There will be a blog!

It's not that I neglected the blog yesterday, its that I was away in another City speaking to another set of schools about the route to rehab my life took. I often wonder when I speak to these kids if anything even sinks in, if I am having any kind of effect at all.

But, the fact is, I don't look like the typical addict - whatever that may be - and I dont act like it, so I think that just showing up makes some sort of an impact to help them realize that a normal looking fella can be as addicted as the guy holding the sign on the street corner.

In any event, I have a more substantial blog I've been writing, but I wont be able to post it until this weekend, I am having computer problems!!

Have a great day all, and I'll update you soon!

A decent carnival trick.

Usually when the volunteers come in, we have a bon fire at some point. This is just a semi-social event where we can relax with them and they can have what they paid for – the chance to mingle with real life addicts.

These volunteers come from all over the country – this time of year they are on spring break – and usually college groups that come in instead of partying for the whole week. They opt for constructive time, they call this alternative break. Its huge on campuses these days apparently.

I generally avoid these volunteers and any chance to interact with them. There is something about being on display that I find unnerving, like a zoo animal, or a carnival attraction. ‘Look kids, he drank himself into rehab, see the meth head try to say ‘she sells sea shells by the seashore’ with no front teeth, come one come all.’

Last night, however, I finished working out and was walking back to the dorm and saw there was a bon fire going on. Brian was going to give a testimony – which is when we are really on display. It’s sort of the story of our lives, a chronicle of how we got to the ranch, the things in our life that led us to this point. I’d imagine this is the main attraction of the week – the chance to hear an addict speak.

Brian has given countless testimonies, he goes to the schools with me and so his story is one I have heard many times. I can almost recite it verbatim. But, he is my friend and moral support is about the only thing I can offer people on the farm many times, and the support of a friendly face in the crowd goes a long way when you have to map out all your transgressions to a bunch of rich college students who you don’t know.

He began his talk as he usually does. He detailed the first time he got high at a Pearl Jam concert. He always gets an ‘ahhh’ when he tells that he lost his last baby tooth when he did LSD the second time. He started young.

He tells of how he chopped off his thumb the time he used the wood cutter and his parents rushed him to the hospital, thumb in hand. He was given a choice, he could be wrapped up and sent home, or they could get a micro surgeon to sew the thumb back on but he would have to stay there the whole week. He wanted to go home, he needed his drugs.

Eventually he was convinced to stay and his thumb is now back on his hand, but when he tells the story, he shows the deformed thumb and people gasp at the grip of addiction.

Brian is someone who is always a source of sunshine in the darkest of times. I have been very close to him for almost a year, we work together, our programs are parallel in time, we hang out a lot outside of the ranch. He has an amazing ability to keep me in a pleasant mood. I don’t know if I would have managed this without this friendship with the unshakable, unrattled, always in good humor, Brian.

Maybe it was the darkness, maybe it was the fire, maybe it was the fact that Brian is realizing that his time on the ranch is nearly over and real life is about to begin, but last night, he strayed from his usual script.

He spoke about his family, about the bridges that he burned, about the money he stole, about the pain he caused. He told how he knew those bridges would take years to rebuild. He said he had only time to give these days, and that he was committed to having his family back. He spoke about his friend who sent him a bus ticket because Brian’s life was spinning out of control, the friend wanted to save his life. He began to speak in a tone that I hardly recognized, the voice of someone I had never heard; the voice of someone who was crying.

He looked at the ground and gazed into the fire as he recalled losing all the people in his life who meant something to him, losing the job opportunity of a life time on a cruise ship, he spoke eloquently about the hardship of having to maintain an addiction by stealing copper wire and scrapping metal. He spoke about how people used him for a place to stay, and how he used them for the money to get high. These people he considered friends at the time. He tried to gain some composure and he muttered something that no one except me probably even heard because I was sitting next to him.

Disguised deep in the muffled mutterings of someone who had nothing left but the pathetic story he could share at a volunteer bon fire, he said, ‘I was so sick of myself.’ When he said this, I couldn’t believe it. Those words, the way he said it, it was how I felt before I came here. Doing drugs or getting drunk always looks like fun from the outside, but inside, its torture being in all that. And the disappointments we cause other people are nothing compared to the disappointment we feel about ourselves. We are addicts, not sociopaths, and guilt is the one thing that never leaves us. Family, friends, opportunities, happiness, our teeth, health, our appearance, even our very lives; all these things leave. Guilt and shame, well, they are loyal companions.

He said he now lives with an attitude of gratitude, which explains why he is always in an inappropriately good mood all the time. He cried more but explained that these were tears of joy. He detailed how he is building his life on a foundation of something he never had before, this new life, it’s built on self-respect.

And while he has a long way to go in repairing the damage he’s caused, the best he can hope for is that his life may appear like his thumb – deformed from the original design, but it works, and he’s still got it.

I hugged him, which is strange because I am not a touchy person. He rolled his chin into my neck, cried a little more and told me that he is thankful to have real friends. I think he did really good.

One of the volunteers decided to speak. He told us that his father was an alcoholic. He said that he was about 13 before he even realized that something was wrong with his dad. He didn’t know anything but a life with a drunk or high dad. Finally, when he was a teenager, he realized that his dad was NOT normal. That getting high, getting drunk, with small children in the house was not how a father was supposed to act. He began to resent his father, and his father’s drinking.

Eventually, as happens with chronic drinkers, the addiction begins to kill you. His father had developed cirrhosis of the liver. This is a disease that deforms its victims. There is generally a large, over-sized protruding belly that fills with poisonous fluids, and eventually, the liver is functionless and death is pretty swift.

This volunteer spoke of the resentment of losing his father the week before his graduation and how he has harbored this for a few years. He spoke about how he has always been angry at his father for the inability to control this. He spoke about the embarrassment and abuse he suffered at the hands of his father. He spoke about how he had planned on living his entire life with that grudge that could hardly be considered frivolous. I mean, c’mon, this was his dad, he should have known better.

So the past several years have passed and he decided to try this alternative spring break. Mostly he wanted to help people directly, working on the ranch, farm work, Christian work, in the soil. But he was also secretly a little curious about what rehab might have entailed, what kind of help was available, or what might have been done to prevent his father’s death.

