Uhmm, k, don’t do drugs, uhmm k, drugs are bad, uhmm k

It’s apparent that we live in a hypocritical culture. Parents tell their kids not to do drugs but most have experimented. Are drug people bad people? I remember getting an article from an addict talking about if drug people were bad people. I never read it. I guess I figured I knew the answer.

Lately, the Olympic swimmer Michael Phelps caused controversy when a picture leaked him smoking from a bong. It became all about is he a bad role model. It didn’t matter that he accomplished an extraordinary Olympic career, he must be told to be perfect or lose millions in dollars advertisement banked on his popularity.

I had to ask myself, why don’t these advertisers do background checks. It seems to me, anyone sudden celebrity is elevated to role model status by bored housewives. These lazy parents don’t want to parent their own kids rather hand them a television and video game, but get pissed when the surrogate substitute for guidance disappoint.

I don’t think I would care what any celebrity does with his or her life when it came to my child. Those people aren’t gods and infallible. We are all human. Not even heroes are heroes. I love Oprah but she is still a person who shits and I hope wipe her ass, and not the afterlife.

I don’t believe drugs are bad. I know some people abuse drugs. I know some people medicate their lives with street drugs. Any thing on this planet can be abused. Some people abuse food. Some people abuse sun tanning.

I think it’s greed that’s bad. I think taking something so simple to one person and exploiting for selfish need. I also don’t believe addiction is a disease. I’m not sick. I’m greedy. I’m often irresponsible.

I found with liquor and sex something made me feel good, validated, and special and I got greedy. I was like a fat kid breaking into Willy Wonka.

Did the greed make me a bad person, yes and no? I didn’t kill or rob for my addiction. I lied and sometimes stole from love ones because of my addiction. I destroyed my reputation with the addiction. It wasn’t the liquor, drug, or sex; it’s what I did with the liquor drugs and sex.

I once say a show about obesity. I couldn’t’ imagine how anyone could let their life and body get do out of control. Yet, as an alcoholic, my addiction wasn’t always so visible. It only brought attention to itself when it got out of control: running down the street naked, skipping work for afternoon sex parties, cheating, passing out in front my yard.

I’ve never been a functional addict. I’m an extremist. I was like what Charlie sheen once described, if I had one cocktail I wake up two weeks later passed out on in a pile of cocaine and a dead hooker

When I turned 30, I got to a point where I didn’t like myself anymore. I wasn’t trustworthy, I felt like I was flunking the same grade and had gotten to big for the desk therefore had to sit on the floor. I felt I was being left behind in my age group.

Yet, it took me another three years to take responsibility for whom and why I was. I got greedy. It was that simple. If my addiction was a person, it would weigh a thousand pounds. Yet, I’m six feet and weigh about 165 pounds.

Sometimes I wish I was really fat. I am big as a house and then go in for a surgery or something, and lose dramatic weight and then go on Oprah. I would be one of those people with the before and after shot. Yet, as a drug addict and former alcoholic I have no pics of what I was like before. I only have the memories and a bunch of people no longer speaking to me.

All addictions are the same, its greed and that’s one of the seven deadly sins that lead to a life of hell on earth.

Heroes, Victims, Villains or Survivors

It is said life begins at conception. I believe life begins at consciousness. That first feeling you get when you realize that you are alive and one day will die. I remember the feeling the day my father died when I was five years old. It was the first time I knew death. I remember seeing him in his casket and thinking damn, it’s just a body.

I became keenly aware of myself the day my father died. It was the first time I knew I was breathing and that if I stopped I would die. I felt my skin. I felt the air. Every single object around me became real. We spend most of our lives walking around in a routine ungrateful daze. The genius of the human body is that everything is automatic. Our hearts pump without the Manuel, blood flow through our veins, our lungs take in the oxygen. Everything on this earth or universe has a purpose. Everything on this planet is energy, is alive but humans as we know it have consciousness. If I kill a bug is that the same as having an abortion? To say the bug’s life is less than our own is like saying the tree life is less than a flower. It all has purpose. I don’t mean to get all Buddhist but there is life and then there is conscious life. Just because we are born human doesn’t mean that all of us are truly aware.

I thought I was going to die a victim. The fear created anger and the hurt child decided to grow up and hurt others, so I evolved into a villain.

A lot of victims become villains: Hitler, Hussein, King Kong. Lol. It’s the hurt child who doesn’t want to be hurt anymore that seek the most power. It’s external power. It’s a way to control the pain. It’s irrational power. It’s schizophrenic. We human beings are equipped with remarkable ways of surviving. The body learns to repair itself. If one is in pain, the body would shut down the nerve endings in order to survive the trauma. I sometimes wonder if the body was designed after the soul. The soul is also capable of repairing itself. Children born in abuse, molestation refigure the world and learn to adapt their journey towards god. I truly believe the human experience is the journey towards God. When the soul experience trauma, begins to questions its existence and purpose, feel as if God is against she or he, it also rebels. I think true evil is a hurt soul, rejected soul, broken soul, when one feels the light has abandoned.

