addiction, Adult Child of an Alcoholic, Altruism, Consequences, Recovery

My Story, Part Four.

Not. Fucking. Guilty.

I left the courtroom, walked to my car, put my head against the steering wheel and cried. The two biggest obstacles to my recovery (in my mind) – the legal charges and the hospital bill – were now over and done with. A year and a half later.

I called my mom and told her the news. It was over.

I drove back home. My sense of relief was overwhelming.

It was a miracle…

…so I smoked weed with my girlfriend. And that is the truth. Not an hour after the end of my trial.

Relapse.

They say relapse starts way before you pick up – and I believe them.

My end goal the first time around in the recovery had been to get back to where I had been before, just better. I had achieved all that. Back with the girlfriend, DJ-ing again, money problems overcome, health problems overcome.

The problem is that where substances are involved, you can’t simply walk back into your old life. You must change your life, and start anew – especially if your circumstances were as desperate as mine. Some people are able to go back to drinking in moderation. Others have been able to kick elicit drugs, yet still drink alcohol with no issues. I don’t begrudge them, because I recognize that addiction is a spectrum.

But that is not me.

Sure, the things that happened to me as a kid were awful, and needed to be addressed. They weren’t. No one had shown me how to manage my own money. No one had shown me effective ways of coping with my anxiety. The people I counted on the most had basically run for the hills to tend to their own wounds. I was left to tend to mine on my own as well. I now deal with that pain, and learn to cope with it one day at a time through a variety of (healthy) means.

But I had destroyed my life. No one did that to me, but me.

For better or worse, once you reach a certain age no one cares about your problems. The assumption is that when you’re an “adult” somehow you’ve figured it out – or can at least fake it well enough to not be a public nuisance. Faking it carries its own set of problems, but jail time is generally not one of them.

My girlfriend had always had marijuana in the house, as well as a small stash of LSD and mushrooms which were left over from Burning Man. Prior to recovery, I wasn’t much of a pot smoker – primarily a drinker who used downers to come down after using hallucinogens. I didn’t smoke daily at first, but we learned that one of her performer friends was a dealer, so we began buying from her. Then I began buying on my own, weekly. All told I spent over $8,000 on weed over the course of a year and a half.

Things on the home front were rough, marijuana notwithstanding. My girlfriend, filling the role of the perfect co-dependent, attempted to control everything I did and every move I made. I had to maintain a spreadsheet of all my expenses and money owed her, to the tune of close to $2,500. She also made me add daily expenses to that spreadsheet, especially anything she bought “for the house” and split those evenly. So even as I paid down my debt to her, the tab was perpetually increasing. There was no hope of getting out from under it.

What began as an amend began to feel like indentured servitude.

I was unable to find steady graphic design work at first, taking every contract position I saw on craigslist and collecting unemployment in between. When I was unemployed, my girlfriend had a list of tasks she expected me to accomplish while she was at work. I would do everything in my power to do them correctly, but no matter what I did, she would find fault and criticize. Eventually, I would do the exact opposite of what she wanted done on purpose simply to piss her off. Then, I would spend whole days getting high, not doing anything, in defiance. In other words, I was using “at” her. I couldn’t make her happy, I thought, so why try?

She had also assumed the role of stage manager for the DJ event I was helming, and was booking the talent, eventually taking the role of booking the other DJs away from me. My suggestions went unheard. At the end of every night, basking in the afterglow of an amazing gig, I’d have to endure the car ride home where she perpetually bitched about everything that went wrong and why I hadn’t taken better video of her on-stage. Of course, my response was to go home and smoke. I got to the point where I hated going to the gigs. My attempt to give my girlfriend a creative outlet had turned into a personal nightmare. I felt trapped.

At this point, any semblance of a sex life was non-existent. I had stopped going to meetings, stopped calling my old sponsor or anyone in my network. As a fall-back, my girlfriend and I started going to couples counseling sessions, which devolved into her venting about everything wrong with *me.* Our counselors had to split us into separate sessions so that I wouldn’t be made to feel like the “fuck-up.”

The one ray of sunshine I had was the dog we had adopted, Roy – a Jack-Russell/Beagle mix. He was the only dog I had ever owned, and I loved him more than my life. At one point during an argument, my girlfriend accused me of loving the dog more than I loved her. In the beginning, that would’ve been false, but by the end of our relationship it was the absolute truth. I wanted to take him and quite literally run away from her.

During the summer of 2012, she and I “toured” together…booked to play/perform at several different festivals, one as far away as Pennsylvania in a town not far from where I was born. I had allowed her to book the dates because I didn’t want to argue with her about anything. It was exhausting, physically and emotionally. In fact, on our way back from Pennsylvania I had a nervous breakdown. I had to stop the car and pull over – and she wouldn’t stop nagging me.

Things started looking up in October of 2012, as I took a long-term contract position with a local government agency. They seemed to like me and I did good work. At home, my pot smoking had really taken off. In fact, when I went to a conference in Charlotte to take photographs for a work function, I took a small vial of weed with me to smoke in the hotel room after work was over. I wasn’t caught, and everyone seemed to like the photos. So I didn’t think twice about it.

I had gotten to the point where I hated being at home. For all intents and purposes my girlfriend and I were simply friends living under the same roof, and sleeping in the same bed. My girlfriend had been in 3 different post-doctoral positions and had ended up leaving all of them for various reasons. I was paying the full rent on our apartment, still paying my tab, working, playing DJ gigs, and on the verge of losing my mind with no rest. The only time I had to myself was when my girlfriend would fall asleep, and I could come downstairs to smoke weed.

My mentality had shifted entirely away from recovery, and back into active addiction.

