanksgiving, here are the things I am grateful for:
1) Being alive despite a sustained effort to poison myself slowly.
2) Always having at least one other person who loves me.
3) Not going hungry except by choice.
4) Finally feeling like I may be on the right track in life.
5) Bright skies and cold air - in short, norcal Fall.

OK - going to do some step work.

11:06 pm: Check-in
Currently working step 1: We admitted that we were powerless over our addiction and that our lives had become unmanageable.

The first part - well shit, I realized that a while ago. When you are repeatedly jabbing yourself in the arm with a syringe looking for a usable vein and contemplating moving to the one on your neck, you pretty much know that you will do what it takes to get high at that point. And even those of us who have limits they don't cross - well, when we're not crossing them we still feel fucking miserable and resentful, and are counting the moments to when those limits recede enough to provide the space needed to use again.

Addiction is obsession plus compulsion - not use itself, which is just a symptom. You learn this early on - I can still obsess over using and not use, and I can obsess over the fact that I am not using, and that obsession is just as much a part of the disease (and evidence of powerlessness) as track marks on your arm or a fucked liver.

No, the part that was (and is) harder for me was always the part following the conjunction - "our lives had become unmanageable". I excelled at making the little tactical moves necessary to preserve my usage - I kept on going to work, I avoided legal hassles, hell - I even did well at my chosen career. As long as I didn't lose my job (I only lost one due to drugs, and it was sort of crappy anyways). But a managed life means more than just getting by, surviving from one day to the next to use again. Life is a journey, and you are either progressing or you are regressing - you are never actually sitting still. To quote Bob Dylan - "he not busy being born is busy dying".

You either grow or you stagnate - you are either moving forward, or you are waiting to die. While I was using, I was not able to grow as a person - I was immune to the emotions and motivations which make growth necessary, and as it was not necessary it did not happen.

Webster's defines manage as "to handle or direct with a degree of skill" - while using, and while not involved in recovery, we do not handle or direct our lives at all (let alone with or without skill). We simply react to those things which stand in our way, and let the rest slide. Some of us do this well enough to pass, but eventually it catches up, and we are left wondering what the fuck happened. But the better we are at this, the harder this first step is to swallow.

07:56 am: Sunday morning
It's just restless feeling. . .

So, lots to do - I have to do some house painting today, and then go meet with my sponsor to do some step work, and then probably paint some more. I should do laundry, I should clean my old place so my soon-to-be ex-landlord (B.H. the last one ever) can start showing it, but honestly none of that is gonna happen most likely.

What I really want to do: sit on my ass and watch football, but that is part of my addict behavior. "Hide from your responsibilities and commitments" it screams. That way be dragons.

Priorities - I gotta go with what leads to future happiness the best. My landlord will get the apartment back in good condition when we leave (provided she does not act like an ass these next few weeks) but my future happiness depends on a nicely painted house to move into and my adherence to the 12 step program. Recovery is selfish, and the couple of hours I will spend with my sponsor today are more important than cleaning today.

05:00 pm: A Chemical History of JunkieNoMore

The first time I used drugs was when I was 15 years old. I guess it was a party and I just didn't feel I needed to worry about consequences. I was tired of being the good kid, bored with the non-alcoholic options for fun or whatever and I got piss-drunk and had a blast.

I suffered some consequences - threw up, had a small hangover but even those were kind of a badge of honor.

A few weeks later, 'J', who was sort of a big brother as far as partying went, offered me some a toke of weed (out of one of those little one-hitters that comes with a dugout) . We were with a couple of my sister's friends and it seemed more or less harmless. I took a drag and everything was funnier, immediately. I think I walked into a hot tub fully clothed at the party we were at; it seemed like the thing to do.

From then until college, weed and alcohol were my drugs of choice. We would typically gather over at 'J's house since he always had weed and his Mom didn't really care if we partied, toked, and drank a couple of sixes before heading out toe bar or a music club or what-have-you to continue for the night. I guess this was most common during the summer but during the weekends this was also our modus operandi.

By my senior year in high school, I would usually go out drinking at least 2-3 times a week, typically wherever their were deals (we had a calendar which listed the drink deals each night). Sometimes we would just buy some cases and go to someone's house. I was often the purchaser because grocery stores wouldn't card me.

