I'm just not sure...

So I am grabbing the keys for the first time in several months.  My heart is jabbering away in my chest - worried, excited, nervous...  Just fibrillating away, making me feel out of breath.  Just because I'm asking it to feel.  I was fine a few minutes ago, until I read some of my writing and saw the beauty and compassion and wit and love.  Then I figured I better write again; loosen up a bit.  Get ready for this next stage.

And now I'm fibrillating.

Could be the Ritalin that I've decided to stop.  Funny, forty-two years of unmedicated lunacy and then the diagnosis and subsequent prescription.  I spose I haven't given it a proper chance though:  I've been using consistently.  I thought that perhaps my frequent disappearances were because my mind needed a break from the constant high level thinking I was doing (insert sardonic grin here).  Saw the parallels in ADD symptom and my behaviour and sought to bridge the gaps, synaptic that is, with legal psychoactive medications.

Bullshit.

I like crack.  I like the way it tastes and I like the first few hits.  Period.  No romantic psychobabble or esoteric interpretations.  If I was a dog, I would probably lick my balls too.  I have, since the earliest memories, overdone those things that bring me pleasure.  (interpret how you see fit)  And the natural progression of this behaviour has led me to the street and to the devil's dick. (a slang for a crack pipe)

15 years.  15 fucking years of using.  All the while, perpetuating some kind of weak illusion of being a smart, sensitive Indian man with traditional values and compassion.

How compassionate is it to pawn my son's spiderman fishing rod?

These behaviours do not define me.  I am more than this deluded thinking and acting would have one believe.  But if I keep doing it, keep perpetuating the lies and self destructive act, I am this in toto.

These words today are scattered, jabbering.... a little disconnected.  So am I.  All over the fucking map.  I have been thinking so much of what I should do, what I should have done, could have done.  Thinking all the while of what I could be doing right now that is conducive to my recovery, to my family's and my health.  Doing it a little bit and then jumping off the fucking deep end again.

This is my start.  Again.  A first stab at self awareness and liberating the convoluted thinking and feelings that cram my heart and mind like so many peanut can snakes.

I don't want to hurt the ones I love anymore.  I can see a way out of the misery, pain, fear and suffering.  It starts with honesty.  I will do my best.
Love to all,
even me.
S.

To Wit, to Woo...

My thanks today to Paul Weinhold; his blog answered me a pressing question and also directed me to the narrow gate through which I must pass, by annotating the immortal words of one of the greatest writers in history, Hesiod.

Encouragement from Hesiod

σοὶ δ᾽ ἐγὼ ἐσθλὰ νοέων ἐρέω, μέγα νήπιε Πέρση.
τὴν μέν τοι κακότητα καὶ ἰλαδὸν ἔστιν ἑλέσθαι
ῥηιδίως: λείη μὲν ὁδός, μάλα δ᾽ ἐγγύθι ναίει:
τῆς δ᾽ ἀρετῆς ἱδρῶτα θεοὶ προπάροιθεν ἔθηκαν
ἀθάνατοι: μακρός δὲ καὶ ὄρθιος οἶμος ἐς αὐτὴν
καὶ τρηχύς τὸ πρῶτον: ἐπὴν δ᾽ εἰς ἄκρον ἵκηται,
ῥηιδίη δὴ ἔπειτα πέλει, χαλεπή περ ἐοῦσα.

For your own good, I tell you, Perses, you silly fool,
Badness by the barrel-full one can lay hold of
Easily; the way is smooth and quite close at hand.
But the immortal gods have put sweat before excellence.
The path to that is long and steep
And rough at first, but when one nears the top,
Then it gets easy, though it is still difficult.

Sheldon, you silly fool.  This is beginning to not hold water anymore.  Less a silly fool than a hurtful ass. 

We claim spiritual progress rather than spiritual perfection.  But really, is there anything really other than spiritual perfection?  Our spirits are perfect.  Our bodies' abilities to house them perfectly are less than average. 

Selfishness.  This came rising to the fore again.  I had worked it down till it was barely noticeable, but then, like an old unwelcome friend, the dreadful knock on the door, that at once awakens fear and queasy feelings, but at the same time, a little perverse excitement. 

So many exhort me to make recovery a full time job.  I am beginning to think they are right. 

My brain is bruised today and my face is sore from the oral surgery the other day.  I need to heal.  My spirit is also sore from being misused and maltreated.  Today is one day. But it is one day.  The saint with whom I share my life grows weary of my bullshit.  There was supposed to not be anymore bullshit.  I sincerely thought I was through the woods.  There was my biggest failing.  Never through the woods, only one day reprieve from the insanity of active addiction at a time. 

Fuck me. It is from the self hate from "same ol', same ol'" that the desire to dig in and persevere wanes.  The frustration of failure, the immensity of the wreckage that can form in such short fashion.  These things conspire to keep me lost, blind and broken. 

No, I say.  No.  Today is for me.  Today is for my heart and soul and my children.  Today I live.  Today I will give love to those who stand by me, and love to me too. 

I had attached myself so firmly to a program of recovery and a fellowship, so firmly to a feeling of being done, of being committed to a life of sobriety and health.  Then, I stopped moving forward.  I stopped helping others.  I got busy again, jumped back into work, being a multitasking ADHD doughhead, smooth talker and crazy homelife.  Recovery took a back seat and so did my sobriety.  Asshole selfish druggie jumped back into the front seat, and I never even put up a fight.  I just let him slide in.  And once in, he has a hard time relinquishing the wheel. 