Marijuana had become my coping mechanism, and it was starting not to work anymore. On New Years Eve, my girlfriend had double-booked herself and told me she had taken care of things at our main gig, Revolution. Unfortunately, she hadn’t, and I ended up having to field questions and put out fires because of it. The gig went well, but that was my breaking point. She had asked me to buy a bottle of vanilla vodka for her for the new year (2013), and I did (why anyone would ask a relatively new recovering alcoholic to buy vodka, I’ll never know). She had opened it and taken a swig during a break from one of our sets.

Without her knowledge, I did too. And that is where my full-blown relapse began.

It escalated on February 20th, when again she asked me to go to the ABC store and buy her a bottle of bourbon. I bought one for her, and one for myself. I drank it over the course of two nights, and drank some of hers as well. I then bought another bottle for myself in secret, called in sick to work, and spent the day drinking it. She came home and found me passed out on the couch – and understandably let me have it.

At this point, I had a chance to turn it around…so I took it. I was worried about losing my job, so I went to the local treatment center where I got my Effexor prescription and told them what was happening. My psychiatrist saw how shaky I’d become, but I convinced her that I could taper myself off. So she prescribed me Librium, with a strict 10-day regimen to follow. I took another day off work to get my shakes under control.

She also prescribed me a 50mg dose of Trazodone to help me sleep. I’d had issues with being able to sleep continuously through the night ever since entering treatment. When you’re drinking like I was, and using like I was, you will screw up your sleep cycle. Additionally, being unable to sleep caused me a great deal of anxiety in early recovery. Most people look at you and tell you, “that’s what you get for using!” The tough love approach never really worked for me. Needless suffering is needless suffering, plain and simple. I cannot express how much good this did for me.

I completed the Librium taper and the shakes were done. I also started going to meetings again. I picked up a “start over” chip and got phone numbers.

If I had been able to navigate the next 30 days, I might’ve been able to stay the course. Unfortunately, my girlfriend took vocal issue with me using Trazodone. Even though it was prescribed to me by a doctor, even though this same doctor had reassured me that it was a tiny dose, my girlfriend the rocket scientist knew better. She started getting angry with me for taking it, making me feel guilty, made me feel like I was using again. I hadn’t been sober a month when I started drinking again. I had no peace, and no escape. I could’ve left the relationship – but I didn’t. My self-esteem was too shot for me to care.

At that point my drinking simply spiraled downward. I began drinking during work hours, sometimes passing out at my desk and coming to after the office (and parking deck) had closed. Watching me scale a wall to get into a locked parking deck was a sight to see, let me tell you. I was also buying marijuana from a different dealer closer to my work, and smoking during working hours. I didn’t want to go home, and yet I did because I didn’t want to leave my poor dog alone. In order to get sleep, I began stealing my girlfriend’s 2-year-old Lunesta pills, her Ambien, and her Xanax.

I was finally fired from my job after my HR manager found me passed out in my car in the parking deck, surrounded by vodka bottles. This began a further month-long downward spiral, where I did everything to avoid going home to my girlfriend. My couch-surfing tour took me as far as Asheville, NC, where I ended up having to be hospitalized with DTs – again. I was able to stay with two very dear friends who helped me over the course of 4 days. I came back to the condo I shared with my girlfriend, and I broke up with her, having been sober for 4 days. I knew it couldn’t continue – I knew I was no good for her, no good for myself.

I went walkabout one last time before voluntarily checking myself into rehab and not telling anyone. I was drunk when I checked myself in to rehab and turned my phone in before I realized I should probably make a few calls. All of the earthly possessions I could fit in my car were, in fact, in my car. I spent a week in treatment with no access to email or phone. As my girlfriend’s area code was not local, I couldn’t call her from the office phone (no long-distance calls). I was in this rehab for one week, and ended up moving into another Oxford House.

(studio, before relapse)

Upon leaving rehab, my girlfriend took possession of the bulk of my recording studio equipment as payment for the money I owed her – save for my electric guitar, electric bass, my laptop and one speaker. She wouldn’t allow me to enter the house to retrieve my belongings unless I was supervised. It took me four trips to get my things out of the house. I pondered lawyering up to get my music studio back, but didn’t have any money. I had been locked out of my checking account by my bank for missing a loan payment, and was having to use a backup checking account I hadn’t touched in years.

(studio, after relapse)

My father, who’d been so supportive of me in early recovery the first time around, made it a point to showcase his displeasure with me.

He refused to see me for 3 months, and for my 40th birthday he sent me a card with an enclosed letter explaining in detail that he would no longer be giving me anything. His reason was that I was old enough to take care of myself (fair enough), but his real reason (in my opinion) was to twist the knife. I’d rather he simply said because he didn’t want me spending any of his money on drugs or alcohol. Or, he could just as easily have sent a card telling me how glad he was that I was alive on my 40th birthday, and let that be that. I would’ve been happy with that. Instead, he chose to use it as an opportunity to punch me in the gut. I’m still working out those resentments.

I was able to get contract work out of rehab designing Powerpoint slides, and then landed full-time work as a pre-press person for a print shop. Here I was managed by a scatterbrained boss and her 29-year-old lackey office manager. In February of 2014, she and I both determined that I “was not a fit for that job,” and I left with a severance package that allowed me to exist until finding a new full-time job in April of 2014, one I still have today. I have now been employed with this place longer than any other job I’ve had since graduating from college.

I was able to buy all new DJ equipment, all new PA equipment, and started two bands – Roxaboxen and Born Like This. With the money I’ve earned playing DJ gigs since 2013, I’ve been able to pay for and pay off all the gear I purchased. I helped start Raveclean – an event company that for a time threw clean and sober dance events in North Carolina. We’re currently on hiatus, but again – miracles are always possible.

(Born Like This)

(Roxaboxen)

It was at one of the Raveclean events where I met my girlfriend – who is herself a singer, songwriter and pianist. We live in Greensboro with a dog named Boots and a cat named Shadow. It is a better life than I ever could’ve imagined for myself. In my online travels I’ve met a host of wonderful people in the recovery community who’ve strengthened me on my journey. I hope that I’ll know them all for a very long time to come. They will all certainly be welcome wherever I am.

