Blast from the Past

So I am going through my news feeds on Facebook and see an article about indictments for the drug dealers that I worked cases on and that killed Thomas and his wife. I honestly wasn't ready for that. There is still a lot of shame a guilt associated with that part of my life. I cant help but think about the pain and misery I was dealing with during that time. I also think about Thomas and his wife. Would they have eventually gotten clean? Overdosed? Put in jail? I don't know. They do not get to make the choices that would lead them to any one of those places anymore. They are dead. The news story had a picture of the "ringleader" of the drug enterprise. It was strange seeing his face. I had almost forgotten what he looked like until then. The article went on to say that besides facing trafficking charges, conspiracy to sell a controlled substance, and multiple sell charges, he now also faces a conspiracy to commit murder charge. He will probably spend most of his adult life in prison. Law enforcement sees this as a victory, but I know better. The only thing this does is give a whole new group of people a chance to take their place. The day he was locked up was the only day the drugs were dry in the town he lived in. Within 2 days it was back to business as usual, just different faces. I am not really sure how I got out of the life. I like to think that I just decided I didn't want it anymore, but that would be a lie. I still want that feeling sometimes. It is an everyday battle to stay clean. My best guess as to how I escaped is that God intervened in my life. That really is the only explanation. I have watched too many friends not make it out. They are now dead or in prison. Some are still out there getting high every single day while they countdown the hours until they have to get high again. In the rooms of 12 step programs you will often here quotes recycled over and over. One that really rings true for me today is "But for the grace of God, there go I." I should be one of those people that died, or in prison, or still out there suffering, but I am not. I do not deserve this life I have today, but I have it. I have to always be grateful for the moments I have today. For some reason I made it out. I am not immune to going back to that lifestyle, but I can say that today, I am clean and happy. Thanks God, I owe you one!


The saving love of God is his doing whatever must be done, at great cost to himself, and for the least deserving, so that he might enthrall them with what will make them supremely happy forever, namely, himself. - John Piper

A Letter to My Younger Self

I once had a great therapist who suggested I write a letter to my younger self. I wrote the letter, but was very brief. I guess I was a little afraid of what I might discover. I recently read a letter that someone else wrote to their younger self. It inspired me to write mine over.


Dear Little Rip,


1. Never be afraid to be yourself
I know there will be times in your life where the urge to fit in will be great, almost too much to resist, but don't give in. The feeling inside that you want to fix will eventually disappear. Trying to fix your insides by changing your outsides will never work. Your compassionate personality is one of your greatest gifts. Don't let anyone tell you otherwise. Your ability to see the best in everyone is why so many people love you, don't lose it.  Most of all, don't ever feel that being yourself is wrong or somehow less than others. People sometimes try to hurt those that are unique and wonderful. They do this out of their own insecurities, it has nothing to do with you. Keep being you.


2. Never give up
When you make it to 8th grade you will be one of the most intelligent people in your school. You will be recognized for your outstanding achievements. Other kids might laugh at you, but it is because they are jealous and envious. They wish that they too could possess the knowledge that you carry in your head. Keep doing what you are doing. You will want to give up because you don't think having good grades is worth being made fun of, but it is worth it. Those people will one day be gone and your fear and loneliness will disappear. Hang in there. Don't ever stop drawing. You are so good at it, but one day you might wake up and realize you have lost the gift after not doing it for many years. Keep drawing and being creative. Doing what you love is one of the greatest gifts of life.


3. Always forgive
I hate to tell you this, but you are going to get beat up by a bunch of guys during PE one day in the changing room. It won't physically hurt, but it will hurt you emotionally. You will want to hate all of them and wish bad things on them, but don't. Forgive them. Carrying that resentment will only lead you to more feelings of insecurity and loneliness. I know you are going to feel all alone when it happens and you will cry, that is ok. It will pass. Just remember that no one hurts you because you deserve it, they hurt you because they don't like themselves.