He has guilt too, but he won’t admit it. I saw it, though. The mere act of trying to decode his father’s behavior and reconcile his resentment was a thinly veiled attempt at getting rid of the guilt he had for hating someone he never wanted to hate. A son should never have to hate his father.

I think part of him wanted to believe that help was unavailable for his father, though, and he would determine this with this visit. Rehab wasn’t for everyone, not everyone could kick it. Rehab was the last house on the block for many guys, and his dad died before it ever got that bad. Then he could blame the death on timing, bad genetics, something else.

And then he heard Brian speak and something else happened, instead. For the first time ever, he got a glimpse of the inside of the heart of an addict. It’s unthinkable, it destroys us to know we are monsters, as Brian said, we get so sick of ourselves, and unlike family or friends or opportunities, we can’t leave, we are stuck, forever, with who we are.

The volunteer said that dying from alcoholism does no good to understanding what it does to people, this leaves a wake of so many more questions. He had lived trying to understand it from the perspective of someone left behind by a mysterious and selfish death. Living in alcoholism obviously does no good. Recovering from it, and surviving it, and then sharing it, well, people who are victims of the terror caused by the monster deserve to know what the hell happened. There is a certain justice that is awarded to someone who lives with an alcoholic and then buries one, when they are allowed again to love the person they were forced to hate.

I don’t know for sure, but I think the volunteer left his guilt at that bonfire. I don’t know for sure, but I think Brian did too. I don’t know for sure, but I may talk to the next set of volunteers. Perhaps we are an attraction, but making some guilt disappear is a carnival trick I don’t mind repeating.

Have a good week all

If you want to write, the email address is snapshotsfromrehabranch@yahoo.com

Drop the stick, I no longer chase carrots....

You know, before you enter a rehab program, it feels like people in your life will tell you just about anything to make it happen. There is a certain amount of suspicion that follows all the grandiose promises that I was fed before I set one foot on the path of this journey.

When I arrived at the ranch, I was fed even more tales of all these wonderful things which would just happen to fall into my lap if I decided to put in the effort to get myself better. The least of which were my health, my self-esteem, and renewed opportunities in life.

A year of your life is a huge investment. I remember when I went in to buy my car, I was told by the salesman how wonderful my life would be if I was in this car. It would take me places no other car on the planet possibly ever could take me, and it would do it at 30 miles to the gallon. It would certainly be a reliable way to get around and of course it would probably make me more attractive, in fact, I would probably realize the love of my life just by SITTING in this car. I just had to make a huge investment.

WOW! How could I say no to this? And, so I entered the program and began to do the work, I heard of all the things at the end of the program which would be waiting for me. I would invest.

It should be noted, none of these things I believed. To be quite honest, I entered because there was a moment right before I came in that I thought I would certainly die if I didn’t do something about this, and if I died from alcoholism, I would be pretty pissed at myself! That is not how I should have to die, alone, on a bathroom floor, in some drunken pool of my own vomit.

Sometimes at the ranch, the way they convince guys to stay in the program is the ‘carrot at the end of the stick,’ approach. The promises of what life has to offer may not be enough for other guys either, so they throw in a car… and they throw in free dental work… and glasses… and the chance to work or go to school and save money… then there is rental assistance when we leave… and lest we forget the house full of furniture they provide… and of course there is the anytime $2000 loan they will give us.

Suddenly the year doesn’t seem like that long, this seems more like a sweepstakes than a rehab, and I have just landed the grand prize. I wasn’t buying a car, I was being GIVEN one.

It is easy to have some pretty screwed up motivation when all this is unloaded on you, and I am not an idiot, I know that much of this is because graduates of the program are good for the program. Donors love to hear stories about success rates and guys who complete the program, so there is incentive to the ranch to keep us going and completed.

This isn’t the main motivation, of course. But it certainly helps.

And so this week, a couple things happened to me that really tested not only what I have learned in this program, but the benefits of living sober. I wrote last week about integrity, and mine was certainly tested. I also wrote about reputation, and mine would certainly live up to its name, and I wrote about the fact that there is wholeness in living a good life and this wholeness brings goodness to you, like a gravitational pull.

The ranch recently adopted a policy that allows us to park our personal vehicles on the ranch when we get to phase 3. This is great news for me, as I have that car I mentioned, and I drive to and from work. I used to park the car miles away and either ride my bike or walk or take a shuttle to and from the car. This was tedious and cumbersome.

So, the policy went into effect on Monday of this week, and so I had my car ready and waiting, parked in the empty sod field across the street from the ranch, waiting for Monday to roll around.

Monday morning, I went in, paid for my monthly parking pass, gave copies of my current registration and insurance, and went to work. Later that day, I was informed by my case manager that I was being put on probation for 30 days because an administrator may have felt that I was thumbing my nose at the system, that I was pushing my limits by parking it so close to the ranch up until I could get my pass.

I was shocked to say the least. This was hardly the case. This could have meant a postponement in my graduation, it means that I was on the wire to being dismissed, it had some implications.

My chaplain, who I speak with every week, and knows my character, was a passionate advocate on my behalf. I spoke to another chaplain who asked me how I felt about this and my response required absolutely no thought or preparation.

I felt a little railroaded, BUT…...

There have been rumors about me, that some on the staff believe I might be someone who will leave the ranch early, that at any moment I am planning a departure. I mean, I have a job, I have a car, I don’t truly NEED a place to live, the carrots at the end of the sticks mean nothing to me. The chaplain asked me why I stay.

There are several reasons. The first is that too many damn times, I have robbed myself the satisfaction of success because things got a little tough for me. If life was mean, well, thank God there was one small reprieve from all that cruelness and it conveniently came in a $5.99 plastic bottle. I am not going to do that this time. I am not going to pack up and leave because things are not going according to how I expect them to play out.

I am not built to break, I am not built to bend. At some point I have to stop looking in the mirror and saying to myself, “What kind of man do I want to be?” and instead say, “What kind of man AM I?” And, I know now, I am not the kind of guy who quits at life anymore because it’s a little rough around the edges. I don’t have the safety of the bottle to cushion my blows, and so, well, I just need to put on my big boy pants and face it head on. Even when I am tied to those tracks I feel railroaded on.

