Still sober

When I was a kid I used to think not having parents was the greatest thing. It was like living in ghetto “Neverland Ranch.” It was as if I was Peter Pan, never to grow up. I didn’t know it was a curse.

Yes, my father died with I was five and mother was never there, but in the beginning I flourish in independence and what I thought was freedom that is until system stepped in and the government wasn’t going to just let an eight year old boy run around in the world like a chicken with its head cut-off. I moved from foster to orphanage until finally my mother decided to drop me off at my father’s family. It was such a shock to the system I’ve still haven’t fully recovered.

Anyways, when I finally decided to run away at fifteen years old, all of my friends thought I was so cool because that meant I would have no parents. I guess Peter Pan had become a teenager. I never really understood what they meant by parents. I never had any real Sense of a mother or father, I just had my survival. I made no formal attachments to anything. My trust had already been ruined.

I’ve found this new guy named Wayne Dyer, “the father of motivation.” He has written over thirty books and lives in Maui. For some reason, I felt a connection to him accidentally finding him at four in the morning surfing the internet because I couldn’t sleep. I was so amazed how our stories were so similar. I mean he grew up in the depression, his father abandoned and he was also left with the rage of abandonment. He talked about the day he finally visited his father’s funeral after decades how he stomped on the grave, how he used to have dreams of punishing his father, picking a fight, needing to release that insufferable disappointment and what once felt like a personal attack on his existence.
But suddenly he just let go. He realized I guess that his life, his addiction, his pain was about finally learning to forgive. I say he finally realized his own responsibility. He was no longer Peter Pan. It was no longer cool to have grown up without parents because a major lesson wasn’t transferred that we’re just human.

I remember my mother this morning. I have no idea where she is or if she’s even alive. I haven’t seen her in almost ten years and then I didn’t speak. I used to have a picture of her but I burned them. I think of her this morning because it is as if I’m waiting to hear that she died so that I could finally forgive her or stomp on her grave. It amazes me that after all this time that the hurt child still resides in me. I don’t want to be Peter Pan anymore. I never did. It was a lonely life trying to convince trying to always be so strong when I was just a kid myself. That I wanted my mama and daddy. That I just wanted to feel safe.

I mean to meet Wayne Dyer one day because he is one of the first self-help professionals I feel really understands the real issues I’ve struggled with. God knows I’ve been resolving a lot of problems in my life, especially having to deal with all the decisions I made in my twenties. The healing has not been a fairytale cuz I found just because I stopped drinking didn’t mean my life got better. And then I tried to be slick and go back to drinking thinking I could take up where I left off and that didn’t work because I was already aware. I learned dealing with my mental health was no excuse for past or future behavior and I am mostly accountable. Nothing really changed when I got sober except I started to hear people around. Before when I was a raging addict, I couldn’t see or hear anything around me. I had no idea what others really thought about me or if I even cared. It turned out when I got sober I did care. That was the hardest part for me, accepting that I cared what others thought about me when I knew I’ve done a lot of embarrassing and unexplainable things.

Anyways, I don’t want to ramble on that. I just feel I’m at a point in my life where the mountain cracked and the hills fell down. I want to see what’s on the other side. I understand the law of attraction now.