I don’t know what the future holds for me. I know that there will be good times and there will be trouble. I’ll just keep blogging, keep making music, keep doing all the things I need to do to maintain my recovery, and surround myself with people who support my efforts.

Thanks for reading. Be well and take care of one another. We’re all we’ve got.

Read Part Three here:
https://mylaststand.org/2016/10/24/my-story-part-three/

addiction, Adult Child of an Alcoholic, Consequences, Recovery

My Story, Part Three.

(originally posted to Tumblr November 10, 2014)

November 22nd, 2009. I was holed up at what was known as the Larry B. Zieverink Alcoholism Treatment Center (or ATC for short). Larry B. Zieverink Sr. served as a Wake County, NC commissioner from 1980 until 1988. Zieverink, who battled alcoholism for several years, helped to establish the Center, which originally opened in 1977. Almost 10 years after it opened, my mom would receive treatment for her alcoholism.

20 years later, I was there to carry on the fine tradition.

I remember spending Thanksgiving Day in detox, eating pre-processed turkey, something that resembled mashed potatoes and peas out of a shrink-wrapped tray. The company that provided meals to the treatment center was called Canteen, the same company that provided meals to Central Prison. I had no windows, but there was a back room where I could go watch movies on an old TV/VHS combo. The two movies I watched were Apollo 13 and Indiana Jones and The Last Crusade. I was in detox for 5 days. Coming off 3 different GABA receptor agonists simultaneously (Alcohol, GBL, and Klonipin) is no joke.

After detox, I spent 2 weeks in inpatient treatment. Here, we had windows, and for 30 minutes a day could go outside (mostly so people could smoke). I cherished that 30 minutes. I had a counselor named Ed, an older African-American gentleman whose words of advice to me, perpetually, were “don’t worry about it!” I was an anxious mess and hardly slept a wink. I remember also making my 15 minutes worth of phone calls each day. My friends on the outside were all playing the “blame game” and “who gets Jon’s stuff.” It was frustrating to not be able to do anything about it.

Of primary concern were all the difficulties I had created for myself:
1) No job
2) Nowhere to live
3) Almost $25,000 in hospital bills from the overdose in October
4) 2 misdemeanor charges in a different county
5) $1300 I owed the IRS, apropos of nothing (just bad timing)
6) My car was stuck in my friend’s garage, with two bent rims/flat tires on the right hand side of the car. So, no transportation.

All I could think about in treatment was “how am I going to get a job this close to Christmas!? They’ve GOT to let me out of here so I can start looking!” This coming from a guy who only a few days earlier couldn’t even hold a pen. I was not in my right mind. I didn’t even have a home to go back to. I couldn’t live with my g/f (we were in limbo at that point, and she was still drinking/using), nor could I go back to the friend I had been couch-surfing with. My dad certainly wouldn’t have taken me in, and my mom was in Colorado. My last option was an Oxford House. I was terrified of the idea. Is it like jail? How will I pay $100 a week in rent with no job?

I interviewed at two Oxford Houses – one was young guys like myself, mostly opiate addicts, no alcoholics (though I wasn’t strictly an alcoholic either). Felt like a recovery frat house. Bunch of “bro’s.” The other house I interviewed in was all older African American men – all at least 10 years older than me, and all either recovering alcoholics or crack cocaine addicts. I chose the latter. They all seemed way more serious about their recovery, and I knew I could learn a lot from them. A weight had been lifted – I now had a home and a bed. And 30 days to be able to get caught up with my rent.

Next order of business? Get my car on the road again. To do that, I’d have to call a junk yard and get two new rims, and two crappy used tires. But I couldn’t do that until I got to the Oxford House. After two weeks in ATC, I had a little “graduation” ceremony and then was picked up by one of my new housemates, who shuttled me to the house to drop my stuff off, then to my couch-surfing buddy to see the status of my car. I called a junkyard, found some rims and was able to get yet another friend to take me 15 miles out of town to buy the rims, and then to yet another store where I could drop my car off, have the new rims and tires put on. Close to $300, probably my last $300 on the one credit card that I had.

By the time I made it back to my house, it was 7:30pm. I now had a functioning car, my laptop, a home, and an internet connection. I also had a pile of medical bills and credit card statements staring me down. I turned on the TV (I had a TV in my room, with cable – something most addicts just don’t have in early recovery). On TV was some damned diamond commercial, a couple skating around an ice rink with an acoustic cover of “I Got You Babe” playing. All I could think about was my girlfriend, my life, failure, guilt. I cried like a baby. I had never before been so heartbroken. It was a week and a half before Christmas.

And through all of it, I absolutely, positively could NOT take a drink or use a drug – the only coping mechanism I’d had for 14+ years.

The first 30 days had been a “gimme.” I was cut off from the outside world, safe, secure. Now I could make choices. I could drive (though I had hardly any money for gas). If there was a dangerous time for me, this was it.

My job search was turning out to be fruitless. I had to be out of the house from 9-4 every day (house rules) to fill out applications with potential employers. The difficulty/paradox was that all their applications were now online. I could’ve filled them out on my laptop from the house, but had to be driving around to fill out paper applications that were no longer relevant. And, I was wasting precious gas to do it. I ended up borrowing money from my girlfriend against the value of my DJ equipment, so that I could pay rent at the Oxford House and eat in the short term. Though it seemed like a good idea at the time, it was to be my first mistake. From that point forward, she made me keep an online spreadsheet (thanks Google docs) of the remaining money I owed her, down to the penny. My guilty conscience saw it as an amend, but it was to become an albatross around my neck.

I ended up having to go to social services to sign up for food stamps. I was dirt broke and had no real support coming from anywhere, so it was definitely necessary. It was also humbling. As I sat in the waiting area for close to 6 hours – waiting just to *speak* to someone who *might* be able to help me – I became all-too-aware of just how far I’d fallen. When I finally did speak with someone at social services, I was informed it would take another month for me to receive my EBT card. I kept wondering to myself “how in the HELL would someone without the resources I had be able to make it? How could they possibly navigate this?”

