Insights and observations
Saturday, August 10, 2019
I hadn't really planned on going to a meeting tonight. Saturdays are usually for getting things done and hanging with the parents. However, a woman from the program texted me to see if I wanted to meet up then go to the DAA meeting. Well, how could I say no? S is in much the same situation as me. She's come back to MF and moved in with her mother to get her shit together. She's got almost two months clean and sober so she's several weeks ahead of me but she's not started writing about anything yet. I'm finding that the writing has become almost my favorite part. When I sit down at night in front of the computer and just put my fingers on the keys, stuff comes out the way it needs to. It's pretty amazing.
Tonight at the meeting someone said something about how they hated the taste of the drugs and alcohol which triggered a memory for me: the way my body would try to reject the pills as I was taking them. Sometimes it was all I could do not to throw up the pills before I'd even managed to get them down my throat. It was almost as if my body knew it was poison and was trying to expel it before it could enter my system. I also have this distinct memory of how nasty the liquid codeine cough medicine tasted. That chemically sweet flavor that's almost grape but not quite. Just thinking of it makes me nauseated.
Another memory that came to mind was from the book What Dreams May Come. In it, a woman has committed suicide after the death of her husband in a car accident. The husband has been happily living in his own version of heaven since he died. He finds out that his wife has killed herself and so goes in search of her. He meets many people along his journey but one in particular sticks out. He meets a woman bound in the fetal position by these big thick chains. At least to her they appear to be chains. To the man, her bonds are nothing more than spider webs. Thin, wispy spider webs that could easily be discarded if only the woman could see but she's so caught up in her own mind and her own ideas that she can't see anything but thick chains. That's how I see myself the last few years. I've been bound up in these thick chains that are actually spider webs and to be free all I had to do was believe that I could be free. I just had to stand up and I was free. It was that leap of faith, though, that was so hard. Once I finally realized it seemed easy but I think it's going to be a conscious decision every day to believe my bonds are nothing. Sometimes they seem so real.