The other reason is that many of the guys on this ranch have looked at my program and have decided to emulate it. To them, I work a good program, to them, my successes in this program are equipping me with the skills to maintain a lifetime of sobriety, too. What the hell kind of weasel would I look like if I demonstrated that I am the kind of person who sticks around when its easy to do, and high tails it out of there when its rough.

I have asked these guys to trust me for 10 months, I have talked the talk, I need to walk the walk. Hmmm, what do you know, I do have some integrity.

But you see, none of this required a second thought. For one of the first times ever, doing the right thing did not require a second guess. It felt exhilarating to hold my head up high at the ranch and take the probation and know I was doing this completely by choice. I was not going to challenge the decision, I was not going to try to get out of it, I was not going to play the ‘I am a victim here’ card, I was not going to leave because this screwed up my summer time table. I had been railroaded, but instead of getting pissed, I lumbered up on the train and decided to take it where it lead me. None of the reason I decided to stay with it had anything to do with those carrots at the end of that stick.

All of those responses are the typical responses of an addict, by the way. To try to get out of something, the decision to leave because I didn’t get my way, “everyone hates me so that’s why they are picking on me,” these are all addictive responses to challenges.

Addicts as a rule don’t like authority – authority takes away the opportunity to get loaded – you gotta answer to authority. Screw them, right.

But there is one authority on my life that I can not escape, and that’s myself. I am accountable to only one person, me. And here is where I begin to complete the circle I was drawing last year. You may remember there were some blogs about the fact that it is OK to be accountable to other people for your sobriety. I detailed how this was OK, that you have commitments to other people and so if you decide to live sober because of these commitments, this was as good a reason as any.

I also said that the idea, to an alcoholic, that you needed to do this ‘for yourself’ was ridiculous. I wrote that we are perfectly good with the intention of self-destruction and so deciding to get sober for ourselves wasn’t really a good carrot at the end of the stick either.

But trying this for the people I loved, well, that’s something I could live with at that time, that was certainly a reason to give this a shot. So I put on those big boy pants, and I gave it a shot.

And now I am noticing more and more that my motivations are, indeed, because I am no longer ignoring the good angel on my shoulder who is whispering a pretty decent code of conduct to me all the time. I am accountable to me, just me. And my fears about staying sober for a lifetime because I didn’t know who I could be accountable to, well, these are subsiding.

I can stay sober because I am accountable to myself. I was promised I would achieve this. I was told, among other things, that I would have this amazing ability to do the right thing, including not drink, because it was the right thing. I even had hints that I was developing this, but to actually see it put into practice, well, this was a really unplanned opportunity.

And so, I think about the ‘incentives’ that this ranch offers. I think about all the ‘things’ that I have been promised because I am here and upon my completion. There is more to me, though. What I got was what I was promised, and more. My health – physical and even emotional and spiritual, the health of my relationships, the health of my heart – my health is in the best shape. I was promised better self-esteem, and you can see how I feel about myself, I love me. I do. And I was promised renewed opportunities in my life. I feel like the world has rolled out a red carpet for me and I finally have the confidence to step up on it.

So the resolution to all this, you might ask. Well, I am still on probation and thanks to a chaplain who knows me well, these are the terms. Thirty days probation adds thirty days to my minimum phase requirement; phase three minimum is 12 weeks. I now have a minimum of 16 weeks in this phase. I will be at 16 weeks the end of this month, long before I graduate. Probation also means that I can be dismissed if I break the rule that got me on probation in the first place – which is parking in the sod field across the street. So I won’t be doing that. And this was achieved because my reputation was bolstered by my integrity, and a chaplain recognized this. I wasn’t trying to escape the probation, it was an opportunity to test what I was made of, and I think I did OK.

And so those promises were real. More than I expected, more than I had hoped for. It was sort of magical how all this came about inside me. There were some really dark days when I couldn’t even feel the life inside me enough to hope for anything more than the strength to get out of bed long enough to throw up. Hope has returned.

My mom shared with me the other day three things which she believes make a happy person – First is someone to love, second is something to do, and third, is something to hope for. I have so many people to love I feel as if my heart may explode, I have a renewed sense of my own purpose, there are so many things in my life to do that I have to actually live to be a hundred, I have so much to hope for, things bigger than the carrots at the end of sticks that might be waved at me.

This is happiness, I was promised this at the beginning, I should hardly be surprised that its here, but I am, a little bit.

The wholeness of all this has a gravitational attraction that you can’t deny. I am like a magnet these days, events in my life are working to build me up and catch me up. And so I received an unexpected email from my mom last week and my whole family has decided to help me with a bit of happiness by sending me to the Bonnie Hunt Show before she goes off the air in May.

I am beside myself! Touched doesn't begin to describe it. I immediately wrote to Bonnie Hunt and asked her about tickets (if you feel compelled, please write to her too, and ask her to send me some! www.bonniehuntshow.com) – I explained to her that in the throngs of addiction, there were days when I would get lost in her hour of television, that it provided me with a window to the world and a reminder that the rest of the world was going on, and the world was pretty happy about it. I know it seems silly, but life was pretty empty back then. And I mentioned that I keep a count of the loss of this hour, not the loss of drunkenness, and this is why I mention the days since I saw her show on this blog.

I mentioned that you can only be successful at something if many people want you to be, it fills my brain with more molecules of hope than one person should be allowed to have, to know that my family wants to offer me something like this. It also means that they believe in me.

I was promised this, too. And here it is. And do you see the beauty in this gift, because I have to attend the show before I graduate, this is not a carrot at the end of a stick, this is a gift because I am loved and because the people in my life want me to be successful, and they want me to kow it. Another promise, made good.

I was thinking about this as I drove into work this morning, and I stopped at a light and looked at myself in the mirror and I realized another promise that was made to me that was made good on… as I looked at myself in the mirror, I realized, indeed I had seen the love of my life just by SITTING in the car, and it was me.

Have a good week all.

DAYS SOBER: 310 DAYS
DAYS SINCE I SAW THE BONNIE HUNT SHOW: 301
DAYS UNTIL I SEE THE BONNIE HUNT SHOW: ????

The dark side of the moon

This blasted ranch is finally beginning to thaw and it is almost spring time, this means the volunteers are beginning to show up. Every year, volunteers from around the country come and work for a week or more on the ranch, you may recall I wrote about them with fondness last year; this year, it is with a little more contempt. I will say it did get annoying when 15 year old girls would pat me on the shoulder and say, “You are on the right track,” I mean, for chrissake, 15 years old? Really? What the hell do they know. I tolerate them, but only slightly. This is a common feeling of all the guys in my phase, the new guys still see the novelty in having them on the property.