Of course, there was the matter of the massive hospital bills as well. Each came under separate cover, and three of them had gone into collections while I was in rehab. The hospital had a section of their website where I could fill out an application for financial assistance – fortunately for me I had a laptop and two decades of experience with the internet. I printed out the forms, filled them out, xeroxed the receipts, and mailed them off. Again, I wondered to myself how anyone without the resources I had could possibly navigate this system. Those in poverty, those without an education, those without access to or an understanding of technology. In the end, the hospital determined that my past earning potential did not entitle me to assistance. But they did defer the debt for 6 months, and told me I could re-apply once that six-month period had expired.

In addition, my friend who had saved my life after the overdose – the one who had introduced me to every drug I had ever done, the one who I had couch-surfed with after leaving my girlfriend – was facing attempted murder (as in, my murder) and drug charges which he was completely innocent of. I spoke to the assistant district attorney and explained the situation to him, and had to be present at his trial to give my account of what had happened, the truth. I would’ve rather spent the rest of my life in jail than see my friend go down for a crime he was innocent of. They gave him 6 months probation, and that was that. There may be an order to the steps in AA (“making amends” is Step 9), but life doesn’t always wait for steps. I had done the right thing, but was emotionally exhausted and still had no job.

Finally, I found a chain pizza delivery service that was taking paper applications. I filled out the application in the store, talked to the manager right there, and my first day on the job was December 22nd. Because I’d be getting tips, I’d have cash in-hand to be able to pay my rent at the house (money orders only, no checks, no cash). The only other job I could’ve done to get cash in-hand that quickly would be as a server in a restaurant, or a drug dealer. And i can assure you I’d have made a *much* better drug dealer.

So another small victory had been won. While delivering pizzas on New Years Eve, I got to witness first-hand what I probably looked like while in active addiction. House parties, college parties, and a hotel party where a guy offered me a joint and his topless girlfriend gave me a $50 tip because she was too high to count the money. True story. Maybe I should’ve said something. Nope. I also watched police chase a drunk driver who was going the wrong way on a major thoroughfare. My re-education had begun.

I was attending outpatient treatment sessions at ATC with a counselor, who periodically would write me recommendation letters to give to my attorney for my 2 misdemeanor charges – a case which would end up being continued close to 12 times in a year and a half. He, like other counselors, had asked me (in regards to my childhood), “so, when your parents divorced and you’d gone through all those things – did either of your parents ever bother to put you in any kind of therapy?” The more I got asked the question, the more resentful I became. I was what they called “dual diagnosis” – meaning, I had clear anxiety and emotional issues which pre-dated my substance abuse by many years, issues that fueled my addictions. Issues which should’ve been dealt with much sooner. I was asked the question at least 4 times, by four different counselors over a 3 year period, and had no better answer to give them. All I felt like doing was smashing both of my parents’ heads into a cinderblock wall.

During my time in outpatient at ATC, I discovered a medication which I’d done research on that I thought might help – an SNRI called Effexor. I had never in my life taken an anti-depressant. But I knew that my anxiety and the symptoms of it were too severe to simply “pray away.” I tried Effexor, and within one week the trembling hands and the butterflies in my stomach which I’d known for most of my life were all but gone. I was now able to read and speak in meetings. I had more confidence now that I was no longer cowering under the weight of anxiety at every turn. And, as a side effect of the Effexor, I began losing weight like crazy.

Of course I was also an active member of AA. I had a sponsor who was exactly what I needed at the time. Kind, intelligent, and very hands-off. I guess he knew me well enough to know that in some regards I was going to keep my own counsel – or that I was just stubborn and would have to learn for myself. He and I worked the steps together, and he even allowed me to help him paint his house unsupervised (which he paid me for). He is probably one of the best friends I’ve ever had, certainly one of the strongest male figures in my life, and without question taught me the skills I would need to save myself from myself. If there is one person I can credit with helping me begin dealing with my resentments toward my parents, it was him.

This was just the first 5 months.

There was one moment in that five months when I seriously contemplated suicide – I had been delivering pizzas during an unusually heavy snowstorm in Raleigh (unusual for Raleigh, anyway), my car was stuck, the person I had delivered to hadn’t tipped. I saw a steep overhang into a ditch. I thought about “gunning it” and making my final curtain call. Life was simply not worth living in that moment. Too many problems, too much pain, so much anger and rage towards so many. So much failure. Before that moment, I had never once ideated the end of my life. For some reason I chose to push my car out of the snow and drive back to the store.

I now had some of my things from my girlfriend’s place in my room at the Oxford House…mainly, my MacPro tower, my CD inkjet printer and my guitars. I began thinking about music, and getting back to DJ-ing and producing. I had all these songs which had been languishing on a hard drive – half-finished shells of ideas, hooks, riffs with no direction. I now had a direction, and a passion. I began working on an entire album, one which would eventually come to be known as “Last Man Standing” – which from beginning to end is about virtually every emotion I experienced in recovery. It would take me another 3 years to put finishing touches on it and release it to the world…you can read about that here.

I also auditioned for a DJ gig, at the encouragement of my housemates. Electronic Dance Music, or EDM for short (what we used to call “house music“ or “rave music” when I was coming up), had finally started to hit the mainstream – and local venues were ready to embrace it. The event was called Revolution, and though it was horribly mismanaged, it ended up being the flagship EDM event in the area, which others would attempt to replicate. On average we had close to 500 attendees anytime we did an event. I had gone from near-death and broke to being resident DJ for what was certainly the biggest regular EDM event I had ever participated in. And I would play every single event stone-cold sober. No alcohol, no drugs. I even had a group of about 8-10 sober regulars who would come support me. My girlfriend had also auditioned as a dancer and stage performer and became one of the regulars. She would go on to become stage manager for the event – mistake number 2 on my part.

