It's simple to stop. You don't use the next fix. Then you be. And you be. And you be---when every cell in you does not want to be. It is the hardest thing you have every done, are doing and will every do. What you are not feeling, and feeling are two of the reasons 12-step programs work. Simple reasons.
When you stop, the delicate neurochemistry of your brain turns, as a recovering alcoholic woman once told me, into five-week old split pea soup that somebody left on the back of the stove in the middle of August. If you can live with that reeking mess in your brain all by yourself, you're a stronger - or more numbed out - person than I am. And even if you can, you'll slowly discover that what lies under the addiction is worse than rotting soup. Down there, way down there, you'll find - maybe for milliseconds at a time, maybe for endless hours - the place where nothing moves or natters or cries out for comfort, the place no-one can visit, the place into which nothing from outside can bring comfort or surcease.
I will do anything to not have to go into that place - except use. If I don't go into that place, my writing disappears. The March scent of the river near my house disappears. The taste of the first bite of a chile relleno from Tortilleria Reyes, the little Michocan restaurant in the strip mall a few miles from my home; the constant ache in my cells for the Southwest of the early Eighties---all of this is gate gate paragate, gone, gone, gone to the other side. I move through the days as though I'm wrapped in a gauze of stale cotton candy; my nights are dreamless.
So I catch myself in that snare of emailFacebookChatsurfing and I log off. I sit. I am not a seventy-year old woman forced to raise my grand-kids because of a child gone to drugs, or simply gone. I am not a caretaker for a dying partner or parent. I am, as a Chaucer plaque my mother once gave me says, myne owene woman - though I'm not, in the words of the full quote: wel at ease. Myne owene woman wel at ease - my own woman, completely free. I am an addict.
I sit. My first thought, albeit a grudging one, is I am so lucky to be able to do this. My second thought is: what if I go crazy. My third thought is: Remember the shrink who came to our GA meeting and said, "The only time an addict feels normal is when they are using. My fourth and fifth and hundredth thoughts are something like: I can't do this. I need to work on the new book and change the kitty litter and take books back to the library and save the world and e-mail the long-gone lover - all the long-gone lovers. It would really be fun to just jump in the car and drive to the casino. No. Stop. What if I go crazy? Wait, what's that sharp pain in my head, just above my ear and my hands are numb and I bet it's a stroke.
Welcome to my Big Empty. Welcome to the immutable truth that disconnecting from that which disconnects us feels like the ultimate disconnection. Welcome to what happens when you stop talking about change and you take action. Welcome to the empty hallway, the unmarked trail that might lead you to who knows what. Welcome to planting a tree: Until you dig a hole, you plant a tree, you water it and make it survive, you haven't done a thing. You are just talking. -Wangari Muta Maathai, activist and Nobel laureate (b. 1940) Welcome to digging the hole.
Welcome to coming into the Big Empty. Welcome to that which moves me to go to meetings with other addicts and to hear the stories that tell me I am not alone.
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Facebook brought me into contact with a man who lives on ancestral Hopi lands in Northern Arizona. His inter-net server is dial-up. He likes it that way. He wrote a comment on Max Bet on Facebook and Cypher's Steak. After 45 minutes of trying to post it on this blog, he gave up and asked me to post it. my phasebook phase and addiction is over thanks to you. i think that my bottom line is that it's an ego driven distraction from reality or,as you so aptly described it,the three dimensional multi-sensory world. how many "as soon as i finish picking my nose and going to the bathroom, i'll tell you what i'm watching on tv" posts does one need to wade through? and one's personal info is being sucked up by the great internest vacuum and is going god knows where for god knows what purposes. i suspect none of those purposes is good.
Joe found me on Facebook, sent me a message, we shifted to email, I post his words on this blog. Sometimes I think my life is a koan, an oxymoron. Sometimes I suspect all my efforts at control are only illusion.
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Some of you have written to tell me who you are. When I hear from more of you at shebetsherlife@gmail.com, I'll make a patchwork for a new post. Thank you.
