Back to the Front

All of a sudden I’m excited about life again!

My blog has been negleted because my soul has been neglected. I remember being so incrediby happy to have found my true love. My true love and I were ravished by addiction all over again – AGAIN! I managed to climb my way out of the darkness, but he is trapped in his own version of hell. I am once again free. I so wish that I can promise the world that I will never go back to that living hell again. But I have to be honest. It is a promise I cannot, in good conscience, make.

Anyone who has been there knows this to be true. It takes a miracle to stay clean forever, and this is why we addicts know that only today is promised to us. We only have control over right now.

So in order to make light work of controling my ‘right now’ I once again attempt to write my thoughts down. I know that I have to regain my confidence. I have a lot of work to do, and I am attempting to do this knowing that there is a very good chance that I might never see my true love again. It breaks my heart to leave him behind, I had but two choices: stay with him in the knowledge that death was but one hit away, or leave him there, where he chose to stay, try to live my life clean and sober, and pray that he finds the courage needed to catch up. I had looked death in the eyes one time too many. I had to choose life, before it was too late, and my dad would lose his daughter, my daughters would lose their mom forever, and my brother would lose his sister, never to be seen again… I knew that I was not present as a daughter, mom and sister for a very long time, but I was alive – I might not have been living, but I did exist! There was still hope for me. There is still hope for me.

Coming back home to my weary dad, who had been searching the streets looking for his daugther, praying that I did, in fact, still exist, it dawned on me once again the pain that I had causd to, not only everyone that remained behind, everyone that cared for and loved me, but also the emotional sufferring and pain that I had done to myself, I now had to face all over again. Numbing your pain, your fears, your emotions, your conscience, it doesn’t make it all go away. It just buries everything somewhere deep within. The second your body has run out of drugs, is the second where ALL the emotions, pains, fears and the full force of your conscience comes flooding back. All at once. It hits you. And oh my word! Does it hurt! Add to this the fact that I am now not only letting go of the one thing in my life that remained consistent, that I knew I could turn to, that was reliable, and that had been in my life for years: I am letting go of my drug. Then, at that very same time, I am letting go of my one true love. Not because I don’t love him anymore. Not because we fought. Not for any other reason than the fact that he doesn’t know how to let go of his drug. The pain of using is not worse than the pain of change.  I had hit my rock bottom. He still has further down to go…

When I say that I feel like my body is literally being torn apart, and my heart is being ripped to pieces, it doesn’t come close to what I have been trying to deal with. For the first week, I could hardly get out of bed. I didn’t want to eat. I was just lying in my bed trying to compartmentalise all these feelings and emotions mixed with the heartache and the loneliness. I was just trying to sort out what was going on in my heart and my mind. Trying to understand what had happened to me, and what was happening to me. The day I came home from the streets the last time, was the 21st of April 2015. It is now the 2nd ofJuly 2015. Only now am I feeling comfortable enough to start writing about my feelings. I am still hurting, of course. There is a lot of remorse and guilt going on inside me, too. I know that I have so much to deal with still, and so much to learn too. And of course, I miss that someone special very often. BUT! What is different this time is that I have tools. I have been fortunate enough to have been introduced to a program – a step by step guide – on how to work on my issues on a daily basis, with the help of other recovering addicts, the guidance of my God, and the experience of years of lessons learnt put into literature so that I too can learn from others mistakes and experiences.

There are plenty of us. Addiction does not discriminate. Old, young, black, white, pink, yellow, men, woman, gay, straight – every single type of person you could ever imagine, and their families, has been affected by addiction. People die all the time. And it saddens me when I compare the amount of junkies there are out there on the street – just like I was, just like my love of my life still is – to the amount of people who are willingly fellowshipping, doing whatever they can to stay clean. Its a hundred to one. If not more.  What makes it even worse is the lack of resources for the junkie that wants to get clean. Rehabs cost in excess of R20k per month, what junkie can afford that?  What junkie has medical aid. It is such a mission and rigmorale to get into a state rehab, the junkies just don’t have the time or the inclination to risk time spent on something that might not work, when they need to spend all their time on getting their next fix before they go into withdrawal. Its a sad state of affairs. I am really blessed to have my dad in my life, to help me get through the worst of it, to have a bed I can just colapse into and sleep off the absolute exhaustion from walking, hustling, using and getting more in fast forward mode. Stopping only to sleep a few odd hours at night. Its not an existence I would wish on my worst enemy.

So that leads me back to the front of my blog where I now have some new and fresh insight to the world of death and and learning to fill my life with appreciation for the tiniest of things that I just didn’t have only a few months ago. Here we go again…