In July I re-applied for financial assistance through the hospital after my 6-month deferment of my medical expenses had run out. I received a letter in which the balance of my hospital bill had been reduced to zero. It was a miracle. There is no other way I can characterize it. I remember opening the letter and weeping in my car. One of my difficulties had been surmounted. That August, I finally landed a job in my field and said goodbye to the pizza business. Things were turning around.

Then during one of our Sunday “house meetings” at the Oxford House, two of my housemates (both 50-year-old “grown ass men”) began exchanging words and got into a fistfight. One of them pulled a kitchen knife on the other and began slashing at him. They were promptly ejected from the house and arrested. My safe place was now in jeopardy, so in haste my girlfriend and I decided we might as well try living together again. I loved her so much and wanted to make up for all the pain I had caused her. I clearly thought myself the villain, and happily accepted the challenge. However, I unknowingly brought something with me from the Oxford House that I did not expect.

Bed bugs. If you have never experienced them, you do not want to. Especially not in early recovery.

So from day one, my move back in with my girlfriend was plagued with problems. It would be two months and close to $2000 to take care of the bed bugs. More stress, more money I owed and more charges to go on my “running tab” she was making me keep.

There was one last obstacle to clear: my DUI arrest and possession charge for the GBL from September 2009. The case had been continued over and over again. Then, at 4pm on December 14th, 2010, at the Alamance County Courthouse, my lawyer decided to go ahead with the trial. The Assistant DA was ready to proceed also. I ended up having to take the stand (to my horror). My lawyer coached me on what to say and what not to say. During the middle of my cross-examination, the ADA rolled out a TV and VCR, and played back what the cops saw the day I had been arrested, the video recording from their dash cam. There was the old version of me, from a year and a half ago, staring me squarely in the face. The ADA would rewind and playback certain sections, over and over again. It was torture. I was on my own episode of COPS.

Fortunately, two things were in my favor. First, the police had exaggerated on their report, saying that I was weaving wildly on the road while the videotaped evidence showed nothing of the sort. Second, the blood test found no mind-altering substance in my system, save for trace amounts of THC (the active ingredient in marijuana) which wouldn’t have been smoked that day. GBL – the drug I had actually taken that day – is in and out your liver in minutes, immediately metabolized to GHB which (this is your curious fact for the day) all human beings produce naturally. It’s one of the compounds involved in our sleep cycles and also present in some red wine. So there’s no real way to say whether a person is high on it, or simply has elevated levels. Two huge technicalities, which allowed the judge to utter words I’d been waiting a year and a half to hear:

Not. Fucking. Guilty.

But that’s not the end of the story.

Read part Four Here:
https://mylaststand.org/2016/10/26/my-story-part-four/

Go back and read Part Two Here:
https://mylaststand.org/2016/10/21/my-story-part-two/

addiction, Adult Child of an Alcoholic, Consequences, Recovery

Adult Child.

(originally posted to tumblr Feb 5th, 2014 – revised, edited and re-written)

In addition to being an alcoholic and addict myself, I am also the “adult child of an alcoholic.” So what does that look like? During the early part of my life the only drug I had ever seen with my own two eyes was alcohol. It was mass media that gave me my first inklings of drugs other than alcohol. My parents drank wine occasionally, but I never saw beer or liquor in the house.

As a kid in the mid-1980s, crack cocaine was all over the news, and “just say no” was the catch-phrase of the moment. I can tell you for a fact that my parents had no access to crack cocaine, wouldn’t have known where to buy it, and probably wouldn’t have been able to buy it from a street dealer even if they wanted to.

Of course, crack wasn’t the only drug I’d learned about through the media. The first time I’d heard of LSD was the case of Jeffrey MacDonald, a clean-cut Green Beret and doctor who was convicted in 1979 of killing of his pregnant wife and their two daughters. He himself blamed the killings on Charles Manson-like hippies doped up on LSD. He was first indicted by a North Carolina grand jury in 1975, so the case was all over the local news, and spawned the book “Fatal Vision.”

I didn’t know what LSD looked like, didn’t know what it did, and knew of no one I could buy it from. However, based on what I’d heard from those many news reports, I thought I “knew” two things:
– LSD makes you want to kill people.
– Hippies are dangerous.

That remained my impression for many, many years. In my real-world experience, I have found neither to be remotely true. All of it seemed so far removed from me.

The only “drunk” person I’d ever seen up to that point was Otis of “The Andy Griffith Show.” He seemed silly, clumsy, and I could never understand why he would go to the courthouse and lock himself in jail – all the while the TV sitcom laugh track running in the background. It wasn’t until many years later that I realized he was doing for the sheriff what the sheriff would’ve done anyway: lock him up so he could sleep off the booze.

None of this is reality. But I was about to face reality for the first time.

I had never seen either of my parents drunk until 1986. My mom had gone to a faculty function at the private school where she taught, and my dad and I went to see the movie “Gung Ho” with Michael Keaton. It was a typical mid-1980s movie about American superiority over other world cultures, and this case the Japanese and car manufacturing. We both enjoyed it a lot, and it was during those trips to the movies that I really got to know my dad for the first time. We drove home laughing all the way.

(Side note: it was through watching movies that I was first able to find ways of coping with cravings for alcohol and drugs in early recovery.)

Once we got home, the laughter came to swift end. My mom’s car was parked to the left of the driveway, diagonally and very close to the lone tree in the middle of our front yard. Dad and I looked at one another, and were both concerned (read: terrified). When we walked into the house, I called out “Mom? Mom?” Her response was delayed…”I’m right here.” It was faint, and at first I thought I heard it coming from the living room. So we went into the living room, and she was not there.

“Where are you mom?”

“I’m right here,” her response again.

