- Alcohol
- Drugs
- Faith
June 13, 2014
Day one.
June 25, 2014
Just want to take a moment and thank all my friends and family that have shown their love and support! I love you all! The word “coincidence” is no longer a part of my vocabulary, as I have seen God’s will in many facets recently. With His grace I’m truly a changed, refocused man. I look forward to seeing all your smiles (but hope you know mine will always be BIGGER and cuter). This second chance is more than a reprieve. It’s a chance to help save lives as sick as mine was (you don’t know great it feels to use the past tense) and use my past as an example for others. With a willing, honest, sincere approach and desire, one can be transformed by God’s grace. I’ll never be a saint, but I’ll be happy to die as a martyr with a joker grin and to die finally living free and helping shoulder the burden of my fellows!
July 22, 2014
As I reflect back for a moment on these last 40 days, it occurs to me that the hardest part of this journey wasn’t the heart-wrenching, courageous first step. It’s every day/step after. It’s getting up smiling and ready to seize the day. It’s pulling the knife out of the back, apologizing for putting it there and for being unable to face them with kind words. It’s hearing/feeling the anger, hurt and frustration in my friend’s/family’s voices and seeing it through their eyes. It’s a hug or kind true words from the friends you never knew you had. These friends are joining you on a journey to change the world by starting with their own life. When my mind, heart and soul were lost in the abyss, I cared nothing for the light of the next day. Now I pray to share that light while enjoying every last breath and every waking moment. I don’t know where the road leads me, but I finally have the courage and strength to smile, face it and enjoy this rollercoaster of life with my hands up the whole way! It’s been 40 days and 40 nights, and every day forward as important as last!
September 17, 2014
There is a simple, grateful, recovering alcoholic/womanizer/addict/flawed human on vacation in Sin City and enjoying life to the fullest while being sober, clean and happy to be alive. Rather than leaving his morals behind on the counter or thrown in the dirty laundry bin, he packed them up for application. He’s refraining from indulging in obsessions brought on by haunted, not cool, distorted memories of hangovers, working gals, have-nots and howevers.
This trip was another gracious, small step and testament to the power of the truth in God’s, or a higher power’s, life principles. These were instilled in him as a day-dreaming child but lost as a “know it all,” fearful, insecure adult. Fortunately God decided to shine His light through wisdom, life experiences and lessons taught by family, friends, enemies, girlfriends, support groups, churches, counselors, coaches, teachers, music, art, bosses, bikers, dancers, gays, lesbians, drug dealers, judges, coppers, robbers and jail time. Honestly grateful doesn’t describe the clear, HD resolution of this light and picture. He cannot begin to thank these uniquely talented, good people for the hard life lessons learned. Why judge anyone anymore? He relates to being all of them. Each person was strong enough to withstand his twisted, dark fantasies made reality.
Focused, day by day, step by step, he is reprogrammed to reach his God-given potential and by doing so make peace with the wreckage of a past he created to destroy himself and those around him by means of slow suicide. By accepting that his limitations are strengths, he helps shoulder the burdens of others who often did so for him. This guy should be dead a million times over, just another number on the O.D. list. He would have left behind his grieving, broken mother, sister and brother because he choose to live, to die for himself. Fortunately he bottomed out, was wide awake, desperate and broken from an 18-year bender. He looked into the innocent, uncorrupted, angel eyes of his niece and saw “it:” HOPE. In that moment he realized, “Life is beautiful and bigger than me by the grace of God.” Powerless, he made his first good choice, the choice to get help beyond his own means. He turned his life over to his higher power. Rather than remain selfish, he humbly looks to help others by planting the seed of hope in just one person just as it was planted in him by an inspiring friend and sponsor.
The sponsor believed in a heaven for me when I had made peace with hell. At the very least, the hope is to help one resentful, bitter, angry, hopeless person in life. The blurry background filled with the distractions of bright city lights remains to my back and in the past as I press forward to help be a solution. My smile, once one of desolation, is now replaced with one of serenity. My shades hide eyes that look up to heaven for another little miracle to happen, this time in someone else’s life. I am truly excited to see God’s next miracle in you.
October 16, 2014
Whoa, my God, hands up to the sky—I remember the wait in the line for the Magnum always terrified me more than the ride itself: 136 degrees, corralled like dancing zombies through a maze of pipes while an undignified DJ played the Macarena to get me hyped up to drop 500 feet. Once I got to the front seat of the coaster, got up the clickety-clacking hill, paused at the top to look around at the people wandering below like ants sprayed with Raid, I put my sweaty palms up in air and cruised. The freedom I felt through the dips and turns was intoxicating. I couldn’t wait to get in line again. That’s the feeling I have as I finish my fourth step, moral inventory. After some 300-plus honest, handwritten pages of selfishly sinful acts, devilishly delicious deeds and personally perverted perspectives, it’s a proven scientific miracle to finally, truly think about and care for other people, to care beyond what I could get out of the situation. I now see my weak, insecure choices to drink away my feelings with a bottle, straw or whatever I could get my hands around in response to adversity, change or too much of the same. The poisons I ingested were a means to get up the false bravado to conquer only myself. I couldn’t handle life like a sane normal person (Does such a person even exist? Or do they just hide it better?). I needed and still need a complete change of character to better equip a weak boy. I’m grateful to God, family, life, church, my sponsor and the magical fellowship for the means to get the hurt, pain and insanity out of my head, to use my humble heart to love others such as me. I’m looking forward to the day I can wait in line with someone else to see the miracle of freedom God has in store for them. The work is never done. For that I’m grateful, and I’m grateful for the ability to face life in eyes without expecting anything in return and smile BIG with hands up all the way enjoying the ride.