When I went off to College, the first night there I found I was lucky enough to be in a suite of other people who liked to smoke weed. Se we smoked until I passed out - and for once, I felt like I belonged at a place from the first moment. Weed in college became my connection with the hipster community.

I began dealing weed my sophomore year. This was really just a way for me to have some control over the party; having the extra money didn't suck either. It was also about this time that I started slacking off on attendance in class. If somebody I knew had a free period I would hang out with them and get high.

Since my social circle placed a high premium on getting loaded (we were a co-ed fraternity with no national organization whose focus was on getting loaded) there was little motivation for me to not use.

I also came across cheap LSD. LSD was a different drug for me. I used out of boredom with my brain. And sold it because the profit was good.

But eventually I got pretty bored with acid, never mind weed and alcohol. So I knew there was heroin around. Me and 'B' and 'C' (2 friends) went to one of the bodegas on Amsterdam Ave. that had smack dealers in the front. We each got a $10.00 stamp bag and went back to the House to get loaded. I felt like I had finally found my home.

Fortunately, I didn't have enough money to do this often. I could support weed use by selling some weed. Same for acid. But smack just wasn't like that - it wasn't socially acceptable even in our scene, so the market was furtive. So I kept it to once a week more or less.

This pattern of usage - more or less constant weed use with weekly heroin use - continued on throughout my final year in college. When graduation rolled around and I left college, I started traveling around the country on a school bus that some friends and I had purchased. We brewed our own wine and smoked lots of hashish and did LSD. Occasionally we would sell our extra acid for cash.

When the dust settled (a couple of hazy detours aside, including 5 months in Boulder and some time in New Orleans) I found myself in San Francisco. Kind buds were the name of the game for a little while. But eventually, I figured out there was heroin there.

So I started off with the occasional street $20 (one balloon), which I would smoke down on some tinfoil. At this point it was just a once in a while thing - maybe once every couple of weeks.

One day while I was couch surfing, I found myself staying with my friends 'R', 'S', and 'Ca'. They were interested in trying dope so I went and picked up a couple of balloons. I brought them back and we were about to start smoking them when 'R' suggested we make use of her supply of syringes that she had for her allergy medicine. Se we all rigged up some cookers and muddled through shooting up although none of us really knew what we were doing.

We all got good and high even though we mostly skin popped it - but on my last shot I found my vein and I got a taste of what it was like to be touched by G-d.

I started using once a week again. Then I went out of town for a few weeks and I have to admit to fantasizing about returning to SF so I could use again.

The day I got back to SF, I went straight to the Mission and picked up several bags and some syringes. After I fixed up, I called my girlfriend. As it was early in my usage, I still had a pretty strong libido. But I still hooked up the dope first.

For the next few weeks I did heroin everyday, weed only sporadically. For the first time, I used injection as my primary route of administration. The overall euphoria was combined with the joy of early love with my non-using future wife. It’s hard to separate the two emotions in my memory.

At one point, I quit. Just like that, the heroin wasn't doing it for me anymore so I stopped using it. I was sober for about a week, because at that point I carried no weed and alcohol made me want to vomit.

It didn't last - a friend of mine and his girlfriend wanted to try dope so of course I was willing to oblige and hook him up (because hooking people up had become a source of power for me). So I started using everyday again. This time, I finally decided to make use of the little coke packets they included in street bags in SF - speedballs.

This first time I tried a speedball, it was under the advice of one of my connections. Whereas before I felt like I was touched by G-d, now I felt like I was G-d - G-d of my personal universe. It was revelation and apocalypse - everything changed.

The trajectory from then on was pretty straightforward - increased usage and higher-risk behavior. Some of the people I used with OD'd - none died, but I had to call 9-1-1 a couple of times.

I would occasionally run out of money; then I would go into work and close the door to my office and just lie down on the floor for most of the day, so clearly my job was suffering. At one point during this part of the cycle, my boss called me in. He told me that they knew what was going on and that I had to get into a treatment program.

Thus motivated, I entered an outpatient program and started back at work. It was easy to stay clean that one week because I was out of money. But then I got paid again and, starting off slowly, I began using again and stopped going to therapy. When my boss asked me for a status report, I basically told me I was done with treatment and so they paid out the next month's salary and we parted ways.

Now, with nearly two months salary and no job, I had a clear path to my own gratification and destruction. I was spending nearly $80.00/day on heroin and coke.

