I've Already Apologized, It's Time to Forgive

I'll just be straight forward and honest here. I have some really awful experiences with the church. I don't mean "OMG I can't believe the sermon went 15 minutes long today" experiences, I'm talking "well I guess it's time to throw myself into a life void of religious morality, because that clearly did not work out for me" experiences. Now, before I forgive anything I believe it's my right to explain what it was that the church did to me in a time of need, and how it affected my life.

As a 15 year old, about to turn 16, I thought I had my life figured out. I was involved with the church (not even reluctantly!), I had a great girlfriend, and everything seemed to be in perfect order. Then, the night before my 16th birthday, by Grandma passed away. This wasn't the Grandma that you had to visit on holidays while delivering a fake smile in fake appreciation for the lovely off white hat she knitted you, this was the grandma that was there for almost every important moment in my life. She was the grandma that was cooking for every holiday, making sure everything went according to plan in order to provide a memorable experience for the entire family. She was the grandma that had only encouraging things to say, but wasn't afraid to correct you in your missteps. She was more than a grandmother to me, she was a best friend.

In Music, we shared a bond. I can remember playing guitar as she played her favorite old songs. Sure, I wasn't that into playing hymnal versions of Greensleeves, but that wasn't the point. The point was that I shared something with my grandmother that the other grandkids didn't. It was something that gve us a special bond. And before I could even say something worthy of a goodbye, she was taken out of my life by cancer. You'll have to excuse my language, but it was bullshit. It wasn't fair. Why her, out of anyone? Why did the kindest lady I had ever known need to be taken from me when things were just getting good? She would never get to see me perform in any honor bands, she would never get to see my play guitar in my own band, she would never see me graduate; never see me go to college on a music scholarship. It tore me apart.

However, I managed to see my way through that trying time through my relationship with the church. My youth pastor, Tim Olson, helped me find a way to see myself through it. I was getting back on track again. Then my girlfriend of just over a year broke up with me out of the blue. Fantastic. Granted, this is not nearly as large of an issue as my grandmother's passing, but come on. Was it really what I needed right at that moment? I was beginning to lose a good amount of faith. I thought God was supposed to have my back or something. The guy is omnipotent and he can't even intervene in my time of need? He was turning out to be a shitty side-kick. However, I still found a way to lean on my church family to find my way through. I convinced myself that there was more to life than romantic relationships, and I was strong enough to get through this as well.

Then the final straw was broken. The one thing that I couldn't afford to have happen, happened. I remember the day my youth pastor came over to talk to me. I found it odd, because he usually never showed up at my place unannounced, but whatever. He probably just had something to talk about in regards to church, or was simply checking up on me as he did consistently. He sat down and told me that the church was firing him. He would no longer be my youth pastor, and would probably be leaving town soon. I couldn't say anything. Nothing could truly express the rage, hurt, and betrayal that was racing through my veins. My mind was clouded with inexplicable pain. The one thing, the only person that was keeping me in check had just been taken away from me by the same foundation that I had been looking up to in my times of need. I had been stabbed in the back. There was no other way to put it, and I still stand by that opinion today. That same night, I drank for the first time. Why wouldn't I? Why should I have been held accountable to an institution that had just kicked the legs out from under me? How could I stay loyal to an organization that hung me out to dry when I needed it most?

That was my excuse for my alcohol and drug use for the past 3 year or so. It was the churches fault. If they hadn't hurt me in such an extreme manner, I wouldn't have delved into any of it. I was sure of it. Now that I'm clean, I realize that I was simply making excuses for myself. I was acting like a child, and there is no way around it. I spent that phase of my life blaming my own discretions on the church, yet I had failed to realize something. I had friends in my youth group that were just as hurt and betrayed by Tim's firing as I was, but they hadn't taken a nose dive into drug use and drinking. They didn't fall off the bandwagon at the first sign of trouble. I can no longer blame the church for my problems; I need to accept the fact that it was my own damned fault for choosing substance abuse as my fall-back option to faith. It wouldn't have killed me to just take a break from the church to catch my breath, get some thinking done. It's not like my only option was to drown the hurt with synthetic relief.

It was extremely selfish of me to decide that without church, I had no one to be held accountable to. How about my parents? They spent years trying to raise me right only to have me spit in their faces time and time again. How about my siblings? Dylan could have gone his entire life without having to see his older brother sitting in an emergency room with his face busted to hell because he ate too many hallucinogens. My younger sister could have used a respectable role model while her older brother was staying in the house. All she got was an irritable son of a bitch that would hardly look at her or speak with her. It now makes me sick to my stomach to think of what my grandmother would think seeing me live like that. She would be disgusted and appalled. She knew so much better of me, and I didn't have the self-respect to see it in myself.