As I write this, I am somewhat unnerved by the idea that I have less than 100 days left at Rehab Ranch. I met with Art, my case manager yesterday and we started speaking about my transition planning, and what my life will look like the day I walk off this farm for good. There is a bit of apprehension I feel in myself, the idea that this experience will be completed soon.

And then as I walked to the chow hall yesterday after my meeting with Art, I began thinking about this season, I began to notice the days are getting longer, and how it was this time last year when I began preparations for moving up here. I was still drinking, but I began to accept and mentally prepare for the next step in my life’s journey, the one that would happen only after I came up on this farm.

I remember last year when I started this whole thing, the concept of being here, at this time, it escaped me. Forward thinking is one of the first things an alcoholic loses when they begin to drown in their addiction. Successes are measured in pints and liters and gallons, not in weeks or months or goals met. So here I am, winding down, watching the newer guys as they move up through the program, understanding their progress.

But the volunteers. They signal something. They are the manifestation of the progress of time to me. They have returned in full force. The cycle is nearing the end for me, I am nearly complete. I use the word “complete” intentionally. In Greek, the word Telios means ‘complete’ it also means ‘perfect’. When you study Greek philosophy and literature, you will often see people referred to as ‘teliotic’ or having achieved ‘telios’ and while we translate this to mean ‘prefect’, I prefer to think of ‘perfect’ as ‘complete’ – This is also, ironically, what the dark side of the moon is referred to, the telios of the moon.

So, I am nearing completion, but after my talk with Art, I had to decide what that meant, what does complete mean to me? It could mean that I don’t drink, I have a well rounded life, I have things to keep me free from the isolation of alcoholism. Existing in isolation, it’s what hurt the most for me. Completion could mean that a journey has ended, and therefore I will be ready for the next one. The next cycle.

There is something else though. Completion for me, in this program, isn’t ‘having it all,’ or even ‘just finishing’. Here’s how I see it. My life isn’t a circle, I am three dimensional. My life is a sphere. When a sphere is exposed, there is one part that everyone sees. Like the moon, it is the part of the sphere that faces the world, it is what I think of as my reputation. My reputation is the relationship I share with everyone who casts a bit of light on my life – indeed, the whole rest of the planet. This is where so many of us shine. Indeed, even on this blog, in my ‘about me’ section I write about how I ‘shine in the spotlight.’ I look good in direct light, I might say – in other words, I am pretty good at working my reputation, I parcel out what I want people to see.

In a 12 step program, one of the steps is to admit to God and to another human being the exact nature of our wrong doings. I speak candidly about things I have done, people I have mistreated, situations I regret here in this blog. I share it with over a thousand people a week. I don’t do it as a response to the 12 steps, in fact, I find that I follow many of the steps unknowingly, but they work in my recovery, and they work for millions of people. (I know, can you believe it, I had a nice thing to say about AA) But I spoon feed my new reputation, and you should know there is a LOT more going on inside that I don’t share, there are many things in this orbit that only I know about myself.

My proverbial days are getting longer through this process. I am exposing more and more for public consumption and this has an ability to free me from my addiction. There is a sense of escape when I lay it all out on the line like this, like as soon as I give it away, it is gone. There is a bible verse in the book of Joel, 2:25, that I love, ‘I will return to you the years the locusts have eaten.’ I love this verse because it is a sort of promise of redemption. I have gone from sobriety, to recovery, and now, I hope to move to a state of redemption. So many years I have lost to a bottle of gin. So many opportunities that escaped me. So many moments which were clouded by the saturation of intoxication. And these are returning to me, my years are being returned. I have become sober, I have healed, and now, I want to get some of what I lost back.

Through all this, I feel free from the shackles addiction. While I will always be addicted to alcohol, I need not let that control me. I am not controlled by the thought that its almost Friday and I need to get a drink. I am no longer controlled by the having to come up with excuses for a poor job at work, or missing a family event. I am no longer controlled with transportation to and from the liquor store, or blocking out part of my morning for the expected hang over. I am not controlled by this, I have my frickin life back and I want more of it.

And this all seems really great, but there is that unlit part. This is the part that people don’t see, the part that only I see. This is where addiction might hide – on the side of the telios. It is not seen, it is not viewed, it isn’t even noticed. No one has ever seen the dark side of the moon from Earth, the same side of the moon we see every night always faces the planet. But, surely there is another side to the moon. It is a sphere, it is complete, it is perfect - telios.

This is the side that I call integrity. It is the part of me that only I see. Integrity also means wholeness, completion, how strong something actually is you may note. When we discuss a building, for instance, we always talk about ‘structural integrity.’ What kind of person am I? Integrity is not a conditional word, it is not open for interpretation. It does not change with the wind, the cycle of the moon, or if I am out at a bar with friends, or if I am trying to impress someone, or if I am simply home alone and no one will ever know what I am doing. It is what it is, integrity is what I see when I wake up and saunter to the mirror, it is my inner image. If I look in the mirror and I see a man who does not cheat at life, then I know that I never will.

I fully believe in living this kind of life, a life whereby I am sober because I want to be, not because I feel like I have to show it to people. I am all for living in the dark side of the sphere, I am all for integrity if only because life is short and a good reputation is not always easy to come by, and, just like the moon, sometimes it shines bright, sometimes it shines in little slivers, sometimes it doesn’t even shine. But the other side, its constant.

The benefit is there is no tension to all this. If I make a mistake, I own it, if I do something and don’t get credit, no big deal. The stress of managing my reputation no longer impacts the side of the sphere where I live, and that is the kind of stress that makes me want to drink.

Integrity is not a difficult concept. Babies know it. Babies are real, what they are on the bright side is the same as who they are on the dark side. As I have discovered through this whole thing, we tend to make simple things way too complicated, including sobriety.

So perhaps it is good that I am almost complete with the program, I am almost complete in becoming the person I have become. I might even lighten up with the volunteers, I might look past the frozen ground or the resulting mud puddles. Telios, means complete, whole, perfect.

Yea, it feels perfect. It feels pretty damn good.