At this point my non-using friends started talking. Up until now I was able to play off their petty disagreements with one another to keep them apart, something I did almost subconsciously. It all came to a head one night. We were all going to a restaurant together, and I spent much of the time in the bathroom, shooting up. This did not go unnoticed.

The next day, the Intervention happened. Friends and family calling on the phone, friends outside the apartment etcetera etcetera. I was harassed and cajoled into leaving SF and moving back to New Orleans, with only one day to wrap up my affairs in San Francisco.

I kicked speedballs in my bedroom at my folks place. I slept a lot, watched TV, and took a lot of hot baths. After 5 days, my mom took me to a clinic to get my health checked out. They poked and prodded me until they determined that I was actually negative for HIV, Hep A, B, NotANotB and the other assortment of baddies IV drug users tend to acquire.

After 3 weeks, I was bored out of my skill. I wasn't working, I wasn't seeing anybody, and in general I just felt aimless. Under the cover of looking for a job, I went to go track down a pot dealer I knew in New Orleans. Mission was accomplished pretty quickly - things never change much there. I picked up a half-z of weed and smoked a joint on my way home.

So I started smoking weed again - it wasn't great and I knew there was something else I wanted more but it sure helped with the boredom. And I didn't know where to get speedballs there.

I met up with some friends of mine and one of them turned me on to a band that played Irish folk music. I began spending a lot of my time in the bar they played at and thus drinking much Guinness. It did motivate me to get a job since I needed to pay for my beers and my weed.

My girlfriend moved down from California. We moved in with two of my alcoholic friends and their cokehead drag queen roommate. Not a particularly stable environment - we pretty quickly left and moved in with a co-worker.

For the next 7 years my usage remained constant - weed use with alcohol. I worked at the same job, slowly rising in authority at the company I was working for.

When Katrina hit I went to upstate New York to put my company's disaster recovery plan into effect. I was up there for about 6 weeks while my wife went to stay with her folks in California. After all the dust settled, we decided to move back to California. We found a place in Benicia and I continued to work for my old company remotely.

One day my wife started a temp gig in the City. This gave me an opportunity to head in myself. I went to 16th and Mission and was able to find a bag pretty quickly. I smoked it, and the one thing I knew for sure was that I was going to do it again. While she was on that gig (about 3 weeks), I did smack maybe 6 or 7 times.

When her gig ended, my opportunities for going to the city were diminished. I had to deceive my wife and come up with reasons to go out for a few hours - going to a friend's house or something. Whenever I had something like a job interview or a certification exam, I would make sure to set aside some time to go hook up. I had acquired the cell phone numbers of a couple of dealers, which made this easier.

After a few months of that, I decided to take a new job in Oakland. There were legitimate reasons for taking that job - working remotely was difficult, my potential for further advancement was higher, etc. - but I have to admit that part of my thinking was that the job would afford me greater opportunity to score dope.

Almost immediately, I started in on using every day - I found a few places at work I could safely use. This went on for the next month and a half, and then I had to quit because our finances demanded it. I kicked over a weekend, taking an extra sick day. I went back to work - for the first few days my goal was just to get through the day that I barely did. I had trouble getting motivated for anything. Insomnia was a huge problem - at one point, I went 3 days without sleeping until eventually my brain mercifully shut off.

Following that phase, I was mostly just depressed. I self-medicated with weed which did not help me a whole lot except for immediately after I took a hit.

After about two weeks, our financial pressure eased up so I went and scored a $30 bag. This time, I planned to keep it capped at two $30 bags a week, basically using 2-3 days a week with the other 4 days clean. I found those clean days very hard though. The days I was using I was motivated, happy, personable. The days I wasn't I was tired, lethargic, depressed. So I moved to two $40 bags a week which pushed me to 4 days on and 3 days off. After about 3 months, I had moved to two $60 bags a week and was using every day.

From there, every time I thought to quit there was some reason not to; a vacation that I couldn’t be sick for, a work project I had to be on top of. These created a motivation to avoid the sickness of withdrawal.

During this time, my habit slowly increased. In 4 months, I was doing a gram a day (about $40/day). My wife noticed at this point, and my health started to deteriorate. We decided that I would go into treatment, which I did.

Today is my 49th day clean.

I spent 20 years  high.