4. Stay Sensitive
Always keep your sense of compassion and love for everything. Being sensitive is probably your greatest gift of all. You can sense others' pain and you have a desire to comfort them. Keep doing that. Your stuffed animal Dusty, you never get rid of him. You will still have him when you are 36 because he reminds you of security and love. Never lose that. You know what it feels like to be the underdog right now, but one day you will use that feeling to wrap your arms around another human being and say "I have been there. I know it hurts, but it gets better. I love you." This is a gift given to you from God. Cherish it and nurture it.


5. Have fun
I know that sometimes you feel that you have to be responsible. You feel like you have to hold it together for your Mom. I know you are scared that if your mom knows how you feel that she won't be able to handle it. She will be able to handle it. She knows you are just a child. She doesn't expect you to be her rock. She wants you to play, laugh, run, draw, and love. Seeing you happy is what she wants more than anything. Enjoy life, it doesn't last nearly as long as you imagine.


6. It is not your fault
I know you are confused right now about your Dad. You wonder sometimes that if you do something wrong that it will cause him to get upset and scare you. You can't make him that way. Your Dad loves you very much. He is sick right now though. He is going to make it hard to feel like you didn't cause all of his problems. Sometimes he might even tell you that one of his problems is your fault. It is not. Continue to love him, but know that he suffers from a sickness that is beyond your control. One day he will get different and you guys will talk and laugh and enjoy one another's company. It takes a long time, but it is worth it. Your Dad does love you a lot.


7. Drugs?
This is tough to talk about to you Little Rip. One day you will be faced with a choice. The choice is whether or not you will use drugs. It is difficult to tell you what to do because while drugs will cause you more pain than you will ever know, the result of getting off of them and starting a new life will give you joys you could never imagine. I can't make that decision for you. Drugs will cause you to see things that will give you nightmares long after you quit them. They will cause you to lose friends and loved ones. You will see people die. You will see people do things to get more drugs that will upset you. You will do things to get more drugs that will make you question whether or not life is worth living. If you choose the path of drugs you will get clean one day. Once you get clean you will experience life as you have never seen it before. Trees will be greener, skies will be bluer, rain will be wetter, and love will overtake you. It is an amazing life, but only because you have been to Hell and realize how great every moment of life is. If you choose not to do drugs, I don't know what will happen. Maybe you become a successful Doctor. Maybe you become a fireman. I do not know the answer. It might be better than the alternative, but it might not be near as fulfilling as getting life back after losing it. I hope that whatever decision you make is the one that makes you happiest.


8. Be happy
The most important advice I will give you is to be happy. Life will pass you by so quickly and I can tell you that the worst part about getting older is regretting your past. If you are happy then everything you do is not regretted. Regret comes from not being happy in the moment. Always remember that happiness is the way you were made to be. Be happy and spread it to everyone around you.




Little Rip, I hope I have given you good advice. I know life is tough for you, but you will make it. No matter how bad you want to give up, no matter how hard it is to stand again after being pushed down, stand back up. When you feel you have nothing left inside of you and you cant go on, push just a tiny bit harder. You will stand again. Love those around you and spread your joy. I love you.


Your best friend,
You

Another Friend Taken by Addiction

I just received a call informing me a friend of mine was found dead this morning of an overdose. Ill call her Katy. Katy and I have known each other for a long time. She was a few grades below me in Jr. High and High School. Katy was always a sweet quiet girl. At some point Katy started to experiment with drugs and became a heroin addict. When I was clean and a police officer I pulled Katy over one time. I straight up asked her where the dope was and she told me she had already swallowed it. I took her syringes and her spoon and told her "Katy, if you don't stop you are going to die." She replied with the typical response of "I know." Unfortunately Katy didn't know because she died alone with her dope. We weren't best friends by any stretch of the imagination, but we were friends. It hurts me so deeply that addiction robbed her of a family, a chance at life, children, a successful career, graduating college, or any of the other things she could have accomplished had it not been for dope. Katy was truly a sweet girl. She had an illness that she just could not beat on her own. I hope she is finally at peace wherever she is.
I recently did an interview for Mississippi Public Broadcasting. It will air sometime in the next two weeks. I hope that my interview can reach just one addict and convince them that there is a way out. Since I first found recovery in 2002 I have personally lost over 60 friends as a direct result from their addiction. Heroin overdoses, Drunk driving crashes, murders, suicides, etc. All from addiction. Until we stop looking at addicts as low life criminals and start looking at them as people that are sick, just like a diabetic or a cancer patient, then we will never get better. Maybe I don't do enough to let others know that we are your next door neighbors, your ministers, your grocery store clerks, and even your husbands and wives. Maybe I should be more vocal about my recovery and not as ashamed of my past. Until addicts start a movement, much like homosexuals in the 80's, then we will continue to be shunned and hated by the public. God bless the addict who thinks there is no way out. Rest in Peace "Katy."




