What is the biggest challenge you will face in the next six months?
If you’d have asked me three years ago what my biggest challenge was it would have been living life without cocaine. It wasn’t that I couldn’t picture celebrating without it. It wasn’t that I couldn’t handle the hard times, either. I could not fathom getting through a day without going from one opportunity to use to another. I couldn’t imagine how I would ever function.
I said repeatedly that the girl I was was gone.
I would try. I would fail. I would see a few days through. I would fail. Mostly, though, I told myself that I’d really get my shit together right after I finished this bag. I would start a new life, I believed. I would start over and get my life in order… but always tomorrow.
Tomorrow never went the way I intended.
Until it did.
I tell people quite often that I truthfully don’t know how to quit drugs. I tried to do it a lot of times and I only found success the once. This time. I feel like it was a stroke of luck. I feel like the stars aligned exactly the way they needed to to get me enough time to find the tiniest glimmer of clarity, but I can’t bank on that ever happening again.
I spent six months holding on for dear life. I worked hard and took suggestions for once in my life.
The beginning wasn’t pretty. Staying clean wasn’t easy. I made bad decisions and still lived in a lot of bad habits. I started to get honest. I started to see who it is I want to be. I went through a gauntlet of emotion, very little of it was enjoyable.
I had to consciously remind myself in the face of craving – for any reason – that I used cocaine to cope for a long, long time but that wasn’t my life anymore. At times this was all I could do to get by.
And then one day it wasn’t such a struggle anymore. I could do day to day stuff and not crave. I started to go days without thinking about it.
The new pathway was created and it slowly became the default instead of what I used to do in any given situation.
Coming through it, seeing the concept as it applied to me, continuing to prioritize the things that had proven successful and perseverance paid off. Not only do I get to wake up every morning (so far), I get to live the days I’m given with a clarity of mind I didn’t have before.
This is how it goes. Once it was clear that my relationship had crumbled into ash and there was no question I could no longer sustain living the way I was living, I can’t describe the level of discouragement I felt. I couldn’t imagine being able to find anyone who would take us. I couldn’t imagine it being financially viable. I couldn’t get a single thing to work.
Until it did.
The most beautiful home became available to us. We found more than a rental, we found community.
Every day I heal a little bit, not by moving on but by moving through. I know I can’t shut off my emotions, no matter how overpowering they may be, because when I opt out I pick up. I haven’t mastered welcoming my heartbreak just yet but I’m learning to be more gentle with it. I’m hopeful one day I’ll be able to comfort and soothe the broken person in me without the fight.
I have no illusions that things change overnight because I know quite well they do not. The challenge I’m working on now is just a matter of perspective.
The first of the four agreements is to never take anything personally. I can’t fathom how that would work but I want the freedom it could bring.
It doesn’t matter that no one looks back. It doesn’t matter that I’m not missed, whether they walk away or I do. It doesn’t matter if the love I gave amounted to absolutely nothing whatsoever from fathers to partners.
One day I hope how people feel about me stops informing me on my self worth. I hope one day I intuitively understand that my worth is intrinsic, not dependent.
To be meaningless used to upset my entire world view – if I left nothing of note, what was it for? But what’s the meaning in meaning if all of us are equally inconsequential?
To mean something to a bunch of dust doesn’t really mean so much in the end.
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