Mother Goose vs Grimm

I have a couple of really good friends on the ranch who are fairly new – guys who count their time on the farm in weeks, not months- or as guys at my stage count, in days left (I have 110 by the way). I love to speak to these guys, and listen to their perspectives on what is happening to them because it reminds me of what I was feeling and thinking when I entered the program.

I like to be reminded of this because when I entered, I was told by everyone about all of these wonderful changes which I would be making, changes in my attitude, in my demeanor, in my way of thinking – unimaginable changes that would begin to happen to me as I stumbled through the program. I remember listening to program residents, chaplains, house managers, each with a different, almost contrived vision; they would tell me these wonderous tales of the new person I would become.

Don’t get me wrong, this new me was inspiring to say the least – heck I could hardly wait to meet this fine fellow. They were certainly the kinds of things I would like to have happened to me, but without knowing me, these people were just shooting in the dark, and it is likely the only thing about me that would change throughout this ‘ordeal’ as I called it back then, would be my reaction and attitude to alcohol.

And so I allowed them to indulge themselves in their fruitless fairy tales of hope and a bunch of blah blah, and I listened to them with the kind of suspicion and cynicism that you might expect from a person who knew better, knew more, confident in what would happen to me. It is the kind of cynicism and suspicion that I am met with now when I speak to the new guys. So, I don’t tell them about the great new guys they will probably become, instead, I smugly sit back and just know it. I see it in them, I can see attitudes changing right before my eyes, all in response to a renewed self awareness and the forced confrontation of emotions that we, as addicts, sought to hide from.

When I am in the weight room, many guys are motivated to open up to me. I’ve always had a bizarre quality where perfect strangers look at me and think it is OK to tell me really personal stuff about themselves. A nun once told me that it is because I have a very old soul and they can sense it. I had forgotten that she told me that until recently, but I now consider this a gift.

Anyway, Matt told me the other day that he was leaving our work-out early to help a dorm-mate with chores because they were involved in a spirited debate in their LEC class about helping out your brothers on the farm. The following day, he told me that he had to cancel plans with me on Saturday because he made plans with Chris earlier and he was trying to live up to his obligations, even the seemingly small ones.

Mike has a very biting sense of humor – he can seem almost mean, but he is hilarious. He is consciously trying hard to stop insulting people with his comments. He has recognized the power of his words and he is trying to use them to encourage and not discourage. Its hard to avoid the pitfall of good natured humor, a good natured ribbing among ‘the guys’, but I explained to him that everyone in the early stages of sobriety is an emotional mess, when your brain begins to dry up, and you begin to feel things again, its alarming to say the least and so his funny comments are like spears to some guys. You might recall my sappy blogs about ‘joy’ and ‘the beauty in the little things’ that I wrote in the early days – the romantic vision of life I had adopted was only in response to the chemical painkillers that were flooding my head in a natural, mental, attempt to dull all the emotions my neocortex was suddenly trying to sort out.

The differences between the kinds of men these guys are and the kinds of guys they will be is really telling when you get them in the same conversation with a higher phase guy – like Lane.

So, Lane and Matt and I were all talking about the program and about how sobriety has made a difference to us. Matt was listening to Lane and me speak, hanging on our explanations, asking question after question. It is scary when you just begin the program, there is the uncertainty of whether or not we will succeed, of whether or not sobriety will work for us, the unnerving feeling of ‘is this the right thing for me, and will this work?’ My God, that sucks. How can I stand failing at one more thing because of addiction?

And Lane and I recognized right away what he was really asking in each question, and the fact that Lane and I both had many of the same doubts and worries was comforting to Matt. I think this is because he sees who we are now and how our lives are where we want them to be – or at least headed that way. It’s our direction, not merely our intention, that is determining our path and our destination and that’s a powerful tool to have working for us now. Where we want to be is actually where we are heading.

Lane made the astute observation that every alcoholic has an identity issue. There is so much wrapped up in identity issues for us. How are we perceived, how do we perceive others, what do we really think about ourselves. There are so many self esteem issues that only compound the more you are swallowed by your addiction. In my opinion, self esteem, one way or another, is the keystone to addictive behavior. Not a bolstered self esteem that you get from being told you did well… but the real true self esteem of knowing you ARE well, the kind of belief in yourself that can only come from within. Despite all my outward successes, somewhere I got hung up on the idea that I didn’t measure up. Situations like not passing the 10th grade because I was in the hospital for four months and couldn’t catch up despite my parents’ insistence that it could be done – failure like that – well it has long lasting implications. Interestingly enough, the summer after that colossal failure is also the summer I began drinking.

You may recall, Lane and I used to have long conversations when we were in the lower phase dorms – emotional commiserations about how unfair the world was to us, how we failed people, how people failed us, how we were alone in this, it was real at the time to us. One time in September I was writing in my journal and I read some of the entries to Lane about those conversations that we had back in June and he seemed embarrassed and said, “I think I was still drunk for the first three months I was here,” and this was probably true. The effects of alcohol, then the new effects of the brains attempt to sort out this new emotional overload, well, to say that we weren’t in our right minds is an understatement.

What we are dealing with now, they keep telling us here, is a new life. But when you step back, my new life is just regular life to most people. It’s unbelievably pathetic to think that I am now, at my age, just learning the secrets of how to live like millions of Americans live each day. A sober person, with a job that you actually do when you get there, with plans that don’t require any special attention to ‘how will I get home,’ with goals, a strategy, with friendships that are built on companionship and not how much drama we survived together. I am not embarrassed to be myself these days, in fact, I quite like it.

But the changes happen. The changes start from the day we arrive. They begin the day before when we ready ourselves for this year long ‘ordeal’. Once we’re here we realize that these crazy rehab people don’t know a thing about us, that we will do this program but doubtful anything significant about us will change – or NEEDS to change for that matter.

And, secretly, we change. Our routines change, our values change, our duty to other people begins to change. We begin to see ourselves in the mirror as we truly are and not as we think others see us. It is very empowering to look back and see yourself without the distraction of a hundred opinions, it is a quiet victory when we look at ourselves that first time in the mirror and say “I am probably going to be OK after all.”

There is also another change that I noticed about guys who have been in recovery for a while versus the guys who just begin. The guys in the beginning are all really preoccupied with maintaining sobriety. This seems like a noble goal, like a decent plan, like the whole point of being here.

