“It’s so refreshing to see someone throws a saddle on rather thank look a gift horse in the mouth”
I spent the entirety of 2021 helping two former addicts who were friends try and get sober after being told they’d relapsed.
Long story short my car got repoed; staying in a sketchy area all of my most treasured/sentimental items including my passport were stolen in broad daylight.
I mean if we’re being honest even myself got caught up in the white dragon (methamphetamine). You just get so damn bored in those rooms. I remember it so vividly too- one admittedly comfy pretty big bed. Too big for one person if you ask me, had to sleep holding my jacket like a body pillow. The dusty, grotty curtains blocking out the sunlight. A standard A/C unit and Television. I’d keep Cartoon Network on just so I didn’t go insane from the damn lull of my own mind.
And the desk. That damn hardwood desk, chair and floor. At one point I’d been so tweaked out of my mind I began what felt like just a random shimmy of the leg; turned out to be a full on seizure. Started in the left thigh and moved its way up and down my body. The shit thing about seizures is - all of your senses are totally fine. But your muscles have their own plan.
I whipped my laptop with my forearm off the desk HARD onto the floor and shortly followed it myself. Flopping about like a fish, watching my unconscious body slam its’ head onto the floor again and again and again. “This is it” i thought. “I deserve this, here I am about to go out on a bender in a Motel 6 down in Santa Ana.”. It stopped after a minute (I think) and I immediately took something to calm the nerves.
I decided I’d give the pipe a rest that night, and get some food and sleep in me. Not realizing it had been almost 10 days since I’d slept. Mind those motel lifestyles, they’ll take you for the ride of your life. If I wanted to blame Derek for introducing me to it I could but an addict knows better, it’s always your say at the end of the day, you know?
What can I say, maybe I wanted the full roller-coaster experience.
Derek ended up cremated; fentanyl and methamphetamine took away my best friends life and the other relapsed the day he got out of rehab.
Moral of the story? It’s not selfish to care about yourself. You don’t owe anyone a damn thing. And you’re not going to help anybody one bit if you don’t remember that.
“One day it just clicks. You realize what’s important and what isn’t. You learn to care less about what other people think of you and more about what you think of yourself. You realize how far you’ve come and you remember when you thought things were such a mess that you would never recover. And you SMILE. You smile because you are truly proud of yourself and the person you’ve fought to become.”
My mattress is strapped to eight roombas and I leave all my doors open at night so the roombas can go where they want to. I wake up where they want me to be. I trust their decisions.
