I just want to say thank you to Freddy S. of the Netherlands for reminding me of my blog. Yes, it slips my mind. My mind and my thought processes are a mess these days. I have become very forgetful and easily overwhelmed by emotion. There are many reasons for this that I cannot currently discuss, but someday soon I hope to be able to unburden myself of them. The days run together and although I mean to keep up with things like this blog it just falls to the wayside more often than not because life keeps getting in the way. Ahhh, life, right Freddy?
Okay, now let’s get on with this post…
I went through sort of a long term “depression”. I haven’t picked up though. I think I am coming through the other side. I have 13 years clean now. It would have been 20, but as this is a program of honesty, and since the one it is most important to be honest with is myself, I must admit that I fell off once – even if it was only for a few days. At first, I didn’t admit it to anyone, not even myself. It was just too embarrassing, too shameful. It took a lot of faking it until I really was making it, you know?
There was a lot of me sitting at the back of the room in relapse row, as we call it here in the states. Anyway, when I first started going to meetings it was in a rehab; very structured and organized and controlled by paid staff. Then I “graduated” the rehab and went on to a half-way house. That’s where I first started to attend “real” meetings, run by other recovering addicts.
When I first started to attend meetings there weren’t very many NA meetings at all. In fact, I can only recall one. All the rest of the meetings were AA. Many of the people in AA didn’t actually want to share their meetings with drug addicts, because they didn’t see alcohol the same way. They didn’t consider it a drug because it was legal, and they didn’t want people addicted to crack, heroine, pills, weed, etc. to share at their meetings at all really.
Many of my peers (fellow drug addicts), many of whom were cross addicted to drugs and alcohol were frustrated with going to these meetings, but had to per the court system. They were frustrated because some of the AA folks would cut them off in the middle of sharing if they wandered into talking about drugs. I found a way around that.
I realized that it didn’t matter if you were drinking from a glass, smoking a crack pipe or a joint, popping pills or shooting up; you had to bend your elbow to do all of those things. So, I advised everyone who wanted to share, heck, who NEEDED to share to just talk about bending their elbow without getting into the specifics of why they were bending their elbow – and it worked.
The AA folks didn’t seem to mind if we shared in this way. More importantly it allowed us addicts to unload what was waying us down. It was so great when NA became more prevalent in America and addicts could share completely unfettered by this ridiculous bias. Now-a-days, it seems like all of the Anonymous programs are on board with the idea that a drug is a drug is a drug, whether you drink it, smoke it, snort it, or shoot it. In the end we are all friends of Bill W. So keep coming back, friend.
By Christine C. (me)