I felt for a long time the light abandoned me. I would awake and all I could feel is darkness. The sun could be shining and all I could feel was darkness. I was hurt so I grew up to hurt and I did it brilliantly cruel. I was the best at hurting myself. I became such a victim and soon the villain no one trusted, not even myself.

What changed?

Intially I rejected the idea of being a survivor. I remember watching those kids from Dafur have to cross the brutal African night for safety. I thought to myself after everything they had experienced how would they ever be sane, happy. They were kids who saw their parents murdred, mothers raped, had been raped, brutalized by a war they would never understand. It wasn’t something they created but was born into. Yet, they had decided not to become victims. The only goal, short-term was to survive. I could only think the human soul, short term always want to survive. Every animal just want to survive. But surviving for the short term can’t be enough. To live a good life one would have to want to survive for the long term.

I believe short term survival begets victim mentality. Getting high or drunk is just a short term victim mentality, it’s surviving to the end of the buzz and then back to reality. I remember when my apartment in Chicago was broken into how it changed how I dealt with people. My short term survival was to protect my life and make sure my belongings were safe. I called the landlord, demanded better security. I never spoke to strangers for a long time. I developed an angry persona. For the short term I needed to survive. Yet, I knew long term survival meant I would have to learn to trust again.

As a child, short term survival was just growing up and getting out of the hell in which I was born. When I finally made it to college and graduated and entered the real world I hadn’t graduated my short term survival, therefore, continued my short term survival mentality. I understand it now. Like a wounded animal after an attack I just needed to lick the wound for now. Like a wounded animal I just needed to get high or drunk for now. The problem, now became long term. The math or logic no longer added up. What changed? I realized I kept the wounds opened. The abuser, the war had come and gone but I was still fighting it in my mind.

The problem I have with the Jesus saved me freaks, is that once the drug saved them. Who in their right mind would just someone so manipulative. It’s drugs one day and then religion the next day as long as he or she is getting their fixed. I more concerned with “how.”
When short term becomes long term life is suffering. When those hide in the dark to escape and the sun rises the next day and they don’t seek the warmth of light soon the sun doesn’t exist anymore. The sun purpose is so that life can grow. Not much survives in the darkness. Without light everything withers and die.

Intially, I rejected the idea of surviving long term. I felt the world needed to know what happened to me. I felt if I forgot that meant it didn’t happened. I wanted my past punished. Ironically, I was my past I wanted myself punished for surviving.

When I looked in the mirror all I saw was the past. I saw my molester when I was naked how sex became so distorted. I saw all the childhood abuse would I cut myself early in the morning. I saw abandonment when I refused to let anyone in my life, quit a job, became homeless. I knew I could survive it short term. I could survive the short term lust which would probably leave me with a long term problem. I could survive the short term driving drunk and high which would leave with a long term record. I could survive short term suciuide which would leave me with having to deal with life after completely giving up—if I could trust myself again after what I did to myself. The worse was always did to me.

I knew to survive long term meant believing in a purpose. When a tree loses a branch in a storm it doesn’t bitch about it for the next hundred years. It grows another branch. It never loses its purpose to provide oxygen.

My purpose is to create. To write these words. To share the story. That’s my purpose. It was my purpose before I knew it was my purpose. Every time I write I get stronger. Every time I share the story I feel love. Silence is darkness. Silence is short term survival. Silence begets victim mentality.

The greater good: love yourself like a child of god, love someone like a child of god, and love something to survive to tell your journey back to god.

I say god not like religion. I say god like the universe. I say god like how one interrupts their meaning.

What changed?

Now I know what changed. As a victim it was always the question of “why?” Why me? Why did it happen? As a victim I thought if I forgave would make me forget. I didn’t want to forget. I needed everyone to know what had happened to me. As a victim I thought if I forgave that would make what happened permissiable. I didn’t want anyone to think I was every okay. Or that I could be every okay. I thought forgiving would make me a victim twice over. I thought pretending would make me a victim twiced over.

What changed is that I stopped asking why, and started asking how? How I could learn to forgive and be okay for real. How I could be a better person. “How” I could learn to heal, trust myself again and truly love. And with “how” came “I can.” “I will.” “I am.”

As a victim it was always “I was.” I don’t’ think short term survival anymore. I survived ocean and quick sands, now I must build.