When Dad and I went upstairs, we saw my mom sitting indian-style on the bedroom floor, with a towel wrapped around her head. “Mom?” I said again. “I’m right here.” She thought that she was sitting in the bathtub taking a bath. She didn’t seem to be aware of where she was. I couldn’t understand the disconnect – did my mom not see me? Her eyes were sometimes closed, sometimes open, but she didn’t really seem to know I was there. It would be many more years before I saw another person who was black-out drunk, and several years after that before I’d find myself black-out drunk.

As with the fights my parents had during my childhood, my parents sat me down in the living room the morning after. My mom told me what had happened, that she’d had a mixed drink for the first time at the faculty party. That drink led to another, and before she knew it…you can probably extrapolate the rest. My guess it that it wasn’t the first time my mom had tasted a mixed drink. In any case, they reassured me that they loved me. This time, however, they promised me “it would never happen again.” Fights between parents were normal, drunkenness was not. As you can probably guess, her promise was broken time and time again.

All of it left me feeling sideways. I was still thinking about the version of my mom I’d seen the night before, thinking about Otis. It scared me to the core, and I remember thinking how wrong the media was in their portrayals of alcohol, drugs, and addiction. For me, this was the beginning of wisdom and betrayal.

For years I struggled with the pain of that moment. For years I imitated the examples I had been shown in both my parents: my mom, the active alcoholic trying to put her life together, slipping, getting back up, slipping; and my dad, the codependent and the rescuer, who also took some of his anger towards my mom out on me. At first, being terrified of alcohol, I was the rescuer – as well as wanting to be rescued myself. Neither of my parents really directed me towards any kind of therapy, so I had no idea that I was falling right into those typical self-destructive patterns. I honestly didn’t trust either of them anyway. They both seemed earth to me.

So once I finally gave in and indulged in my first drunk, I became the epitome of the walking wounded. I surpassed even my mom’s worst days, and over the course of 14 years probably consumed more drugs and alcohol that all the members of my family now living combined. I’m not proud of that. I wish my life could’ve gone any other way than it did. Today, I’m in long-term recovery and my life is better than it has ever been.

After I got sober the first time, my dad asked me, “what could I have done to prevent this from happening?” The simple fact is that an untreated ACOA is a ticking time bomb. Of course, there’s no guarantee that someone will go down that path. But the risk goes up exponentially, and in my case – even after years of fear being drilled into me, years of church, years of attempting to find friends in any social group that didn’t revolve around alcohol or drugs – ultimately I chose that path.

Scare tactics aren’t enough, fear isn’t enough, even love isn’t enough. If your child is the son or daughter of an alcoholic, and there has been trauma in the family, treatment is a necessity. Allow them to go to Alanon meetings, talk with them about their feelings, find a therapist they can talk to. And be active about it – not all therapists work with all kids, and not all support groups work for all people. Help them find the thing that works. Listen, be interested, be engaged – because while they are still young, they can still be reached.

Maybe we didn’t know in the 1980s the full extent of an ACOA’s dilemmas and struggles. But we know today. We have access to the sum total of human knowledge from our smartphones. Alanon meetings, therapists and help are a Google search away. We owe our children – our adult children – our best effort. To do anything less is to risk a life being caught up in the jaws of addiction.

addiction, Consequences, Recovery

High Bottom, Hard Luck, Low Life.

A near death experience will humble you.

I didn’t choose to overdose. I simply ingested the amount of drugs I thought would sufficiently anesthetize me from the emotions I was feeling in the moment.

I spent four days in the hospital. Multiple doctors asked me afterward if I had done it on purpose, if I was having suicidal thoughts. I assured them all I did not, because it was true. I had a chance to bounce back, but I kept on drinking and using as soon as I had been released. I had no respect for the chemicals I was putting in my body. I had no inkling of how close I’d come to death’s door. I didn’t care.

My experience of alcohol, drugs, misuse, abuse, addiction and physical dependence has always revolved around catastrophe and desperation. An innocent good time gone horribly wrong. A party at one person’s house suddenly transformed into a 3-day vacation from life resulting in panic and chaos afterwards. And no matter how bad things got, a complete unwillingness to stop. There were no in-betweens or burning bush experiences for me. I rocked it until the wheels fell off and kept going.

By contrast, sobriety seems to be the new “movement du jour” these days – and I welcome it. What I don’t welcome is the blanket assertion of some within the movement that because they chose to stop (as in, their biology had not yet betrayed them), everyone should be able to do likewise. You are powerful! Simply follow my 5 step plan to a new you!

It’s classic human nature. Experience X was like this for me, therefore it must be like this for everyone else. In the context of recovery, I’ve seen 12-steppers do it to newcomers, saying things like “you may as well just go get drunk right now if you don’t follow this program!” A sort-of twisted reverse psychology wrapped in a backhanded insult that suggests their own way of life is threatened. New school sobriety’s response is just equal and opposite.

And there is no middle ground. You are either utterly desperate and destitute and you better do work (or else), or you’re an appropriately dressed uptown someone who found enlightenment and walked away from “Substance D” cold turkey.

Being of sound mind and body at last, I get it. I feel like the sky is the limit some days and love the life I have today. But I also remember that at one point in time I had become a slave to the brutal changes I’d wrought in my own biology. Addiction is biological. Once your midbrain is hijacked to the point where self-preservation is disregarded, you are no longer in control. You are not powerful. It’s terrifying to me to think of it, and has made me cautious in a way that I’ve never been.

I did not simply wake up one morning and say to my mirror image, “Dear god these bags under my eyes make me look ten years older.” I didn’t roll over in bed and realize I was hungover (again) and say “Goddamn it, I’m late for work. Time for a change!” Being a musician and DJ certainly didn’t help. You’re surrounded constantly by enablers of all kinds.

