Meet Em

My addiction started with alcohol. I could function until I couldn't. I was constantly losing jobs and spiraling in and out of severe depression and mania due to untreated bipolar. I would have moments where I was stable and doing well, and then I would get out of control again. My addiction grew to just about any drug I could get my hands on, but my life was drastically altered when I started using meth. 

I dabbled through the years with religion, church, AA, and a variety of other things that I thought would help. And it helped until it didn't. It didn't really matter what I did or didn't, I was always left in one condition: broken and empty. 

Eventually I went to long term treatment. I learned so much about myself, recovery, and healing. After a year, I graduated the program and almost immediately relapsed. 

I felt like I had lost all of the work I had done over the course of that year. All of my friends were relapsing around me and suddenly I just thought recovery was a fraud, that we were all actually destined to be miserable and wait around for the next one of us to overdose and die. 

In this state of mind I called the dealer and got some heroin, put it in my cup holder and drove around screaming at God. I wanted to know why he made me this way. Why doesn't he just make me better if he has that power? 

In my desperation I googled "churches open on Tuesday". This google search led me to a church in Dallas, TX. It just so happened that church had a funeral not long before my arrival for a fallen police officer. So as I pulled up, with heroin in my front seat, hundreds and hundreds of cop cars were leaving the parking lot. I screamed at God more and secretly hoped an officer would come search my car and take the heroin. 

I finally got the nerve to go inside. I took a long walk through the parking lot, smoking a cigarette and purposely trying to blow the smoke on all of the little Christians carrying their Bibles. Once inside I walked up to the first person I saw with a lanyard and demanded a miracle. 

A group of people at the church encouraged me to attend their recovery program on Monday nights. And I did. 

I didn't stay sober, but I kept going back. And I learned about hope and peace in a different way. I was finally able to hear things that had been told to me a million times before. There is hope, there is freedom. I just had to stop fighting the source it comes from. 

Since then, things have changed. Not only am I able to keep a job and not end up in the psych ward, I'm also able to love people, endure through hard days, enjoy good days, and no matter what comes my way, make a choice to not put a single substance in my body, because I will be okay. 

I believe all of us, addicts or not, are looking for the same thing: peace. We're all empty and broken, searching for something to fill that void, whether that be drugs or not. I've found that peace, and I want nothing more then for everyone else to find it too. 

Life isn't perfect, but it's a hell of a lot better. If you're stuck in a rut, reach out, there is hope. There is a way to peace. 

Resources: 

Re:generation Recovery http://www.watermark.org/dallas/ministries/regeneration-recovery

Alcoholics Anonymous https://www.aa.org/pages/en_US/find-local-aa

Windhaven Sober Living https://www.windhavenhouse.com

Windhaven Counseling Center http://windhavencounseling.com