ARE YOU ON YOUR OWN TEAM?

A newcomer to Narcotics Anonymous, discouraged with his attempts at trying to get free of his addiction, said to an old-timer, "The NA program just doesn't work for me."

"That's no surprise," said the old-timer. "The program doesn't work for anybody. To get and stay clean, you have to work the program."

It's an action program. The work involved isn't anywhere near as exhausting as chasing and paying for that high, but there is work involved: Not picking up that drug, going to meetings, getting and using a sponsor, learning about the disease of addition, and reprogramming yourself back into being a human being through working the Twelve Steps. There is also getting and using a Higher Power.

Praying by itself simply didn't work for me nor any addict I ever met. As an old-timer years ago put it, "A Higher Power doesn't read want ads, ring doorbells, pay bills, make apologies, loan money, impress judges, or dig ditches. If you ask your HP for help as you do those things, however, you'll get it." 

For years we prayed for a particular person, the son of one of the members of our group, to see the light, put down the drug, get into the program, and live.

It didn't work; He died using.

It shook our faith a bit until an old-timer pointed out, "God can't cure someone who doesn't want the cure. It takes a team to keep you clean: Meetings, other recovering addicts, a sponsor, a program, a Higher Power, and you. If you are not on your own team, there is nothing anyone nor any power can do.

It is an Action, not a Traction, program. Get on your own team and do the work, or hang back and wallow in never ending nightmares.

Do you want to get clean? Stay clean?

Do you want it enough to work for it?

Your choice.

HAD ENOUGH?

I was called into a local hospital by a drug counselor who said that there was an addict there "who asked for help." When I arrived at the counselor's office, he took me upstairs to the patient's room. I sat in a chair and the counselor tore off into a festival of rage at the young man for using and overdosing after he had promised promised! the counselor he would never use again.


The kid was in bed, urinating into a plastic bag, and being fed intravenously because his stomach as well as a few other organs had shut down. He was about twenty years old, skinny, sallow-faced, and patched up here and there with bandages, and could hardly stay awake. High on coke, he had gotten on his Harley, had a losing argument with a truck at an intersection, and had been defibrillated twice in the ambulance on the way to the hospital to keep him alive.


Finally the counselor stopped yelling at the kid, turned to me, and said, "Maybe you can do something with him." Then he stormed out of the room. It was pretty clear by then that the counselor and I had different definitions of "asking for help."


I asked the kid, "Do you think you have a problem with drugs?"


"No," he answered. "My only problem is the three thousand dollars I owe my dealer. Once I have that paid off, I'll be fine." Apparently his dealer was looking for him with a gun.


"Good luck," I said, then left the room.


The counselor wanted to know if that was the extent of the help I could offer. I answered that if that Mack Truck, peeing into a bag, being hit with the paddles twice, and being chased by a man with a gun hadn't convinced him he had a drug problem, what did he expect me to do? The only help I had to offer had and still has a prerequisite: as the venerable AA bumper sticker says: "You Gotta Wanna."


Three days after being released from the hospital, the young man mentioned above died from a drug overdose.


Got a drug problem? That's a very important question to answer correctly. If you have a drug problem, the right answer will open to you worlds of help and recovery, a rebirth into sanity and renewed membership in the human race. You'll go to meetings, work the Steps, get to know and be helped by some of the best people in the world. You'll get to become a human being.


Answer the question incorrectly, you get to go to other meetings but in either jail, insane asylum, or graveyard.


Had enough? Before answering that question, keep in mind that the overwhelming majority of active drug addicts land in either jails, institutions, or graveyards without allowing themselves to realize that their use of drugs was the problem, not the answer.


Have a great day, be good to yourself, and good luck.

WE CAN FIX IT

For two or three years every time I would pass a particular auto repair garage on my way to the Saturday morning Nineish Meeting ("If you show before eleven, you're on time") I would pass their sign that said, "We can fix it."

Depending on where my attitude was, I would either laugh, get angry, or feel bitter as I inventoried all of things going on in my life, and the lives of others, the owners of that establishment could not "fix." Often it would make me think of the origin of the word "fix," which did not have it's modern meaning of "repair."

