renewal
I want to remember things, so I need to write them down. I am coming back to my journal.
I just finished reading a memoir called "Lucky" by Alice Sebold. It is about her rape at 19 and the aftermath, and the healing that took about ten years of her life. It was a very good memoir, gripping to read, but it made me think about my own story. At 19, I went through rehab, and now I am in the aftermath. I want to be a writer,too, but I have not been inspired by anything in so long. It seems all i read are memoirs and autobiographies. I think I will write a memoir one day.
It is very hard being this young and trying to stay sober. You have few peers, and less aquaintenances. People do not want to be your friend. Older people at AA do not identify with you. They see you as what they wished they could have been, and that haunts them, perhaps, or they see you as an inevitable failure. They don't think you will make it. The truth is, though I am young, but I am no different than them when it comes to this sobriety deal. Every addict who goes through it, fails or succeeds. There is no way to tell who can do it, and who cannot.
I think people my age think I am crazy. They think I am too young, that I need to "live" more and do more things. I hadn't been doing drugs or drinking excessively for very long, surely not long enough to get addicted. How do I know that I am an addict? They don't know, but I do. To figure it out at nineteen, to know that your life will only spiral into oblivion and uselessness if you continue on that path, can't they imagine what horrible things must be in store? That I have already abused enough substances in the course of a year to warrant a place in rehab? I used to think that I was too young. That I needed what other kids must need: experience. Experimentation. Expertise. But in the time I found myself halfway to all of these, I was so lost and far away from myself. I was a body controlled by a brain function, instead of a conscience. Addicts have this addiction brain wave, the thing that makes them need their drugs, that actually allows them to take the time, and deliberation, in considering their ultimate choice: to live or to die. Most people, when confronted with an illness that requires abstinence from a thing, something that makes their illness worse, they say, " Of course," without a second thought. Addicts are people who, when presented with this medical advice, weigh drugs and death against the seemingly difficult prospect of sober life. This delay in decision, this hesitation, kills so many addicts. And it defines us as crazy. It is only when we know how to make the right decision, every single day, to stay sober, when we hesitate less and less as the months go by, when it becomes second naure to choose life over death, that maybe it is the day we can call ourselves "sane."
I just finished reading a memoir called "Lucky" by Alice Sebold. It is about her rape at 19 and the aftermath, and the healing that took about ten years of her life. It was a very good memoir, gripping to read, but it made me think about my own story. At 19, I went through rehab, and now I am in the aftermath. I want to be a writer,too, but I have not been inspired by anything in so long. It seems all i read are memoirs and autobiographies. I think I will write a memoir one day.
It is very hard being this young and trying to stay sober. You have few peers, and less aquaintenances. People do not want to be your friend. Older people at AA do not identify with you. They see you as what they wished they could have been, and that haunts them, perhaps, or they see you as an inevitable failure. They don't think you will make it. The truth is, though I am young, but I am no different than them when it comes to this sobriety deal. Every addict who goes through it, fails or succeeds. There is no way to tell who can do it, and who cannot.
I think people my age think I am crazy. They think I am too young, that I need to "live" more and do more things. I hadn't been doing drugs or drinking excessively for very long, surely not long enough to get addicted. How do I know that I am an addict? They don't know, but I do. To figure it out at nineteen, to know that your life will only spiral into oblivion and uselessness if you continue on that path, can't they imagine what horrible things must be in store? That I have already abused enough substances in the course of a year to warrant a place in rehab? I used to think that I was too young. That I needed what other kids must need: experience. Experimentation. Expertise. But in the time I found myself halfway to all of these, I was so lost and far away from myself. I was a body controlled by a brain function, instead of a conscience. Addicts have this addiction brain wave, the thing that makes them need their drugs, that actually allows them to take the time, and deliberation, in considering their ultimate choice: to live or to die. Most people, when confronted with an illness that requires abstinence from a thing, something that makes their illness worse, they say, " Of course," without a second thought. Addicts are people who, when presented with this medical advice, weigh drugs and death against the seemingly difficult prospect of sober life. This delay in decision, this hesitation, kills so many addicts. And it defines us as crazy. It is only when we know how to make the right decision, every single day, to stay sober, when we hesitate less and less as the months go by, when it becomes second naure to choose life over death, that maybe it is the day we can call ourselves "sane."