The church hurt me. It really did. However, it's time for me to man up and do something that I should have done years ago: forgive them. When you think about it, the church is only human. It can't help but make mistakes. Yes, they affected my life in a negative way, but I didn't need to give them the assist and take it as far as I did. I could have done what my friends had done: taken solace in the fact that shit happens, and you need to keep your head up and power through it. It's what makes us stronger. Crumpling into a heap of self pity and denial of responsibility just makes you a child. That's what I have been for the past 2-3 years: a child.

So there it is. I forgive the church, and the people in it who hurt me in such a drastic way. My issues with sobriety were not their fault; it isn't like they were forcing drugs and booze down my throat. However, on second thought, that could be a great way to boost attendance. Nothing gets you in the worshipping mood like half a bottle of jack and some good hash.

Oh Yeah, I Forgot that Going Sober Really Sucks

Somehow in the euphoric state of finally kicking my old habits in the ass, I forgot that going sober is sort of a long term committment that typically isn't a cake walk (random question: what the hell is a cake walk?). As I rack up my days of sobriety, my body reminds me more constantly that it is really upset with my recent decisions. As I lay in bed, my mind racing, my thoughts nearly always focus around getting high. Don't get me wrong, I deeply appreciate and value my previous few weeks being sober. I do. However, sometimes I really, really want to get high.



Like, this high

I realize that this probably sounds discouraging, but it's just the nature of the beast. As much as my new life will open doors that I wouldn't be able to get to while doing drugs, the doors of my recent past are slowly coming off the hinges and deviously inviting me inside. Also, I am not going to be naive and tell myself that someday these temptations will simply drop to the wayside. I know that they won't. If they did, going sober wouldn't be as much of a painstaking ordeal as it is. Just ask anyone you know that has tried to go sober, and they'll finish their bong rip and let you know that I'm right.

My new room mate, Tim, talked to me today on this issue and raised some concerns about my future well being. He claimed that his worries for me come from the fact that although I have gone the past few weeks sober, it probably doesn't hurt that I am no longer in kahoots with my old friends and don't really have the access to drugs that I used to. At first, I wanted to be offended, but then I reminded myself that he was all but 100% correct. Starting a new chapter of my life in a new town filled with people I don't know is definitely helping the sobering up process, and if I'm honest, I honestly don't know what would happen if I were to be placed in a drug filled environment at this present moment. Not that Southern California isn't a drug filled environment, I just haven't gone out of my way to seek out the local drug dealers (and for my safety, I'll probably keep it that way).

What I'm trying to say is that I am reaching the phase in my walk towards sobriety that is filled with a lot of road bumps. I am coming to terms with the fact that I won't be able to stay in this safe haven forever. One day I will need to return to my hometown and face the people who were my greatest enablers (not that I blame them, they didn't exactly force free drugs on me). Will I be ready to face the demons of my past when that day comes? Here's my honest answer: I don't know yet. But somehow I think that accepting that fact is one of the milestones I've been trying to reach.

An Apology

This is an apology. An apology to friends, and to family. This is my apology for the way my priorities have been twisted and contorted to the demands and cravings of my addictions for the past few years. I had one goal in life, and that was the next pursuit to get high. Anything and everything else that stood in the way or had a chance of holding me accountable was swiftly thrown to the wayside. Individuals who I have been friends with for my entire life have hardly seen or heard from me in the past few years, solely due to the fact that they might have had something intelligent to say, something that could have potentially thrown me off of my tunnel-vision pursuit of drugs and alcohol. Some of you simply stopped making any attempts to contact me or help me, and for that I can't even begin to blame you. I was a shell of a person, nothing near the friend that you had previously known for so long. Others of you actually have continued to stay in contact with me, and we have maintained relationships that are held up on your efforts and your efforts alone. I can't take back the way I kicked you to the curb, the way I kept my walls up in order to keep you from seeing who my addictions had made me. What I can do, however, is say that I want you back. I realize now that the attention you were attempting to give me was the attention of a true and sincere friend, rather than the attention I was getting from many of recent friends, which was based solely on finding someone to drag down with them.

This is not to say that I did not make valuable friends during my time doing drugs. However, the sad fact is that I only met these people because of my habits, and built those relationships from there. You guys have been there for me since I can remember. You were there before my first cigarette, before my first drink, and before I started experimenting with drugs. Your love has been unconditional, and in a sick way of thanking you I simply pushed you away because you were a threat to my newly developed habits.