Some people were able to do that, however – stop themselves before it was too late and right the ship. I hold no resentment toward such people, and wish I could’ve been one of them. In meetings, they are derogatorily referred to as “high-bottom addicts.” A kind of caste system within recovery. The new school sobriety movement adds yet another caste, one that seemingly looks down on anyone who applies the word “recovery” or “sobriety” to themselves – simply because they’d been able to hold onto their dignity and some of their social status after giving up their vices.

We desperately want to keep up appearances in this country. Our clothes must be “fabulous” – not so dressy that we appear uptight (“Today was a jeans and t-shirt day!”), not so casual that we couldn’t run the board meeting. Thanks to the democratization of technology, our selfies can and must be flawless. But not too flawless. Sterile like a pharmaceutical commercial but not so much that you can’t have a slight inkling of hipster chic. I’m edgy, dammit! *Snap!* Lord knows the power of dysfunction and codependence in American families have long lent themselves to secrecy and denial.

But addiction – the kind I dealt with in my own life – is messy. It is ugly and hard to Photoshop away, especially when you pass out drunk standing at a bus stop (this guy). For its part, the recovery community does itself no favors by forcing the “school of hard knocks” approach, an outdated idea of anonymity as social bullwark, and a rejection of 80 years of scientific method. As long as we continue to shoegaze, we’ll continue suffering from terminal uniqueness and miss the world turning.

When I was living in an Oxford House my first few months in recovery, I came home one day and began to pontificate on all my difficulties as newcomers sometimes do. Somewhere in the discussion I referred to myself as a “hard luck case,” which a housemate took issue with. “Jon G,” he said, “you a good dude, and I know that you been through some pretty bad shit from your view. But you ain’t no hard-luck case. I’ve seen hard luck cases, people with nothing, people running in the streets with no clothes and no food. You ain’t no hard-luck case.” So even my experience wasn’t the be-all end-all of rock-bottom. I had unconsciously created a caste for myself, and was judging everyone I thought was beneath me. It was a hard pill to swallow.

Addiction is a broad spectrum, and there is no one-size-fits-all approach. For me, addiction will always be a desperate matter. My behavior took me to extremes that by any metric were beyond the pale. Quantifiably, measurably, there will never be a good justification for me to put drugs and alcohol in my body again. Sure, it’s still technically a “choice” for me to do so – in the way that it’s a “choice” for me to drive my car off a bridge.

Some people had a choice in when they gave up their vices. But having a choice doesn’t mean you have power. True power is knowing your strengths and weaknesses, and then honestly building on that framework. True power is also being humbled enough to understand that judging someone else’s experience through the lens of your own is futile.

addiction, Recovery

Three Years, Revisited.

(originally posted to tumblr July 31, 2016)

So this past Thursday I celebrated 3 years sober. The first time around in recovery I always claimed to be “sober” (I hadn’t taken a drink), but had been dabbling again in weed and psychedelics by the end of year two. It was only a matter of time.

This is 3 very real years for me, completely clean and sober. I’m so grateful to be here. I spent the day at the pool with my girlfriend, her sister and little niece. Then we came home, Netflixed and chilled. I didn’t get sunburnt at the pool (if I was any whiter I’d be transparent), I ate well, laughed and was sober another 24.

But I’m going to tell you, I’m tired. I’m fucking tired.

The events of the last 7 years in recovery are catching up with me. Like a person whose adrenaline has spiked, allowing them to perform a feat of superhuman strength in the moment to save a life. They wake up a few days later to feel sore, beaten – alive, well, but exhausted. I could sleep for a week.

For one, I fired my therapist…she and I were simply not gelling. It was a difficult thing for me to do and put me in a weird headspace, but it needed to be done. I’m trying to work out the anger I have towards my father, accept that there are things I will never hear from him, that maybe he simply isn’t the male figure I need in my life. Maybe I need to find someone to fill that role. Not an easy thing for anyone to come to grips with.

Second, third and fourth, I filed trademark paperwork on the DJ FM name, commissioned a new remix for one of my songs, and booked gigs that could last well through October (if successful). I find myself wondering if I’m not “too old for this shit.” If not too old, then too tired. Too tired to lug my PA system all over creation to various gigs and events. Music has always sustained me emotionally – saved me, many times – but never financially. I’ve come close to breaking even a few times.

I’m at that point again in my music life where I find myself saying, “maybe I should just sell all this gear, recoup and be normal.” LOL, normal. I doubt I’ll ever be normal, and I’m okay with that. I just wonder if I have outlived my artistic usefulness.

Music is not an easy path to walk. There is no clear definition of success save for the individual, how you personally feel about what you’ve accomplished. Sure, if you sell a million albums, then you’re “successful” in the business sense. I just wonder sometimes if my desire to be successful in music was fueled in part by some alcoholic/addict “drug planning.” Ego and ambition run riot through the lens of MDMA and vodka. It scares me to think about it, because I know that I do truly love music.

Maybe all this is absurd – simply how I feel at 2am on a Sunday morning after a day in the sun entertaining a 3-year-old. I don’t have a desire to drink or use. But somehow I need to find the energy to push on with my dreams, while at the same time wondering if the tank has been on empty for awhile and I’m simply running on vapors.

Real talk at 2am, LOL. I am grateful for another day. Time to get these dishes done.

addiction, Consequences, Recovery

Catastrophe.

(originally posted to my old blog, February 2, 2014)

“My life had become a catastrophe. I had no idea how to turn it around. My band had broken up. I had almost lost my family. My whole life had devolved into a disaster. I believe that the police officer who stopped me at three a.m. that morning saved my life.”
– Trey Anastasio, lead singer/guitarist, Phish

Much of what I write here is about my experiences in early recovery from substance abuse, as well as prior to. I think it is crucial that those in early recovery know that no matter how happy or content those with long-term sobriety may appear, we had many difficulties to overcome. Mine had been a slow burn over the course of more than a decade. Once drugs other than alcohol entered the picture, my fate was sealed and my journey to rock bottom was accelerated exponentially.

It came to a head on Tuesday, September 29, 2009.