It is hard to understand addiction unless you have experienced it. - Ken Hensley

Service Work

One of the suggestions in most all 12 step fellowships is to do service work. Regardless of one's membership in a 12 step fellowship, I truly believe that service work is one of life's great joys. Before I got clean, I used people. I was a leech. I used you for emotional support, money, transportation, pity, and anything else I could get that was beneficial to me. Part of the 12 steps is making right what we have done wrong. Service work is one of those ways.
Service work comes in many forms. For those who attend meetings it may be as simple as making the coffee or taking the trash out after a meeting. It may be more organized like joining a service committee like H & I that carries meetings to jails, rehabs, and other places that do not have regular access to meetings. For those not involved in the 12 step fellowships service may be volunteering at a homeless shelter or a food pantry. It might even be helping your elderly neighbor rake her yard. Regardless of the way we do service, I believe that it is one of the keys to staying clean.
I first got involved in service work my first go-round of recovery. I was heavily involved in H & I. It provided me with a feeling of accomplishment and gratitude. What better way to feel good about yourself than helping someone else. Not only does service help the one you are serving, it helps you just as much. There is no better feeling than being approached by someone you help and having them give you that nod. That nod of thanks that says "I don't want to tell you out loud about how thankful I am to you, but just know I appreciate it." It is also great when someone expressed their gratitude in words. Knowing that you have made even a small difference in someone's day is a great accomplishment.
There was a time when I was the one being served. I was the one who needed help and someone had to reach their hand out to me. It wasn't always a 12 step fellowship or a stranger, sometimes it was a close friend or a partner. Either way, knowing that someone cares enough to help you is a comforting feeling. Today, whenever I see someone who needs help, I stop and help. Not too long ago I saw a man pulling a boat on the side of the road. His boat trailer had a flat tire. He was from Africa and had been living about an hour away from where I live. He was going fishing and did not have a spare tire. All the tire stores were closed and it wasn't looking good. Another man stopped and we all assessed the situation. The man that stopped went home, found an old trailer tire, and sold it to the guy for $10. Quite a good deal. Once the African man and I finished putting the new tire on he asked me "What do I owe you." I told him, "you can repay me by helping the next guy out you see who needs some help." He thanked me and headed on his way to go fishing. Those little moments when we pass on wisdom, compassion, love, and kindness are the moments that restore our faith in humanity. If someone can love another human being even though they are a complete stranger then we as humans have a chance to unite as a people. Service work is what restores our faith in each other. Service work is what reminds us that everyone needs help at some point. Service work reminds us that the richest people in the world are the ones that give of themselves to others.


Let us not be satisfied with just giving money. Money is not enough, money can be got, but they need your hearts to love them. So, spread your love everywhere you go. - Mother Teresa

Recovery and Money

Money, Don't we all wish we had more. Money seems to be an issue with a lot of recovering addicts. We want more, we need more, we owe more, or we are just plain out of money. In active addiction, money was a temporary idea. We needed X amount of dollars to get us through the day. I do not know of many active addicts who tried to save their money. Once we get clean, we start to become more responsible. We find a place to live, get electricity, fill our refrigerator with food, get a vehicle, and try to pay our own way through this thing called life. Unfortunately, many of us didn't make it out of active addiction unscathed. Some made it out with felonies while others made it out without any living skills. Either way, finding a job can be difficult. For those of us who are able to find work, our ability to use the money we earn in a responsible manner seems impossible.