I apologize to you with no agenda of this making everything right, no intentions of my words bringing us together like it once was. I know that your friendship and your trust are privileges that I need to earn after such a long time of taking them for granted. I haven't treated you fairly, I haven't treated you with love, and worst of all I haven't treated you anywhere near as well as you have treated me through this sickening phase.

Finally, I ask of you one thing: forgive me. Give me a chance to prove that I am more than I have made myself out to be. I promise you that beneath the bitter, cold, and self-serving guise I have worn for the past few years there is the David that you knew before. The David that you might have played music with, played baseball with, gone to church with. That David is still here, and he is ashamed of his actions, and humbled by your seemingly endless grace. I love all of you, and hope to eventually make things right.

December 21: Broke My Jaw, but not My Habits

I've had better looks.

All of us have heard that drugs come with consequences. Many of us choose to ignore those consequences, however, because they often lie far in the future and we can totally quit before that happens, right? Well, one of my habits gave me a consequence that I would have never seen coming: a broken jaw. Many of you have heard that this happened to me, some of you know how it happened, and even fewer know the real story. In the spirit of honesty and self-reflection, I am going to detail the entire account to the best of my abilities, and explain the repurcussions of this incident, and the surprising lack of change that followed it.

It was a typical day in the summer of this past year, around early-August. I was hanging out with friends, and a drug got brought into question for consumption: mushrooms. For those of you who aren't familiar with what type of mushrooms I am referring to, and how they would ever cause me to smash my face in, you can read up on them here. I agreed to take a good amount of the mushrooms (about 2-3 times the "recommended" amount, as it turns out), and thought nothing of it having expirimented with them before. 30-45 minutes later I found myself in Drake Park, where we had re-located in the hopes of seeing some "super trippy shit". Well, I did indeed see some "trippy shit", but something felt wrong. The effects of the mushrooms had risen far past the peak that I had felt in earlier experiences. As my visual hallucinations grew more vivid, my mind began to lose touch. My sentences became scrambled, and my body movements became staggered and uncontrollable. I saw shades of pink in the grass, and the trees vibrated as if consumed with microscopic bugs. I had to get out. As I looked to my friends, their faces twisted and contorted. I told them that I needed to sit down somewhere else. We walked downtown and found a bench. I began to wolf down cigarettes in an effort to calm my nerves. It wasn't working.

The last thing I remember happening before "the incident" is looking down at my cigarette and watching it slowly tie itself into a knot. I remember beginning to feel sick, sicker than I had ever felt in my life. Too sick to throw up, too sick to even sit straight. I stood up from the bench and told my friends that I needed to go lie down, that the mushrooms had simply become too much to handle. As I walked away from the bench, I remember the insane sensation of being pulled down to the ground. I resisted, but something overwhelming was coming over my body, making it too heavy to hold up. Everything went black.

I woke up with the sidewalk right in front of my eyes. I felt myself being pulled up as one of my friends covered for me by saying "he forgot his medication" to the small crowd of concerned onlookers. I had blacked out in the middle of walking and smashed my face into the pavement. As soon as I stood up, I felt something warm on my chin, chest, and arms. I was bleeding heavily from the bottom of my chin. I can never begin to describe the amount of panick that went through my mind at that point, and even trying to revisit that thought process makes me shiver. For 10-15 minutes, I was convinced that I was hallucinating. This was just another cruel trick that the mushrooms were playing on me. This couldn't be real. However, as my friends led me to the parking garage I began to understand that this was no mind game. My mouth was full of blood and pain, and my friends looked worried.

They began to tell me that I had just "busted my lip". Nothing was wrong, according to them, and I just needed to be taken to a friends house to get cleaned up. In my state of mind, I didn't know whether to believe them or not. I was on the hallucinogenic drugs, not them. I agreed to stay by the car while they left to discuss what to do with me. I began to ask to be taken to the hospital. I told them that I was hurt, and hurt badly. They refused. They told me that I would get into trouble, that it wouldn't be worth it. After a lengthy argument, I told them that they could simply drop me off in the hospital parking lot. I made this offer because I had begun to understand that their primary concern was for themselves, and not me.

