- Alcohol
- Drugs
Submitted by: Amy Cooper
My drinking career began quite early, so I have a good 38 years of experience under my belt. I was introduced to a substance 10 years ago: cocaine, which changed my life forever.
I was also a successful alcoholic for many, many years. Everybody drinks alcohol right? So I was able to manage life quite well for many years and drinking heavily every day never had consequences.
I created my own business about fifteen years ago. I provided a service from coast-to-coast delivering large volumes of product which gave me large volumes of expendable cash, which gave me large volumes of time to do whatever it is that I wanted to do. That was when I was introduced to cocaine and shortly lost relationships with my daughters and my second wife.
I thought that I knew everything. I was not successful in filling the void with material possessions, either. I shortly went after the realm of drugs and it went from having fun out with friends and just using a little bit of the cocaine on the weekends to six months of locking myself alone in my home and using as much I could buy myself and didn’t want to share with anybody else. Richard Pryor said it best, “cocaine is God’s way of saying you make too much money.”
I sold everything that I had to put myself into a treatment facility in 2009.
I put myself in treatment in Florida, went through a 30-day program and came out and was cured—or so I thought. I thought that I didn’t need anything else. I had a sponsor for about six weeks and I was different than anybody else, because you know, I was multimillion dollar successful business owner (self-will). After treatment, I decided to do two things that I had never done in my life: become a runner and learn to play a musical instrument.
I told myself because I was 30 pounds overweight and a smoker that I had a challenge. I came back and I started running here in Atlanta, Georgia about a mile and a half a day. Shortly after building endurance, I realized running a marathon was a dream of mine. I slowly but surely started running and I accumulated some friends in this triathlon world. I trained with them, I learned how to eat, learned how to train, and I dropped a significant amount of weight.
I had to go in and out, in and out, in and out. I kept using cocaine periodically and soon I found going week-to-week with no sleep, no food, and at times, no water. I found myself in an inpatient psychiatric unit for eight days, then I moved to the inpatient residential program 30 days and from there to an intensive outpatient program. That was where I truly lost everything. Divorce, material possessions, houses, and money. I didn’t realize that my partner could kick me out of the firm that I founded, either.
I was 47 years old and standing broken in front of my recovery residence, and that’s when I decided it was time to start doing this ‘recovery deal’. I decided to get a sponsor and to go to meetings. I got through the eighth and ninth step and began to really get into service work.
Unfortunately, unlike any other disease, our society does not wrap its arms around those of us who are medically unstable with the disease of active addiction. Instead, our society sometimes pushes us away and tells people not to care for us.
Sadly, if my medical affliction was diagnosed as diabetes or cancer, there is not a family member or friend or anybody I work with that would not have dropped everything that they had and wrapped themselves around me. They would give everything that I needed to ensure that I have what I needed. To have this disease take away the friends and family we care about is a tragedy.
I’m in middle of working on things every day and life is starting to come back for me. The mere fact that I can run the 6K race the Heroes 6k in Atlanta in July 2017 from where I was a year ago, is a huge success and a miracle for sure. Thank you for letting me share.