Last night,  my fiancé and I sat down and made a budget. My fiancé, who has well over a decade in recovery, has a great job that pays well. I, on the other hand, have a great job that doesn't pay as well. We both make enough money to cover our basic needs, but both of us have gotten caught up in "the life." "The Life" is the part of recovery where you have become a responsible member of society again and start to enjoy things we had once forgotten about. Things like fishing, shopping, vacations, cable TV, internet, smart phones, and eating out are all part of The Life.
In active addiction, many of us let those things go so we could chase our next high. Who needs cable when you have a bag of dope. A vacation is when you have enough dope to last two days. Things that made life enjoyable fell by the wayside out of necessity.
After sitting down with our budget I realized that my fiancé and I have a lot of non essential items that we choose to have each month. $130 for satellite TV, $60 for internet, $100 for beauty services, $100 for cigarettes, and payments each month for credit cards that paid for luxury items like nice clothing and such. These are part of The Life. I can't eat my satellite service. I can't use my internet to take care of my health needs. I can't use my cigarettes to provide shelter for me. I can't use any of these things to take care of my basic needs. These are luxuries. Today, through working the steps and being a part of recovery, we are able to have some of these things. If at any point during the day I get frustrated with bills or money, I only have to take a look into my past or other peoples' current situations. I do not have it bad at all. I have a great life.
Those of us who have made it out of active addiction have to be careful with The Life. It becomes easy for our addiction to convince us that we deserve all these great things. Before we know it, we are in deep debt. The steps work in all areas of our life. If we become obsessive over money and our compulsion to spend it becomes too great, we find ourselves in a very familiar situation. We find ourselves broke, depressed, and feeling like there is no way out. Being responsible is not always fun, but it pays off in the end. Go ahead, enjoy yourself,but just remember that addiction manifests itself in all areas of our life. Today, my problems are first world problems. When I go to bed tonight, in my air conditioned home while watching cable TV, I will try and be grateful for the things that I have in my life thanks to recovery.

Wealth is the ability to fully experience life. - Henry David Thoreau

Why Recovery with the 12 steps?

