Northwoods Recovery: Dope deals to double rainbows

Throughout my active substance using days I stayed busy maintaining the well-earned label “poly-drug abuser;” my drug of choice being subject to personal whim and the vagarities of the Northwoods dope marketplace. On an almost daily basis, I would choose various combinations of available drugs and alcohol, seeking to catch the “perfect high” but instead only finding rank stupefaction.

Yet in all those weeks and months and years of daily drug abuse, I can’t ever recall choosing to give it a break and for once try a sober day instead. Even had I done so, I’m certain I wouldn’t have learned what my first year in Recovery taught me: the perfect high sought after by all addicts is finally achieved — and then merely as a very welcome side effect — only through living out a long stretch of strict sobriety, after suffering the multiple miseries of years spent actively addicted.

It’s what I like to call a Northwoods Recovery. 

That’s not to imply mine or any other Recovery is perfect. All fall short of the perfection only realized in this life at its ending, when we find ourselves rejoining our creator. Recovery is simply the journey chosen to see us through to our common destination, and traveling the high road of sobriety after spending years ineffectively immobilized in daily drug abuse will surely define for us the true meaning of the term “perfect high.” Sober living following the nightmare of addiction wears the double rainbow shining down at us after a long, brutal thunderstorm.   

We recovering addicts were all guilty of the same fallacious notions. We all had found the life we’d been living unsatisfying, and thought we could change that through the use of drugs and/or alcohol; only to eventually realize the cure exacerbated the condition and created a whole new array of problems. But by admitting we were wrong, and understanding we now must abstain from all drugs in order to recover from the results of our detrimental behavior, we’ll find the real satisfaction previously missing in our lives. 

The “perfect high” sought after by drug users is the chimera that consumes every addict attempting to capture it. In reality, seeking a perfect high is seeking personal destruction; very likely it’s the driving force behind death by overdose. 

But a condition close to something like a perfect high is found when we finally have demonstrated that:

We Do Recover.