Northwoods Recovery: Looking back

Looking back now, it seems almost funny; I had not the beginning of a clue what I would be getting myself into. At the time I was scrambling merely to get out, whatever it might take. Finally admitting “I’m a drug addict,” finally seeing that all my misery was caused by my compulsive drug use, came with an obligation to do something about it, and to carry on as before was obviously not a corrective option. The situation demanded drastic change, and suddenly ending my nonstop consumption of booze and dope sounded drastic enough. 

Make no mistake; clearing the high hurdle of chemical dependence seems at first an impossible task, and only later on did I see the attempt result in a condition — sobriety —  that achieved the desired results. But that merely set the stage for another unanticipated turnaround; recovering the life track I was meant to follow before addiction intervened. Overcoming the challenges involved in doing that while shedding all of the encompassing effects of drug addiction requires unending mental, emotional, and spiritual reconciliation of a bewildering array of contradictions and outright paradoxes. 

Like other recovering addicts, I dealt with all this while living a totally unfamiliar existence in a most humbling way; humbling because it was now perfectly clear my decision-making process was deeply flawed, and so submission to the directions from others I’d previously spurned was a basic necessity. Looked at in a studied spiritual sense, making recovery my new way of living is comparable to an atheist taking holy orders after an extended crime spree. 

Jumping from the frenetic chaos of active addiction to the stark simplicity of strict sobriety is nothing short of a giant leap of faith by those who’d lost theirs through years of soul-killing drug abuse. From there the contradictions become only more complicated; outwardly living sober and drug-free, but always locked into spiritual detox, inwardly grappling with the drug addiction one can only pray will remain in remission tomorrow. 

In my bad old days I could never begin to imagine a life without using drugs, but even if I’d tried, there is no way I could have foreseen that one day I’d find myself living in this extraordinary quantum leap, but doing so in the most ordinary way; clean, sober, and grateful to only be one more of our many Northwoods neighbors who from personal experience can testify  

We do recover.