To be continued “Long term Survivor and learning to be a Hero”

The hunger

When I was eleven years old I read Anne Rice book “Lestat.” I remember being so transfixed with the longing of hunger that I wanted to grow up and be a vampire. I remember when I was fifteen years old sitting at the bus stop late at night hoping a vampire would find me, turn me and I would live forever. I guess there was something in me that need to feed on others. I felt for a long time I was starving but didn’t know for what. I never became a vampire. I did become an addict for pure destruction.

I never understood why it was a curse to live forever. I thought it was selfishly romantic. I guess it would be a curse to always be hungry and never full. It would be a curse to feel out of control with emptiness. It looked pretty from the outside, Vampires always were good-looking but they were vicious animals preying on the unsuspecting. It was not only to live forever but to kill forever even that which you think you might love.

I avoided alcohol until I was 22 years old. I was always afraid of it. I saw what it did to my family. I can’t remember a family gathering where somebody didn’t get drunk and act a fool. I avoided drugs. I knew too many drug addicts growing up. My mother is still a crack addict. My aunt was a heroin addict. I’ve seen crack addiction destroy good people. I thought I knew better. I thought if I avoided cheap crack I would be okay. I thought if I avoided paper bag malt liquor I would be okay. I thought if it came in a designer glass I would be okay.

My first cocktail, harmless. It was a whiskey sour. A sweet gay drink that seemed harmless as pink feathers blown by a child whisper. I still remember vividly the first sip, how it laid down so warm on my tongue like a sunset in Jamaica. I remember how it slithered down my throat, tickling and landing with a burn in my stomach. It was so instant, that inebriated orgasm, what I thought was an insignificant small death. Suddenly all the lights in the club got brighter. The more I sipped, the more I needed. It felt like happiness. That which was the wasteland became spring again. That which I felt was my cold heart became the fire of hell.

I remember the first time I did Meth. I met some guy at a hotel. He said it would make me feel free. He wanted to do some freaky things and felt I was too unattractively inhibited. I remember taking the pipe, inhaled the dancing ghost. He was right. I felt brilliant.

I was bitten. A supernatural beast seduced me in the night and took the blood from my veins. I was no longer human. I had become an addict. First sip, first smoke, I was an addict. Yet, I was an addict before I was an addict. I had been looking for that hunger my entire life and I found it in a liquor bottle and a meth pipe. I found it in demonic spirits and seductive poltergeists.
Like a vampire I quickly realized that I could never be full. Enough was never going to be enough. I was cursed with a hunger that was completely consuming like a black hole. Yes, in the beginning it was all laughs and giggles, dancing on table, driving fast in red cars, sleeping with so many men, and then I looked in the mirror and realized I was starving. My body was quickly wasting away. I had lost all my humanity. I was only the addiction. I was that which can not be spoken but only feared, outlawed, jailed. I only lived to feed it. I no longer cared about family, friends or a job. I no longer cared about myself.

I guess it began with the pain. It was the bullets of the past that knocked holes through my window letting in frigid rain and wind. I guess I needed something to repair or take me away from the damage.

Truth, what most addicts don’t want to speak about is that pain so we share our conquests and failures in dark rooms praying for the Jesus we so easily killed in ourselves.
The pain, the beginning, somebody got hurt, somebody refused to heal, or didn’t know how to heal. The pain, it’s the only word I can use or should I call it the haunting. It’s the past that refuse to die, how the soul overcompensates and I just wanted to feel good, maybe be loved.

The demons told me they loved me. They made me feel good. I just wanted the attention of false promises. I knew it was a lie but the truth hurt more, so l laid with my abuser thinking one day a fist would be a soft kiss.

The pain, self medication, it’s like pouring blood on a knife to stab again, thinking maybe if I get the knife bloody it get tired but the knife always want more blood.

The pain, I was an addict before I knew I was an addict, was starving before I knew I was starving, to feed on the misery that beget the misery.

The conundrum are those who get to live forever in their head, get high and forget the mirror, maybe that’s why vampire can’t se their own reflection, or why addict can’t se their own reflections living in a world they now longer reflect.

The great story about being a Vampire, even if you got seduced by the dark side you can still be human. What’s great about God, there is always a choice. I didn’t create it, it created me, but I accepted it, thinking it might love me, now I know it doesn’t love me, so I reject it. God will not save me, because that’s my choice. I turned my back on god so I can do it again.
I believe God doesn’t rescue. Jesus died on the cross. God let him die. God will let you overdose. God will let you kill yourself.

I know it’s a choice. I didn’t create it, but I accepted it. I can’t cure it but I can control it. I take the responsibility. I’m not powerless. Every temptation I know is a chance for me to be a better person.