It the times of ancient Rome, when you were really pissed off at someone, the curse was, "I'll fix you." The "fixing" involved writing down upon a small sheet of lead all of the horrible things one wanted the gods to inflict upon the cursed in the afterlife, folding the lead sheet, and "fixing" it or nailing it, onto the cursed's coffin or tomb after he or she died.

"I fixed her," eventually evolved to become, "I fixed that car." Considering some of the crappy repair jobs I've gotten on cars over the years, however, "fixed " apparently hasn't lost all of its original meaning.

"We can fix it." That sign messed with my mind so many times, I even had my sleuth in the Joe Torio series express frustration over it (in Rope, Paper, Scissors). There, too, was a situation that no one without a time machine could remedy, and there are no time machines in the Joe Torio universe.

Yesterday when I went to the Nineish Group Meeting, I passed the same auto repair garage, and their sign was advertising some deal: oil change, tune up, muffler, or some such, and I realized there was a part of me that missed the original sign. "We can fix it," was a hopeful but hopelessly naïve claim reminiscent of the "addiction cure" commercials I've seen on television over the years.

"We do not believe in the disease concept."

"This is not based on a Twelve Step program"

"And so-and-so cured my addiction!" 

. . . Nah, I don't think so.

Here is what "curing" addiction would mean: It would result in the "former" addict being able to "safely" use drugs(!): Recreational mainlining, smoking, snorting, popping, and chugging. Those who believe that and try it truly get "fixed."

No one can cure addiction, but through working a Twelve Step program of recovery, millions have repaired their lives and helped repair the lives of others.

When I was in aftercare, one of my groupmates said something quite profound: "I hope they never come up with a pill that cures alcoholism. If they ever did, the first thing I'd do is pop one of those pills, head for a bar, and get wasted."

Addiction can be arrested. Even science fiction hasn't come up with even a believable cure. Addiction is like playing chess with a computer set on "easy." The computer set for an easy game isn't very smart, but it will never miss and always take advantage of every one of your blunders. So, be careful out there.

A LIFE SECOND TO NONE

"The journey IS the destination: Don't keep worrying about outcomes.  Worry about the process.  Do your duty and do it well.  The results will take care of themselves."  —M. Sawhney

A fellow once asked me about writing as a career. He said he'd wanted to write ever since he was in school. He'd never really gotten started, however. "I mean, what if I put in all of that work and it never goes anywhere? It's no good. No one wants to publish it? I will have wasted all those years."

I told him that it seemed he didn't really want to write. What he wanted was to become successfully published.

It reminded me of a fellow I once met at an Al-Anon meeting. He told me he had a drinking problem but was attending Al-Anon "So I can get the program without having to stop drinking." It would be funny except for the fellow drinking himself to death, which he did a few short years later. 

The Process: Don't use, go to meetings, get a sponsor, use the telephone, focus on getting through the current twenty-four hours clean.

The Outcome: For you, I don't know, except for you being clean. Everyone I know who's done it, though, eventually calls it "A life second to none."

HELLO, REALITY

Early recovery and, hell, what did I ever think was going to happen? I was in rehab, they had searched me and my duffel bag, confiscated all of my prescription and over-the-counter drugs, and suddenly I was in a very threatening and painful foreign land.

How do you deal with physical pain without medication? How do you deal with painful feelings without a chemical? Taking the medication they prescribed for withdrawal would have been smart, but I had already declared that I didn't have a chemical problem, hence there would be no need for such medication.

One of the drugs I had been on was a tranquilizer to treat anxiety. Withdrawal from that drug was anxiety and paranoia raised to the power of infinity. I was in a building full of drug addicts! My wife and everyone at home were already pissed off at me. Getting my wallet stolen would be the final straw.

That night I put my wallet in my pillow, stuck my hand in the pillow and secured my wallet with a death grip. For some reason I couldn't sleep. Finally I took my beard trimming scissors, cut up all my credit cards, and flushed them down the toilet.