On the evening of Monday, September 28, I received a very terse email from my boss. Not the usual “hey let’s have lunch and talk” kind of email, but the kind that left you with a sinking feeling in your stomach. Somewhat like Bill Lumberg coming by my desk and saying, “Ummmm, yeaaahhhh…Jon, I’m gonna need to have a little talk with you, mmmmkay?” I knew something bad was in store for me. I had this sinking feeling I was going to be fired, so I packed up my company computer, the books they’d bought for me and some of my paperwork. I put them in my car the night beforehand.

By this point, my anxiety was out of control. I was abusing my Clonipin prescription, in addition to my old standard alcohol and GBL (an analogue of GHB and a depressant, first popularized in the UK – a so-called “legal high”). The script called for me to take two 1mg doses, one in the morning, and one at night. I was easily taking 3-4 a day, and that would eventually go up to 5 a day, in addition to everything else. So as you can imagine, my work performance was “wanting” at best.

Now, let’s talk biology here for a second. That’s three GABA agonists at once: liquor, benzos, and G. What’s GABA, you say? GABA is Gamma-aminobutyric acid, a natural inhibitory neurotransmitter which reduces excessive brain activity and promotes a state of calm. In essence, it assuages some of your anxiety. So a “GABA agonist” is a substance that hijacks your body’s natural process for calming itself – hence, why many people use alcohol in situations that provoke social anxiety.

For a normal person, who doesn’t drink to excess (or at all) and doesn’t abuse other substances, a single dose of Clonipin (even 0.25mg) would probably be more than enough to alleviate some of the day’s stress. The point of taking a prescribed pharmaceutical isn’t to feel “buzzed” – it’s to feel “normal,” like a deep breath on a clear spring day. For someone like me, however, who was drinking a half gallon of vodka every two days and taking in somewhere between 20-30mL of GBL a day (a 1mL dose every hour or so), 0.25mg isn’t even a blip on the radar. Even 5mg wasn’t a blip on the radar for me. My body was simply too numb to feel the effects any more.

The real kicker though, is what happens when you try to *stop* taking all those substances. It’s bad enough when it’s *just* alcohol, or *just* benzos, or *just* GBL/GHB/BD. You become “tolerized”, meaning the receptors in your brain get used to those chemicals pumping through your system. Your body begins to rely on these outside chemicals to function properly. It’s not god punishing you or a failure of your spiritual condition. It’s simply your body doing what it does naturally: evolve and adapt. What’s worse is that if you try to come off any one of these substances without medical supervision, it leaves your central nervous system in a hyper-excitable state, which can ultimately lead to excitotoxicity (your brain cells begin to die of overstimulation). This is the beginning of what is known as Delerium Tremens, or the “DT’s.” And without close medical supervision, you *will* die from it.

I woke up that morning terrified, literally shaking so badly that I could barely put on clothes. By that point in my addiction I was sneaking shots of vodka and G in the morning while my girlfriend was upstairs showering. Ostensibly I was supposed to be making us breakfast (two protein shakes), so I simply added the GBL and vodka to my protein shake. I know, that’s pretty nasty. 1mg Clonipin, followed by shot of vodka and 1.5mL of GBL mixed in a protein shake. Breakfast of champions. The anxiety went away within 3-5 minutes, and I felt that warm, buzzed sensation pass through my body. I was back to my old, indignant, irresponsible and omniscient self – at least for a little while. I got in my car, high as a kite, and drove to work.

In my altered state, I began to formulate all possible end results for what might happen when I got to the office. My pride began to well up within me. I had been with this company for all of 45 days. In the 5 minutes it took me to drive to work I realized something which was, in fact, true: even without all the drugs – which somewhere in the depths of my mind, I knew were bad for me – the experience of working there was just too much. I was both a useless employee, *and* the personalities of the people I was working with clashed.

So I quit. I resigned. It was the only active choice I’d made in months, if not years. I couldn’t handle my direct boss, and was using drugs to drive away the pain. I had taken care of one problem, but not the other.

(Note: Until now, I’ve told everyone the story that I was fired, assuming everyone would think I was too useless to effectively hold a job anyway. In my delusional state I thought it was easier to explain it that way. Everyone expected me to be the “fuck up” by that point.)

As I walked to my car, having returned my computer and reference books, I felt free. Of course, I had more GBL in my car and proceeded to get high, because inside I felt like a failure.

All I had to do then was make it home, a 10 minute trip.

The next two and a half hours were a blur. I recall fleeting moments where I “came to” behind the wheel of the car, driving into oncoming traffic on a small, 2-lane country road. Horns honking at me. I think at one point I even stopped on the side of the road. What possessed me to keep driving – if I wasn’t imagining all this – I have no idea. The next thing I remember, I was in the parking lot of a convenience store in another county, with 3 police cars behind me.

The officers could tell that I was clearly altered on something, but were completely perplexed when they gave me a roadside breathalyzer and I blew a 0.0 – thank god I’d only had *one* shot of vodka that morning. However, I had done poorly on the roadside tests and was clearly out of it. In addition, I had one of my prescription bottles with me in the car as well as the “conical” and transfer pipette I used for the G. They arrested me, then took me to the local hospital where they did a blood test, and finally to jail.

To make matters worse, I was supposed to attend a couples counseling session with my girlfriend that afternoon. A session which I missed, because I was locked up.

For me, this was only the beginning of rock bottom.

It’s almost 5 years later, and here I stand proud. Clear-headed, making more sense than I’ve ever made in my life, humbled by what life has shown me both bad AND good. I’m grateful for this moment.

You see, we all have that chaos, that “catastrophe” in our pasts. As the promises tell us, we will not regret the past nor wish to shut the door on it. I need the experience of my past to help me remember what happens when I go down that road. I need it to keep me humble.

I need it to show myself and others what we can overcome when we make the next sober decision.

My Last Stand.

Tag Archives: rock bottom