But after a while, sobriety moves lower and lower on our list of priorities, until it eventually drops right off.

Now, before that freaks you out, let me explain. When you live a sober life, when you live the ‘new life/ (regular life)’ you begin to see sobriety not as the goal but the byproduct of a happy life. I don’t know why it didn’t occur to me earlier that it works like this but it does. You see, in the beginning, being drunk wasn’t the problem. Being drunk helped me AVOID problems. Not solve them, but avoid them. Then they came back – more of them, and I drank more. Then I had more problems, more sadness, and now loneliness. So I drank more. And before you knew it, I had this laundry list of issues I had created and only one solution – Sangria and Gin!

The biochemical compulsions of addiction are pretty minimal after 6-9 months, and they continue to reduce as time progresses - and so the triggers we need to be mindful are emotional and memory triggers. This is why it pays to keep a positive mind.

I explained about the employment of the reality window, when your belief window changes, that changes the result. Now, in this new life, Lane and I meet problems, but we have been given some skills on how to deal with them and the ‘need’ to drink is never triggered. People ask me all the time how I am going to remain sober and I think the answer is wrapped up in my ability to see things as they truly are, through my new beliefs- that includes my self. Have I improved my self esteem? You bet.

And with that comes all sorts of benefits – things like the need to build a romantic relationship with someone who wants to share in my aspirations and on my terms, sober ones; the ability to shrug off the kinds of pains that everyone (yes even you) feels when they get around their families; the ability to accept that we deserve to be happy as much as the next guy whether we failed the 10th grade or not!

I had dinner on Saturday night with Matt and he relayed this thought to me. We went roller skating earlier in the day with a bunch of guys. He said to me that he had a ‘moment’ at the rink because he thought about the fact that he was roller skating for the first time since the one time he went as a kid – with a bunch of friends – and there was no booze or drama. He thought about how the next day we would all get dressed up and go to church. He decided that he deserved this bit of happiness, that he deserved to do nice things. This small happiness will not prevent him from drinking, but it will prevent him from the ‘need’ to drink – at least for that one day.

So let me explain the sobriety as a priority thought again – I am just saying that living sober isn’t the priority to me, staying happy with myself is my priority, and I have a lot of tools to stay that way. Sobriety is the benefit of not 'needing' to drink.

I will never be happy trying to stay sober – that’s like white knuckling it on a daily basis – maybe this is why I don’t like AA because, to me at least, (and ONLY to me) it seems like there everyone is living to stay sober, not living sober to stay happy.

There are really new guys on the ranch as well. Some are counting their time on the farm in days not even weeks. One of these guys just came in last Friday – and I asked him how its going. When he came he hadn’t shaved, he looked tired and worn out. He looked like a drunk. I know that he had a rough couple of weeks before he arrived. Yesterday, he told me he is beginning to enjoy himself and that there were some things that he needed. A bike was one, and the other was a nice shirt to wear to church. If you remember my blog from the beginning, my appearance was pretty important to me. Its how I was perceived, how I felt like I should perceive myself, through the eyes of people perceiving me.

I thought it was great, though, that he asked for a good shirt to wear to church because that shows growth from the way he looked when he first arrived – his perception and awareness is already changing – and beginning with how we present ourselves to the rest of the world is the beginning of a change that will eventually progress into the perception to how we see ourselves. This eventually leads to a sorting out of issues and the eventual acceptance of self, then the cool part – when we like to be who we are. And this is when we stop living to be sober, and start living as someone who is again happy. I hate to burst your bubble, but there isn't such thing as a 'happy drunk.'

That’s what I call recovery. As for the wonderous fairy tales I was told in the beginning about all the great changes I would be making…well… if I could go back to May and start this blog with ‘Once Upon A Time’ I would because, sleeping beauty is up and kickin, Rapunzel has let down her hair, and Humpty Dumpty, well, he's sittin pretty with only a few cracks to speak of. And me, well, these days I find myself recounting these same fairy tales to the new guys, but I will say, I am definitely more Mother Goose, less Grimm.

Have a great week all

Sometimes it ends uncomfortably.

Last night I skipped my work out in favor of cake and ice cream. Am I forgetting my priorities, you may ask? No way. BUT, each night before a graduation, we all gather in the West Dorm (the final dorm) and have cake and ice cream – just the residents – to give a private send off to the graduate before the ceremony the following day.

This week, we are celebrating TWO graduations. One happened today, the other tomorrow. This is a lot of cake, but well worth it. Both of these graduates are changed men – both of them I knew from when we all first arrived. It’s a little strange to think that people that were new when I started are graduating. My, how a year flies by.

“Stubby” was a hard drinkin mountain man – one time during devotions, a chaplain asked how you can tell a friend is a real friend; Stubby raised his hand and said, ‘The guy who will back you in a gun fight,” and this was the kind of life he led.

He grew up in a small mountain town, transplanted from the hills of Arkansas – Take a moment and imagine the Hatfields and the McCoys. Now imagine a neighborhood where they are the most sophisticated people on the block, and you’ve imagined Stubby’s neighborhood.

He once told me that if he met me before he entered the program, he probably would have robbed me.

He is kind these days, gentle, calm. He gave me a hand written note one day in January that said, “I think you are doing a good job.” I didn’t know what he meant, and he said he didn’t either, but he felt like he should tell me.

I can say that the fabric of my life is indeed richer by the colorful thread of friendship I made with Stubby, a man I may never have met had I not come here.

Keith was a meth user, and rough around the edges. He had no teeth when he came in because of the decades of drug abuse. He was aloof, even mean, when he got here. And he leaves with a certain amount of eagerness. His smile is huge these days, his dentures are on the way – and he has a sense of resolve about him that I find admirable.

Keith has always got a cookie to give, it’s his thing – and I have a hard time imagining the kind of person he speaks about when he tells of his days as an active addict.

During this three day celebration, there is one resident on the farm who is noticeably absent. Tom is a resident who is preparing for a planned departure. In the order of rankings, he is number one – he has been there the longest. And it is time for him to go.

There is a strange phenomenon on the ranch where some guys get cozy and feel the safety of this life, a life they can hardly think about losing, and they max out their time. The ranch allows people to extend certain phases for a long time, in fact, its entirely possible I could still be in phase II at this point if I had decided.