I've taken it back.  Today,  with a vengeance, and with some soft love for my hurting soul and my hurting family.

Today, and God willing every day.

The owl's call.  To wit and to woo.  My friend Paul Weinhold describes the possibilities of what Shakespeare may have meant with the owl's call in Love's Labor Lost here.  I think this is the choice I am faced with - to succumb to my wit, to the place of my ego, where my rat-a-tat-tat smarty pants sense of humour and manipulative wordsmithery live, or to woo; to that place of love, which is sincere, real and borne of love and all things of the heart.  The former is a slippery slope for me, where I may be prone to my own bullshit,  The latter is a part of me that I love.  My soft, chewy centre, and one that is safer for everyone.  To wit, to woo:  If that is a question, then certainly I must to woo. 

Much love.
S.

Day Four: Up the Creek without a paddle or "Can someone bring me some toilet paper please!?"

I have found something in my chest that I forgot existed.  A good heart, strong and true, with a love for life and all that it brings.  So funny all the things that are coming forward now; a never ending barrage of memories, fond and painful, trickling over my mind's eye like the headwaters of the Skeena converging in the verdant meadows of northern BC.  Reminders of all that is true - of all that I believe with every fiber of my being.

And the bullshit, slowly floating to the top, easy  to see, easy to smell and able to be caught with a small butterfly net and filtered away.

Yesterday was a new moon.  My mom used to have the odd new moon ceremony.  This is a good time to begin something; to chase away the clutter of the past and commence anew.  I feel it in my bones.

Addiction and all that it brings has been a part of my life for many, many years.  Even before I was a separate breathing entity, I was part of a duality within my mom's womb, where addiction played a role.

Funny. I always knew it.  That our history - her history, helped to forge this alchemical soup that I had become.

My mom used to tell me stories when I was young...   (I LOVED hearing about myself and our little travails and twisted, happy/sad life stories).  But stories that would shock.  Stories about how I was conceived.  About getting punched in the stomach by a drunk when she was pregnant with me.  About crying herself to sleep with me inside of her.  Stories of violence and fear, pain and sadness - but also of hope and beauty and all things that made this life worth living.

I used to think of this poor 16 year old Indian girl.  It's 1970 and she's in a small redneck forestry and mining town.  She is pregnant by the bad boy son of the strict disciplinarian high school principal - an English principal, no less.

Whew...

What pain, what fear, what stigma.

What stress.

What stress...  Stress.  The emotion that wreaks the most havoc on a teenage girl's endocrine system, and most assuredly on her developing child.  I always wondered what it must have felt like in there.  In the dark, warm, comfort of the womb - a place that is generally considered to be safe and sound - a warm wet reprieve from the ills of the world.  In there, among her pain and fear and sadness and other emotions, as she found her way past parental alcoholism and the other goodies of her teenagedom.

I always knew in my gut that I was not "unscathed" from her travails.  That somehow, in some way, they touched me irrevocably.

Dr. Gabor Mate, Canadian physician and author extraordinaire, has written some books which speak to this truth.  In the Realm of Hungry Ghosts is an amazing book (thanks Dad) that speak about some of the most cutting edge brain research that steps out some of these causal factors.

He is the staff physician at the Portland Hotel in Downtown Van.  The only legal injection site in N. America.  He has a few insights to say the least.

It has been through rifling through his work that I have discovered that I am, in fact, ADHD.  Some of you probably figured this out 20 years ago!  ; )  But mostly that I am not alone in my struggles.  At about 5:59 of the video attached above, he touches on some things that make sense right down to my core.

Something interesting that I have finally realized is about the nature of the stimulant addiction I have maintained for nearly 12 years.

See, I used to work with kids in care; I supervised group homes and staff and some of Alberta's most troubled youth.  All came with their own alphabet soup of diagnoses and prescribed medical reprieve.

I had many kids who were ADHD and who seemed to be unwilling passengers on their brain's joyride with their bodies.  We didn't prescribe them "downers"....  They got ritalin - a psychostimulant.  This stimulant flooded the brain's chemoreceptors with dopamine and norepinephrine, effectively allowing them to "slow down" and react in more normal operating levels.

I've known people who are addicted to stimulants and, when they take them, they fly off the handle.  They turn into cleaning machines or sex machines or whatever.  Not me.  I would turn into a zombie.  I would slow down.  Calm down.  I couldn't handle company or other people.  Always alone, always quiet - no music, no sounds.

I understand now.

Self prescribed medical reprieve from ADHD.  Nice try Dr. Hughes.

How bout some other ways to manage ADHD... Like diet, exercise, high energy/high adrenaline hobbies, proper sleep and nutrition.  And love.  Lots of love - both self and for others.

You know, my recent discoveries about the nature of my addictive self destructive tendencies do not absolve me from my responsibility of dealing with them; managing them - mitigating them.  They do not pass off the blame to my parents and the circumstances of my life.  They bring light to dark shady places.  They shine a penetrating unwavering spotlight on those narrow twisted curvy places in my psyche that threaten to undermine who I am.  They threaten to take an otherwise beautiful person and separate him from love and light.

It's nice to know where the "Crazy" came from.  But it don't change anything.  I still have to deal with it, walk with it, and learn how to keep 'er saddled and between the lines.

No pun intended.

Much love all.
S.