Shifting Focus

Yesterday a reader posed some interesting and complex questions that I want to take some time to answer. They all really boiled down to his final question, “Shouldn’t you now start to focus on life after meth?”

The short answer to that is yes. Moreover, I should be focusing on life. Period. I have recently questioned whether or not to continue keeping this blog. My purpose in writing this was to record my experience in early recovery. On about my 5th day clean I was hunting around the net for anyone out there sharing their experiences getting off crystal meth. I had done it before but really wanted to hear other reasonable voices talking about it, mostly to remind myself that it was possible. I was disappointed with what I found. Search engines largely netted a few random voices extolling the joy of crystal meth, not the misery of it. Several other sites offered instructions on how to make it. Much like having to become the boyfriend I wanted to have, I had to become the voice I wanted to hear.

In recovery there is a point where one just gets over it; when the phenomena of craving simply disappears. The book Alcoholics Anonymous describes this as, “We are not fighting it, neither are we avoiding temptation. We feel as though we had been placed in a position of neutrality—safe and protected. We have not even sworn off. Instead, the problem has been removed. It does not exist for us. We are neither cocky nor are we afraid. That is how we react so long as we keep in fit spiritual condition.” That is an important proviso. A tricky one, too. If you’ve read much of this you’ve heard me describe 12 step recovery as ’spirituality for complete idiots’ and I stand by that description still. Few people I know in AA or NA, even the ones with sound and happy religious backgrounds, come to God easily or naturally.

This is the point where one might ask if it is useful to remain 100% focused on the problem rather than focusing on the life that recovery has given me; whether focusing on the problem can even really be thought of as recovery. The fact is that, having had the problem removed, in my day to day life I rarely ever think about crystal meth. I live in a small city and I have an extensive use history. I am constantly reminded of ‘the bad old days.’ Three doors down from my office is a house where I used to buy crystal for years; a fact that long prevented me from applying for the job that led me to the wonderful job I have now. I was afraid, early on, that seeing that place, wondering about it’s occupants, might eventually lead me back to that craving I want to avoid. I can hardly go anywhere in town where I haven’t used, bought or sold crystal meth. I regularly run in to people I used to use with, not just the sober ones in AA meetings, but those that are still ‘out there’ using. Even so, and even when I remember the buying, selling and using, I rarely think about it. It just doesn’t exist for me anymore.

When I’m in a room of AA or NA though, particularly when there are new people there just trying to figure out how to get sober, and often in my writing here, I don’t hesitate to share that part of my story. I “neither regret the past, nor wish to shut the door on it” because I believe that my experience can help other people facing the same things I went through. I hope that in all I share I remember to also talk about what happened to get me sober and what my life is like since getting sober. I realize that sometimes I focus more on one or another of those three parts of the story, but I hope that anyone reading or listening to my story will generally get the bigger picture. I hope I don’t sound like I am “100% focused on meth”. If I do I am failing at my mission.

What I don’t want to do here is dwell on anything too far away from the message that I “have recovered from a seemingly hopeless state of mind and body” and that I could hardly have done that on my own. I don’t want to dwell too much on the luxury of the problems I have today. To anyone suffering greatly from addiction that would only seem petty and selfish. I don’t want my story to be too unique because in the end it isn’t. I’ve taken some minor liberties with editing, but only for topic, not for thrust, but one of my favorite passages from one of my favorite books by one of my favorite authors reads:

[E]very year they leaped further ahead, leaving me in the dust with all my doors closed, and each with a new and better deadbolt. . . That’s how [addiction] feels, once you’ve made your nest in it and learned to call it home. Self-pity becomes your oxygen. . . I finally see how our lives align at the core, if not in the sorry details. I still shiver with a kind of astonished delight when a . . . brother or sister tells of that narrow escape from the coffin world of [addiction]. “Yes yes yes, “goes a voice in my head, “it was just like that for me.” When we laugh together then and dance in the giddy circle of freedom, we are children for real at last, because we have finally grown up.
Paul Monette, Becoming a Man; half a life story

My purpose, then, in sharing my experience in active addiction, is not to glorify the past or to dwell in the painful memories it gave me; it is not to remain “100% focused on meth,” but rather to let others know that when I talk about addiction I know what I’m talking about. It is to let anyone looking for a way out that I’ve been where they are. When I talk about my life today, I don’t talk too much about the problems I face now. Those are luxury problems compared to what I had. Dwelling on that would likely drive away anyone looking for a way out of the ’seemingly hopeless state of mind and body’ that I had and that they perhaps have, too. Sharing the message that by taking the steps suggested in 12 step recovery , a God of my own understanding has done for me what I could not do for myself, is part of what I do to maintain my own spiritual fitness and therefor maintain my own sobriety. There is much more I do in my own community and in private to perfect and enlarge that relationship with my Creator, but I have always considered this an important part of what I do, both for myself and, hopefully, for others who may chance upon it.

Either I’ll choose to give up this particular activity or I’ll become better at sharing the message; the message that yes, there is a point where you get over it. Yes, I was addicted, and am an addict in recovery. Yes, I have relapsed. Today, to outsiders at least, it seems like I’ve got my shit together. That my live was once 100% focused on meth, but I have found a new life in recovery, and that sharing what it was like and what happened is as important as sharing about the details of my life after meth.

If I haven’t said so lately, I cannot believe how much better my life has become. I cannot believe how focusing on my recovery has made all sorts of other, unrelated things possible. God is, indeed, doing for me what I could not do for myself and for that I am truly grateful.