There is a safety in all this, a level of security. It’s a new life, and its easier to maintain when you are accountable to the ranch. But this, I say vehemently, is NOT REAL.

You can NOT live on the ranch. A man of my age, of any age, is NOT supposed to live on a rehab ranch, this is NOT NORMAL. I wrote months ago about how I feel like this place is home, and I have since rethought this attitude. It is uncomfortable for me, it is frustrating, it is a real pain in the ass to be there, and it is supposed to be.

Some might read this blog and think to themselves that it seems like I got off scott-free for all the heartache I caused through my life. I know this because I get letters all the time from people who remind me of the hurt I may have caused and the fact that I am living a fairly tale at other people’s expense, and it isn’t fair.

Perhaps this is true, maybe there should be more of a penalty for me, but the fact is, there is no excuse for the way my life played out – there is also no reason for the blessings I have received, it is what it is. It would be nice and easy if life worked on a credit system, a system of blessings and punishments – where you can add to your prosperity by doing nice things for people, bank good things, then spend them on a few things you probably shouldn’t do – but this isn’t how it works.

The truth is, I do pay for my life’s experience. I have a conscience and a memory and there are times when my past does come to haunt me. This is true for anyone who spends a year on the ranch. There is a LOT of silent time. The activity I detail on the ranch is only the tip of the ice berg of reflection that each of us does and works through.

I wrote a while back about Phil – one of my friends who broke the lamp on his step-dads head at Christmas and his parents want him to apologize before he is allowed to participate in the family again. For four years, this has been brewing, and for whatever reason, he won’t do it.

I know he thinks about it. I know he carries this burden around with him all the time. I can see the weight on his shoulders, the weight of wanting to unload this – but he refuses to apologize.

I’ve asked him why and he doesn’t have an easy explanation but it must be something. He struggles with this, and I think the refusal to apologize is only a small part of something deeper that he feels, there is some other reason he won’t do this, and so he works through this pain – this solitude – by himself – without the full participation of his family.

But he is working through it sober. And I have realized that while I am here, my problems are not going to all vanish, the slate will not be wiped clean, but I can deal with my problems without the assistance of a shot of gin (or a glass of gin), and go on. Phil is incorporating whatever pains him into a sober reality.

It’s not the clean wrap up that everyone thinks it is when families and friends attend graduation ceremonies. Inside, some turmoil is still there for many of us, but we deal with it in a different way now, we deal with it as sober people.

And so while I detail an often recreational lifestyle on this ranch, you might need to understand that there is a lot of work going on; at the heart level, in the memories, in the building of a sustainable future and coping mechanisms. Tearing down a person who has been so bolstered by the illusionary effects of drugs and alcohol, then rebuilding that person from the ground up seems like a lot of work. Now, imagine that you can not tear the entire structure down, but you have to somehow rebuild it with existing beams, a few existing walls, even some of the light switches – you don’t get to start from scratch, you have to build around these things, whether they are broken or not. It is even more daunting.

This is all a big emotional mess if you ask me!

But it is what it is, and this is the only way to have a life, they tell me. So we all do it. And on graduation days, families and friends come and encourage the newly sober graduate, the residents all know that deep down, it’s scary, and still painful to be standing up there. There is a sort of humiliation, an embarassment, to say I was successful at rehab.

We also know that sometimes in life (or on the farm), we have to move on, like Tom, because we have outlived the experience, that we are not gaining from it and maybe we even have to be sent away. When life has stalled like this, it often takes something drastic to kick start it. There is a time when you get so in to your groove that it becomes a rut, this is likely when we start drinking again.

I don’t know really what to say about all this – I tend to close this blog each week with some sort of pleasant wrap up… and I struggle to leave it open ended like this, it is within my addictive tendency to want to put it into a nice package, but I won't, its real life. Uncomfortable isn’t it.

EMAIL: snapshotsfromrehabranch@yahoo.com

DAYS SOBER: 290 days

DAYS SINCE I SAW BONNIE HUNT: 281 days

Red Shoes come in convenient packages.

There are things that you, who may not have alcohol problems, probably take for granted; routines that you have worked into your day or week that you hardly even notice. Alex always knows when it’s Tuesday because Popeye’s has some chicken deal and Alex loves chicken, especially when it’s cheap. A friend of mine in the City was telling me that she gets off work early on Monday nights so she can watch “Hero’s.” Towards the end, when I was drinking, I always knew that Friday would include a trip to Blockbuster so I could enough movies to keep me occupied while I drank a litre of Sangria and one pint of gin. I knew I would pass out by 11:30 (midway through the second movie) with half the pint left – enough to get me through Saturday morning until I could go back and get more.

By the end, my routines always included alcohol in some way. Either I was including alcohol or I was trying to recover from it. I was a very organized drunk, it always managed to make it into my budget as well as my schedule. Its interesting how we always schedule things we love.

Routines are safe and easy for an alcoholic – and as I have said before, we like a nice, easy to package and wrap up kind of life; emotionally as well as in our daily grind. I was surprised when I stopped including alcohol in my life how few routines I actually had. Nothing about my ‘organized’ life was even remotely organized without that one consistent companion. It was alarming at first and thankfully, by design, at the ranch, there is a rigid time structure in place that helps to fill the vortex of a life suddenly out of whack with the void created by instant and immediate sobriety.

But now I am at a point where my synthetic ranch life is transitioning to my painfully real life and I think establishing new routines is pretty important. I still go to devotions in the morning, I think this is important so I can stay connected to the ranch and so I can start my day with friends. I sit with the same guys every morning, Matt and Mike and they have become part of my routine; Mike because he has become my most trusted confident and Matt because he considers himself a “linguistic renegade” and I love to interact with people who elevate normal conversation to the level of art. I look forward to our half hour of friendly banter. Most of my other friends don’t make it to devotions these days because of school or work. Some of the staff sometimes make remarks about the fact that I still do this. Its my routine.

I know that on Saturday I will spend the day with my dad. I will probably do laundry, we will bum around town – we eat, we catch up on the week, we gossip a little, he always has something for us to do. Every week when I leave my time with him we always say, “OK, so NEXT weekend, we need to work on the house, do chores etc.,” but we never do… saying it is part of our routine. When he drops me off, he always rolls down the window and says, “Hey Kid, did I ever tell you that I love you more than anyone in the whole world,” and I usually laugh out load and say, “Yea, you did.” “OK, good, see you next week” he will reply. This is a cherished part of the routine. The kind of routine I might have missed out on had I decided to stay drunk.