Addicts are very untrusting people. We had to be. Most of our character defects were assets at one time. Lack of trust is one of those defect/assets. You see, at one time we had to be on guard 24 hours a day 7 days a week. We were doing things that were very illegal and our acquaintances were very rarely on the up and up. We had to be wary of everyone and everything. Most addicts will tell you that they have purchased what they thought to be drugs, but turned out to be candle wax, sheetrock, table salt, sugar, vitamin C, or even sometimes legitimate looking pharmaceuticals that were made out of nothing but filler. It is in our nature to be untrusting after being screwed over so many times by dealers. Unfortunately, dealers aren't the only ones out to get one over on you. Sometimes your fellow addict "friends" will try and hustle you. Sometimes an addict will take a friends dope then help the friend look for it because they think they lost it. Sometimes a friend will give you $40 to go get a bag and you always take a little off the top. We justify it by saying it costs me time and money to go get it. Of course they use that same line when they bring the dope back and talk the friend into giving them a little more after they have taken their cut off the top already. The point is that we are untrusting.
When first trying to get clean addicts will not want to believe what these strange people in a 12 step meeting are saying. "You never have to use again" or "I have been clean for X number of years" are common things heard that an addict just can't fathom. I know I couldn't. I could not keep from using for a few hours, much less decades. How is it possible for people to quit dope. The 12 steps are definitely a viable way to get clean, stay clean, and live a life that one can be proud of.
My first introduction to the 12 steps was around 2001. I didn't actually get clean till 2002 but, something stuck out to me in that first meeting. The first thing is that people came up to me and talked to me like I was a human being deserving of actual conversation. The second thing was that these people cared and told me to keep coming back. No one wants an addict to be around them yet these people wanted me to come back.
As I kept coming back and finally stopped all use of drugs (including alcohol), I saw that the people that really had what I wanted all had a few things in common. They attended meetings regularly, they had a sponsor, they worked the 12 steps (over and over and over), and they did service work. My thinking was that if they are doing it and they are happy then maybe I can get that happiness they have by doing the same thing. That is exactly what I did.
If you would have asked me to paint you a picture of all I wanted out of life when I first got clean, I would have sold myself short of the actual life I eventually found. My expectations were exceeded 100 fold. Recovery does that. The way the steps work is quite interesting. At first the steps are about understanding your addiction and trying to arrest the things that keep you using, but after a while the steps are about nurturing the things that make you a better person. It took a long time to realize that the drugs were not the problem, they were the outward manifestation of the problem that lies inside of me. Addiction is not about substances, it is about the obsession and compulsion to change the way I feel by any means necessary. It is about the screwed up way my brain has been wired after years of drug use. It is about the survival skills I couldn't let go of after I didn't need to just survive anymore. Addiction is about all the things that keep me from reaching my full potential.
The 12 steps teach me about being a better person. Are there other ways to find recovery without the 12 steps? Sure there is! Do I believe the 12 steps are the best way? I sure do. To each their own, but why try something that hasn't been proven to work when there is something right here for free that we know works. Millions upon Millions have found recovery through the 12 steps. Today my life is a gift. It is a gift because I didn't earn it. It was freely given to me without any expectation of repayment. The only thing I have truly earned is a seat in a 12 step fellowship. I put in the blood sweat and tears to get that seat. Everything after that is a gift.

Bad things do happen; how I respond to them defines my character and the quality of my life. I can choose to sit in perpetual sadness, immobilized by the gravity of my loss, or I can choose to rise from the pain and treasure the most precious gift I have - life itself. - Walter Anderson

The next right thing

Doing the Next Right Thing

Part of being in recovery means changing almost everything about yourself. As a drug addict, my Modus Operandi was lying, cheating, and stealing. My feelings were either "I'm on top of the world" or "please kill me." This is not a life that anyone wants. When I first entered recovery in 2002 I took all the suggestions that were given to me, except the no relationships for a year suggestion. I wanted to be something other than a junky. I changed everything from my habits, words, thoughts, actions, and eventually my feelings. When it comes to feelings there is more than two emotions. We are very capable of feelings besides good and bad. Feelings are neither good nor bad. They are a response to an event. They cannot kill us and they cannot dictate your actions. Changing my feelings took a lot longer than the other things, but there is a simple recipe to changing all of it. A summary of changing your life can be said in the phrase "do the next right thing!" It sounds so simple yet it can be so hard at times.

If I am walking down the street and the gentleman in front of me drops his wallet and doesn't realize it, what do I do? The right thing is to pick it up and tell him that he dropped his wallet while handing it back to him. The thing that I automatically want to do is to pick it up, see how much money is in it, then throw it in the trash. Do the right thing.

I was in Walmart one time and grabbed a water out of the cooler before I went shopping. I had every intention of paying for the water, but forgot about it by the time I checked out. I had driven a good 4 miles from the store before I realized what I had done. The wrong thing would have been to keep driving and relish in the fact that I got one over on a big corporation. The right thing, which I did, was to turn around, go back into the store, and walk to a register and tell them I forgot to pay for the item. And obviously pay for it. Do the right thing.

Doing the right thing feels strange at first. It is almost like being on a strange planet where nothing seems to be quite right. After doing the right thing for a while it begins to become second nature until your first thought when something happens is the right thing. Doing the right thing becomes as automatic as breathing.

I can't say that I do not do the wrong thing sometimes because I do. My relapse was doing the wrong thing, but I learn from my experiences. Today, I am having to learn how to do the right thing over again. It is a slow process, but it pays off in the end.

Integrity is doing the right thing, even when no one is watching. - C. S. Lewis