November 5, 2014
I can’t express enough how great it is to be working with the youth at church. It’s amazing how much we all struggle with our connection to God once you take away job status, titles and adulthood. I guess at heart we are lost children trying to find our way. I love it and get pumped knowing, seeing and growing with these young adults.
November 12, 2014
It’s amazing how fulfilling life starts to become once we put aside our selfish goals and live for God or something beyond ourselves. Getting stuck and stumbling stupid on selfish desires enslaves us to this endless charade of physical existence. In the past I was living high on life’s fumes, drunk with false pride while consumed with insecurities. I couldn’t even look in the dusty mirror of my soul the reflection was so dark and bleak. I didn’t know where to begin to get a grasp on the choices I made to feed my ego at your expense. The repercussions of my self-will crippled my hope for a brighter day. I questioned my own sanity so far as to believe death’s kiss was the make-out session I needed most. At that point I had ceased taking care of myself in preparation for the date of a lifetime. I didn’t shower, shave or brush my teeth. Sexy, right? I know. The stench of depression and abuse was a cologne I wore for all to suffer. Lost and alone in my thoughts, I was so consumed with resentment, dreams turned nightmare and love gone to hate that the little voice some call a conscience, holy spirit or life light was strangled by reality. I relied on the list of those “friends” who were always there for me: molly, cocaine, alcohol, LSD and pills.
Even when I thought I was alone, I was only kidding myself with this illusion. For you see hope was with me the entire time. I just needed to listen, reach out and say I needed help from a God beyond my own understanding. That little voice finally screamed out for action. The hardest part of sobriety or getting help is the “getting” part. The one of many daily miracles of sobriety/life is seeing how God does for you what you cannot do for yourself. All I had to do was ask sincerely and honestly. I lived in shame long enough to know I could not, would not be ashamed of this. Getting sober wasn’t enough for me. I needed a whole life reprogramming process. By placing God’s will and others before my needs, I can look in the shiny mirror of life, smile and share the message of hope, love and serenity.
November 17, 2014
Being honest about how I feel is something I’ve always struggled with. This was the foundation of my struggles. This is what I used substances to cope with. I told people what I thought they wanted to hear with more loveless conviction. My actions were based off of a need to control the nauseating narrative, to hide the dissatisfaction I had for my growing list of drunken, drugged accomplishments. I had an answer for everything but no real solutions. People, places and things changed, moved and grew. I was hopelessly perfect at making the same unique-to-everyone mistakes. Friends got older, fatter, and balder. They had babies, divorced and got even fatter. I resentfully stalked their unhappiness and cheered and “liked” the chaos of their demise for my own twisted dark amusement. Somehow I justified the lowest defeats as my victory, as fuel for my next beautiful, orchestrated bender. I took pics with beer in hand, “Cheers.” I judged and compared your lives against my struggles and pain. I couldn’t relate to living life honestly on its terms. I could make the most of my charm, joker grin and partial half-truths. I could maybe earn an immoral victory for the evening. I’m learning that dishonest intentions reap dishonest results. It’s that simple despite all these words. It wasn’t until I started being honest with myself that I could find myself sharing my true feelings and experiences as a means for amends, my personal satisfaction therapy. I know I lived very dishonestly before, and merely getting sober, clean and right with God isn’t enough.
December 5, 2014
I’m grateful today for fellowship. Just when I think I have this whole recovery thing figured out and that I might not really “need” it anymore, I hear from a friend how my positive words and actions set forth some rewarding change. It honestly keeps me humble as I approach the six-month mark which may as well be 27 years in sober time. I am still learning, still grateful and still have such a long ways to go. I’m glad there are not any shortcuts to recovery. I’m glad there isn’t a light switch to just turn off my addictions and sick thoughts. I’m glad I have to get up, pray and fight every single day. I’m glad for a group of individuals who relate to struggles that normal people can’t understand. I really wanted to call it quits on this sobriety thing because I felt like I had arrived and like I had this, but that’s a lie, and I can’t afford to live dishonestly. I’m glad to have the tools to recognize that and do something about it like help others still suffering, get to a meeting and get to work on these steps.
December 13, 2014
Six months sober/clean, one day at a time.
Twenty years from now you will be more disappointed by the things that you didn’t do than by the ones you did so. So throw off the bowlines. Sail away from the safe harbor. Catch the trade winds in your sails.