Curtis and I have a new routine. Every Tuesday he has a long break between class and his campus is only 5 minutes from where I work so we’ve decided to make Tuesday a standing lunch date.

“We should really try to make Tuesday lunch our thing,” he told me a couple weeks ago
“Cool, that’s great, because you don’t get to see me much anymore?”
“No, because if you don’t take me to lunch then I am stuck at school until 3 and I don’t want to do that. I mean…er…yea because we’re friends.”

His honesty is one of the reasons I enjoy his company. But we used to talk when we were in lower south about how cool it would be to do normal stuff like have lunch with friends when we got to higher phases, so now it’s possible, it would seem stupid to not do it.

This Tuesday he and I were eating and he asked me, “So what are the chances you are really going to stay sober once you leave – like what is the percentage you think you will succeed.”

This is a question that we all ask when we get to this part of the program – real life is pretty real to say the least and most of us are trying to figure out how to incorporate this into our sobriety.

I answered him and then asked him why he was asking. (You want to know what my percentage was, don’t you, but I am not saying). He asked because he told me that he ran into a graduate of the ranch recently and this graduate was drunk. This troubled Curtis quite a bit because I think he saw this failure as a failure that he too could have. It’s a dangerous question when we think, “I can use SOME things, I can’t do others,” because when we begin to bargain with ourselves on what we can ‘get away with’ – well, this is addictive thinking and its relapse time!

It’s shocking to see someone finish the program and then run back to the bottle. One graduate a couple weeks ago left the farm and THAT NIGHT went to find an old friend to get hammered. Its troublesome to think about because it makes each of us wonder - what’s the point. I mean, if I relapse, perhaps I should just give in and give up.

I mean, really, why am I spending this whole year doing all this if my chances of success are so slim. What in the world am I thinking, and who the hell am I fooling with all this. Statistically, I have not finished drinking – statistically, there is still a 78% probability that I will drink again. (Out of the hundred guys who enter the program yearly, only about 25% will graduate, and only about half of the graduates will remain sober – 12% of the guys who enter the program)

So Curtis and I began to dissect the situation. One thing we both agree on is that the guys who tend to fall are the ones who come in with the absolute, gung ho, this time there no turning back attitude. The guys who have no margin for error. Rigid, unbreakable willpower to stay sober. 90 meetings in 90 days guys – the guys who were drunk and high and probably ‘bangin some whore’ Friday, entered the program on Saturday, and Sunday they were Uber-Christian and 'living sober'. Those guys drive me nuts.

I’ve always maintained that the possibility of relapse is real – and I am far far from an Uber-Christian. Heck, I probably sin in my sleep. My relationship with God is real, however. The package of sobriety to me isn't pass or fail and I used to challenge my attitude and say that I was too passive about the whole thing.

But the point is, as an alcoholic, we like things simple, in boxes, with names. Things like “drunk” “sober” “recovered” are all easy packages. It’s not an accident that cheap wine comes with a twist off top, that the curve of a pint of liquor fits nicely in your back pocket.

And real life offers NONE of that. There are no easy packages in real life, there is no twist off top to drink from life’s solutions. It's blurry. It takes time. Sobriety is an endurance race – and the 90 meetings in 90 days guys are almost always successful at GETTING sober. Hell, I was sober every Monday morning by 11am. Hung over, but sober, and I maintain that GETTING sober is a cinch. Staying sober is the hard part. But how I define success at this isn't always going to fit into a package.

I have inched along in this rehab at a painfully slow rate. You may recall, I hadn’t planned on staying past June of last year. Then I was convinced that I would be home by fall. Christmas was out of the question and there was no way I would spend New Year’s on that stupid ranch.

But, here I am – beginning my 10th month in the program and life is purring along with new routines and I have made only baby steps. Sometimes I feel like I have traveled only a short distance, made only slight course adjustments.

Is this the solution? I have no idea, but it is a solution for me, for now. The baby steps, just a few small things which result in a few big results. There are many times, most times, I don’t feel like I have done much, gone far, my journey hasn’t seemed particularly difficult. It’s almost been comically easy in some ways. Has the solution ALWAYS been this easy to grasp? Sobriety.

And then I rest because there is some comfort in knowing that my real life, my new happy real life, has always been only a small distance away from me. I am able to stop beating up on myself for ‘letting it get this far’ because, maybe it didn’t. This makes it possible to forgive myself for many things, things I have harbored and resented about myself through this whole program. It’s like Dorothy in the Wizard of OZ, when she sees that home was only a click of her red shoes, away. And forgiving myself for messing up is gong to always be part of my sobriety.

I know you may be thinking that I should consider this work. I can hear my parents now talking about how much more I will appreciate things when I work hard for them, but this doesn’t seem like work to me. It seems like something I am able to do naturally, like walking. Maybe I shouldn’t stress out because I am not stressed out. Maybe I don’t need to feel like I should be feeling something else; maybe my new package is emblazoned with, ‘Tastes great, less FEELING’?

So here’s how I will wrap this up. Like all the guys here, I worry about relapse, I worry about staying sober, I feel like I should worry about it. I catch myself feeling rigid, like if anything happens and I have a drink, I will be immediately transported through some cosmic tornado to a distant land where my companions will be scarecrows, tin men, and "linguistic renegades." But then I think, that’s not how it has to be. In the crappy event that something happens, I need to get up and click my shoes, and remind myself that my reality isn’t so far away and its time to get back to it. I am less scared by this.

Does this grant me permission to relapse. Hardly. But it also grants me permission to forgive myself and start over if I do and NOT give up, grab a litre of Sangria and go back to old routines. Is that an easy package to live in?

Yes.

So, if you see me walking around town, clicking my heels, never you mind, it’s just part of my new routine. And if it’s a Tuesday, I will either be on my way to eat cheap chicken with Alex or have lunch with Curtis. If its a Saturday, I am probably playing hookie from chores with my dad, who loves me more than anyone else in the whole world.

All in all, my life comes in a pretty nice package.

Have a good week all - enjoy your routines….