If I know you from recovery and you are one of these stringent people who see everything two dimensional and black and white, you may want to skip this article. If you don’t know the story of how and why I abandoned sobriety again, you can always Google “Billy Manas Elephant Journal Mary Oliver,” and the story is right there in all of its nakedness.
If you don’t feel like going through the trouble, I’ll lay it out briefly and succinctly: recovery is not a linear process. I mean, it isn’t for me. If you want to judge that or dispute it, talk to me after you have 11 years of abstinence and I’ll listen. If you have substantially less time, I don’t blame you for your attitude of “it is for me,” because I’m sure I might’ve said the same thing when I had 6 or 7 or 8 years.
And I meant it, too. You have to mean it or you could never reach those double digits. In the 12 step rooms, you’ll hear old timers refer to their lapses in a snide and self deprecating manner—“I needed to do more research…,” but I’d like to contend that research is an excellent way to put it. I needed to see what I was missing. Or remember what I forgot. And yes, for opiate users, particularly those who go out and immediately pick up fentanyl, that can be fatal very quickly. There’s a really good chance my survival instinct would’ve stepped in, a cooler head prevailing so to speak, if my first thought was to reach for a syringe instead of a glass of Merlot on a plane.
So, please, by no means should this essay be looked at as a primer on how to relapse successfully. This should be seen as a confessional that I need to get off my chest and out of my gut. I do not see my return to sobriety as anything less than miraculous. It may seem like I am coming off somewhat cavalier, but it’s quite contrary to that.
Yes, that’s right. Now that I have surpassed an entire week of my new “pill-less” existence, I can come out with it publicly: I’m finished having my “slow motion tantrum.” And aside from the obvious physical side effects, I feel wonderful. I’m once again whistling quietly as I get myself through my workday.
As humorous as it might sound, the whistling at work—or lack of it— was the starting point in my return to a life of sobriety. One day, a few weeks back, it dawned on me that no matter what circumstantial sadnesses I was carrying around at any given time, I could always count on whistling as I watched myself accomplish the tasks needed to arrive at the end of my day a few hundred richer than the day before. Some might refer to that as “baseline happiness.”
Well, substances took that away. With those, I’d feel wonderful for the first hour and then progressively more horrific as the day wore on. Then when I added benzodiazepine to the mix (always only after work), the numbing agent that helped me forget that some other guy was going to have a lot more access to my kids than I ever would, I became a zombie. A brainless zombie at night, but an emotionless one during the day. Physically it was up/down up/down, but mentally and spiritually, flatlined.
I spoke about this in therapy and we both agreed that there is an equilibrium to life that no one can avoid. Close yourself off to pain and you will be closed off to joy. Open yourself to joy and you will have to endure the pain. But seriously, might there be a reason that the poetry all but stopped a year ago? Like, perhaps, I no longer embraced joy or pain? It was a safe hypothesis.
I refuse to judge myself too harshly, but there is a certain amount of courage required to accept the pain and pleasure of living on earth, and I inadvertently became less and less willing to find that courage within myself. It began by blotting out the ho-hummery of getting my ass in gear everyday with a generous portion of adderall and began to seriously progress when I added the blotting out of the come down, too.
There is the famous Shakespearean quote:
“By my troth, I care not; a man can die but once; we owe God a death and let it go which way it will he that dies this year is quit for the next”
Like much of Shakespeare’s writing, there are so many facets to this idea. Of course, we arrive on earth already owing our death, but we also owe a copious amount of pain. No one has ever found a way around it. We may find a way, through drink and substances to sort of push it into a dark corner or sweep it under a rug, but it will still be there.
For those who decide to ignore this, they will be faced with other forms of pain down the road. It might be the humiliation of rehab or incarceration. It might be the sadness of hitting rock bottom.
No matter what it turns out to be, one thing is for sure: IT WILL BE. One of the most extravagant gifts of sobriety is that it gives a person much more control over how and why that pain can be endured. Substance addiction takes all of that control away and makes a person susceptible to having pain imposed upon them at any time.
Endure the pain here and now and you will be out of debt and “quit for the next.” You won’t have it hanging over your head like an impending doom.
I used to feel pretty awful that me, a guy who wrote a book on recovery, used. I’m over all of that. I’m a living, breathing, feeling, emotional human being. I am not made of metal. Yes, right now, I am embracing sobriety and the courage that requires. Last time, I was able to juggle those arrows for 11 years.
This time, I might be riding this horse into the sunset forevermore.
Only time will tell.
Firstly, thank you Billy for always going in vs around. Getting to the heart of the matter vs idling in neutral to avoid the hard stuff. Breathing all of life's air vs only the good inhales. You write so vividly that it paints the real picture vs this fairy tale version of what we intended our lives being. Keep whistling through whatever the day brings & know we're right here for all the highs and lows with ya :)
Thank you for sharing. As someone that just hit 14 years a couple of months ago, I know nothing and always learning more. Keep on keeping on....