By my best guess, I had broken my jaw at 6-6:30 on a Saturday, and I wasn't taken to the emergency room by my so-called "friends" until 8-8:30. After getting a healthy amount of stitches and an even healthier amount of morphine (lord almighty that shit was a god-send), I was told that I had broken my jaw in 3 different places. I went on to have reconstructive surgery at St. Charles Medical Center, and was released a few days later with my mouth wired shut and my chin and lip in stitches. I spent 5 weeks eating out of a straw (I lost about 30 lbs), and a good few months after that getting intensive dental work done on my wreck of a bottom row of teeth. It is now December, and my jaw is just now getting it's full range of motion back.

As scary and disturbing as this story is, my main beef with myself isn't simply that it happened. I can't go back in time and change it, as much as I wish I could. My anger towards my decision making comes into play 5 days after I broke my jaw and was smoking cigarettes again. It comes a few weeks after I broke my jaw and was smoking weed again. Had I honestly learned nothing? What else needed to happen to me before I realized that my lifestyle choices were leading me astray? This, mind you, isn't even reflection. I was angry with myself right as I was sinking back into these habits in the first place. I didn't get how I could go right back to the lifestyle that had left me battered in such a horrible way.

The reflective revelation comes when I realize that I had really left myself no other option but to go back to my habits after my injury. During the period after my surgery, I often times felt depressed, lonely, and worthless. Not many people feel the shame of being on a liquid diet, having to be nursed to health by your own mother, and knowing that you could have prevented all of it by just saying "no" to a mind altering substance. I was in one of the worst phases in my life, and I had no way out. Except drugs. I swore off the mushrooms, but I still needed relief somehow. In my state of weakness, I hardly find it surprising that I relapsed as soon as I was given a chance. With each bowl, with each line or drink, I felt relief if only for an hour or two. Hell, it was more than I was getting sober.

With this little revelation, I can finally forgive myself for not "waking up" instantly after the incident. I was weak and confused, and turned to the most solid form of relief that I knew at the time. I wish it could have happened differently, that the accident had given me some startling new take on life that caused me to clean up. However, I find solice in the fact that if I had not broken my jaw, I might have never gotten to the point I am at now. The point where I have finally begun the much needed path to sobriety.

December 12, 2011: 13 Days and Counting

My first hope for this blog, more than anything else, is that it can connect with those who are sober or not sober, trying to quit or completely content with their substance of choice. I do not condemn any of these lifestyles because to do so would be out of my place, and I don't have the ability to truly relate to anyone's life but my own.

Other than the goal I just mentioned, this blog has several purposes ranging from self-serving (giving myself concrete milestones of my sobriety), to creative (any chance to practice writing is a chance I should seize). As of now, I live in Lancaster, CA with an old friend of mine. I moved here 13 days ago to hopefully kick-start a revelation of sorts (looks like I might have already). This old friend also happens to be my old youth pastor, and that dynamic alone has led me into conversations that I wasn't quite expecting. I have delved into subjects such as death, self-worth, and (of course) my sobriety. Not exactly what I was expecting within my first two weeks.

The main difference between my life two weeks ago and my current day-to-day routine is sobriety. I am now 13 days sober, and although that doesn't sound like much to the most people, it's the most that I have acheived in a good long time. If I'm honest, I knew this would happen upon moving here for at least a short while (until I could find a reasonable dealer...). What I would have never guessed for myself is this: I am actually enjoying it. I do have urges, those incessant tugs deep in my concious to find some relief from the clarity, but they pass as soon as they arrive. I am starting to have emotions, thoughts, and sensations that I never had in my time abusing substances. I often times feel bored. I realize that this probably sounds like a negative, but the way I see it, the boredom provides a canvas of opportunities waiting to be filled where my habits once resided. I play more guitar, I read more often, and I find myself being forced to come up with something productive to do with my time. After these years of finding instant gratification in my drugs of choice, I am now realizing that there are senses of acheivement and euphoria that can be obtained in a non-synthetic manner. It's as if my mind has been reopened, and I now have the previously rare opportunity to fill it with something other than cheap, fake feelings of grandeur.

I realize that the path I have started on will be difficult, trying, and faltering (well, hopefully not faltering). However, unlike the path of substance abuse, I don't need to repave it every other day with $20-40 (perhaps I'm simply trying to save money. Drugs are freaking spendy). Whenever I have reached a time of revelation, a time of struggle, or a time of acheivement, you can bet that I will document it to the best of my ability on this blog. This way, whenever I feel the urge to find temporary relief through the vices I have taken up in my past, I can read back and see that there is a reason to the madness of kicking a few addictions at the same time. I guess what I'm saying is that I don't really need you to read this (but it would make me feel all giddy inside if you did). Your comments are always welcome from any perspective. You may happen to think that I am simply full of shit, and I can accept that.

Here's to another day of clarity.