I was living in Matthew’s home. Matthew was a guy I met in the rehabilitation program I had been in for twenty-eight days. We weren’t supposed to be dating because the rules of recovery dictate no intimate relationships or major changes for the first year. I was still breaking rules. That much hadn’t changed. I moved in with him and his father in State College, Pennsylvania, after leaving the halfway house in Lancaster and lived in the room that was his sister’s until she moved out when she got married. Matthew and I were dating, if that is what you want to label it. I had no idea what we were doing because I had no idea from day to day or moment to moment what I was doing. What I wanted and who I was were total mysteries to me. I was catapulted into this new life and these new surroundings, and I felt as awkward as a newborn fawn trying out its legs for the first time, all wobbly and unsure. At least a fawn has its mother’s safe underbelly to retreat to when it is unsure. I was here virtually alone.
I swung my feet over the bed and stumbled out toward the hallway. I heard the clanging of coffee mugs in the kitchen to my right, and I knew Matthew and his father were most likely getting ready for work. They had jobs, purpose, and something structured to look forward to. Me, I was twenty-two years old and still floating around in this bubble, this “pink cloud” they call early recovery. I had yet to find a job or purpose or anything other than my daily twelve-step meetings and Oprah to keep me sane.
My days had been pretty boring as I adjusted to living outside the daily grind of confinement. I went from having every hour structured with activities that I had to complete or else, to a freedom that didn’t quite fit yet. I felt incredibly vulnerable and naked all the time. Like a snail slowly poking its head out into the world for the first time, I realized the world was way bigger and scarier than the comfort of my shell, and I quickly retreated back. I would normally just crawl back into bed and pull the sheets over my head like the snail; but unlike me, the snail doesn’t have a horror flick waiting inside its shell. Best to avoid sleep. At least while I was awake I could stop most of the nightmares or quickly disengage them when they flooded my memory like flash photography, quickly blinding me and shifting my balance.
Anyone who tells you early recovery is easy is full of shit. It is the hardest transition and transformation I have ever made in my life. And it never ends. The processing, the talking, the crying, the feeling never stops or I will stop—stop being clean and in recovery, that is. And for me, that would mean to stop living. I was saved somehow from the desire to use and from the survival instinct to run from everything. Now it was my job to maintain the new life that I had been given and to build upon it—to stop running. I felt like that new life was a direct gift from God, and violating that gift by using would be like giving a big ol’ middle finger to my higher power, and I was not willing to do that. Even though I was not sure who my higher power was, I was pretty sure I didn’t want to piss off him or her just yet.
Recovery is the biggest commitment I have ever made. It is a lifelong changing of behavior and a full shift in thinking. I had to become willing to set aside all I ever thought I knew and open my mind to new ideas and approaches and a completely different way of thinking. It required a deep level of humility and willingness to accept that my ideas and my thinking weren’t the best at times. These are tough things for the ego to deal with and let go of. I was more comfortable being right and being stubborn about how right I was. I liked to argue, and I was creative and quick in my intellectual debates. I could make a case for anything and have it come across sounding accurate. I have the gift of bullshit, like most addicts and attorneys. The beauty and sometimes-annoying reality of recovery is that I am not unique in this gift, and, as the old saying goes, “you can’t shit a shitter.” I had to be willing to put that aside and try to be open to accept that I was wrong and then listen to someone else tell me what was right. Well, that was just exhausting. But it was a process, and one with a built-in learning curve. I had a “get-out-of-jail-free card” to make mistakes and have someone guide me through those mistakes and show me how to do it differently the next time.
I finally figured out in rehab that my problems and my pain stemmed from using alcohol and drugs. That was a huge admission for me. I never wanted to look at using as the problem—in my mind, it was the solution. But after I tried to kill myself, it became abundantly clear to me that using would eventually kill me. Then, as the clarity kept coming, it became easier for me to look back on my destructive years and realize that the majority of bad things that happened in my life involved drugs and alcohol in some way. My actions were at the root of all the evil. These revelations began to light up in my head all at once, and it hit me: I am an addict. I made that admission rather quickly in rehab. I realized I was powerless over drinking as I sat thinking about how often I was actually able to drink and not get hammered. I think I counted about five times. I remembered them vividly, because every time I had obsessed over wanting to drink more. By the time rehab came to an end, I’d had so many lightbulb moments that I felt like a Lite-Brite toy, walking around with all my knowledge beaming out of me. I was glowing with new information that began to transform itself into actual strength within me. They say knowledge is power. What a truth!
As I became more knowledgeable about my disease—and I do believe addiction is a disease—I was building my strength and flexing my new muscles. See, once I knew and understood my enemy, it would be much easier to defeat it. Now that I knew my weakness was the disease of addiction, I began to build my army to protect myself against it. My army consisted of twelve-step meetings, the recovery text of my twelve-step fellowship, my connection to a higher power and praying, continual education for my brain, talking to people, exposing my disease, and just being honest with myself and others. These little soldiers helped me one day at a time in the big war against my addiction. And the soldiers began winning. They are armed not with my hands, but with thoughts in my head. But like any war and any fight, my resources become depleted quickly, and I often need a ton of support to keep winning.
Tired and in need of that support, I found it in State College, a little town up on a mountain in Pennsylvania. Until that point, my natural reflex in response to everything challenging in my life was to run, hide, get high, and just escape. This whole idea of facing everything was a new learned behavior, and like any learned behavior, practice would make perfect. But the practice, while exhilarating at times, was also horrifically draining.
State College is home to Pennsylvania State University and not much else. The town thrives on the university, and if you live there you are a student, faculty member, staff, or an unfortunate townie who was born there and somehow ended up never leaving. I joked that State College was a fairy-tale land, a little make-believe oasis way up over a mountain in a valley—“Happy Valley,” to quote the town’s slogan. The town had very little crime, at least little that the residents wanted you to know about, though date rapes and assaults occurred on campus and were underreported or never reported. The town also had very little, if any, homelessness or poverty, unless you counted the small trailer park next to the local Wal-Mart or the one long-haired dude we called the vagrant who wandered the streets. One lady also wandered the streets; we called her the dime lady because she walked around picking up change all over town. The story was that she was very wealthy but chose to live on the streets because of mental health issues. Otherwise, students, professionals, and a bunch of drunks and former drug addicts made up the population of Happy Valley.
There were no drug dealers or prostitutes on the streets at night. I learned later that they hide in the fraternity houses surrounding the campus. After all, there are always drugs to be found; you just have to have the ability to sniff them out like a trained dog. I’d always had that uncanny ability. No matter where I was, I could sniff out a drug user a mile away and would find myself migrating in that direction. It’s a gift, really—just one I no longer have any use for, unless you consider the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA). I would be a great drug enforcement agent because my nose for drugs is ten times better than any trained bloodhound’s. Actually, if the DEA agents were smart, they would recruit at rehabs, because who better to hunt down drug dealers than their best customers? Perhaps ironically, you cannot be in the