Still couldn't sleep. Perspiration was coming off me in rivers. I couldn't breathe. I couldn't sleep. I spent some time in the patient's lounge where everyone was withstanding the New Year coming in with vegetable platters, Ping-Pong, and ancient disco. It was there that another patient said, "Remember, today is the first day of your nightmare."

There were a number of other persons there who were going through what I was going through. It didn't really get through to me that night. I was still unique, an island of pain unto myself. After drinking a vat of coffee, I stumbled back to my room. I couldn't sleep, so to kill time I read one of the pile of books I had been issued: Alcoholics Anonymous.  AA's Big Book.

I was looking for things to fight about, and I found plenty. One of my former occupations was that of printer, and after the sixth or seventh time flinging that book from my bed against the far wall, I became quite impressed with that volume's binding.

I did learn something, though. I learned that I had a problem with alcohol and other drugs. That word "addict," though, was still poison. I couldn't be a drug addict.

I had one laugh that night. I was back in the patient lounge, sitting there, smoking, sucking down more coffee, shaking, sweating, my head aching. Another patient was telling the story of the Three Little Pigs.

"'Little pig, little pig, let me come in,' said the big bad wolf. 'Not by the hair of my chinny chin-chin,' said the pig. Then the big bad wolf says, 'Whoa, man! A talking pig! I gotta stop smokin' that shit.'"

The next twenty-four hours were worse, and the twenty-four hours after that even worse. With spiders crawling all over the walls, the ceilings oceans of worms, a blinding headache, and I said to someone at the nurse's station, "I feel terrible." A floor counselor asked me if I wanted to talk and what was my name?

I couldn't remember my name. In between hallucinations, tears, pain, and talk that night, I finally had to admit I was an addict. I had been so wrong, put myself through such a nightmare, and felt like such a fool.

Later it was explained to me that humility is you being in touch with reality. Humiliation is reality getting in touch with you.

BALANCING BALANCE

Bruce C. once told me, "NA is not my life. NA gave me back my life." That was right after I had recited about half my inventory of meetings, events, services, and things in the program I was doing and scheduled to do.

The point was in becoming a human being and the message was balance. An old sponsor of mine put it another way: "God didn't put you on this planet to sit in in endless meetings and chant steps and slogans like a robot. The program is medicine for the disease of addiction. It is not a life. Out there somewhere you have a life. Go and find it — but don't forget to take your medicine."

BALANCE ITEMS TO KEEP IN MIND:

Of those who relapse and do stay alive long enough to crawl back into the program, they usually start off by saying, "Well, I stopped going to meetings."

The only way to determine accurately how little of the program and meetings you need to stay clean is to do too little and relapse.

The Twelve Steps are designed to move your mental programming from addict to human mode. If you are still living life with the same attitudes, outlook, relationships, and success you did as an addict, but without the anesthetic, Sponsor + Steps = Balance

Motto of the Moscow Circus School: "Balance is better if the head is full."

ONE MORE GOOD MORNING

Hello all and welcome to another twenty-four hours. Here the sun is shining, the temperature is cool, went to a meeting last night, I exercised this morning, feeling good and I am clean. If I don't pick up a drink or a drug for the next twenty-four hours, I'll have another day clean. So, I am already a miracle and Step Three seems to be working. Absolutely no reason for me to have a crappy day.

A lot of bad stuff going on in the world, though. War, terrorism, hunger, murder, violence, and somewhere on a schoolyard a little kid is talking another little kid into "trying some of this shit."

My disease wants to take on all of this because the more miserable and frustrated I am, the more likely it is that I will use. Not taking the bait, though. At least, not today. There are a great many things I cannot do anything to change. That's the stuff my program tells me I need to accept, acknowledging that acceptance is not approval. Acceptance is recognizing the facts of reality.

One of those facts is that mystery and adventure books don't write themselves and it's time for me to get to work.

Have a great day and remember this sign that appeared on the lawn of a funeral home:

DRIVE CAREFULLY - WE CAN WAIT