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I fill my life with extraordinary & rewarding activities. Each and everyday, I try to bring compassion, gratitude, and service to my fellow humans. In December, I married the love of my life. Just five months ago, I celebrated two years of stone cold clean & mf sober. Less than a month later, I completed the final steps to adopt my daughter. Since she came to our home in May of 2008, I have raised her as my own; on May 7th of this year the court proclaimed it legally so.
......Even after I began treatment and cleaned up in 2007, I never expected to get married, never expected to have any children - these were not things I sought in my life. But one of the true blessings I found through recovery was being able to engage in all possibilities when the moments present themselves. And so I found myself willing to engage the possibility of this beautiful, compassionate, awesome woman as my wife. I was able to do so with an open heart and a clear conscience, filled with the deep and abiding conviction that continuing on my journey of recovery enables me to be an outstanding husband and father; that being an outstanding husband & father requires a deep and abiding commitment from me to ever improve in my own health and rejection of addictive behaviors. Indeed, the very responsibility, accountability, and love of my family cause me enormous motivation in addition to bringing me stalwart support in my daily struggle. These days, the struggle has evolved instead to a glorious, grateful & joyous grasp of life: the happy alongside the sad, the bitter with the sweet, successes as well as setbacks, pleasure alongside pain. Occasionally “struggle days” arise, but a strong foundation of recovery tools -combined with an exceptional support structure of loved ones- allow me to persevere, to overcome, and to embrace that very mundane which is woven inextricably within the truly extraordinary.
......For many years, at least since I was 18, I plunged myself into (and became plagued by) problematic use of drugs and alcohol. When all's said and done, alcohol has always been my true drug of choice, but my recreational experiments and abuses ran the gamut - there was virtually no drug I wouldn't try, haven’t tried. But, by the time I reached the end of the line, it was alcohol alone that had become a desperate, daily, physiological requirement for me; it no longer provided me with any pleasure whatsoever. In those last days, from the time I awoke (often mid-afternoon or evening) I struggled to hold out for as long as I could until I took my first swig to "repair" the awful damage of my hangover from the previous day. Some days I couldn’t hold out for even an hour. Most days I needed to start by forcibly gulping down at least a drink or two to soften the withdrawal symptoms. I would still feel wretched, but a little more manageable. The bulk of my time was spent in deep dread, despair- even mild terror: I felt raw, vulnerable, frayed and almost too emotionally paralyzed to cope. These were the last months of active addiction for me, and even thinking or speaking of it today brings me an irrefutably palpable, visceral revulsion. I knew without question, for most of the last two years, that my addiction had long ceased to be anything over which I might triumph alone. I needed help, enormously needed; yet still I hesitated.
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...MHSA PROP 63
....MY RECOVERY