Lights in the Dark

“It is no teaching and no instruction that I give you. On what basis should I presume to teach you? I give you news of the way of this man, but not of your own way” - CG Jung

Allow me to begin by stating that the drugs of 2024 are not the drugs of 2008. The main reason being that fentanyl was never a concern back then. In fact, fentanyl was next-to-impossible to find even if you were looking for it, as it was largely available only in hospitals. 

Sadly, this is no longer the case. It seems to be found in just about everything on the streets these days, even if you’re not looking for it. The life of an addict was a miserable one back then, and that hasn’t changed. The only difference is that the crash to the bottom strikes me as much, much shorter than it used to be. If you require further proof, look no further than your closest homeless encampment, and if you live in a major city, like I do, it shouldn’t be too hard to find one. The only thing resembling a silver lining in all of this misery is that the youth of today see addiction and all of its accompanying horror laid out right in front of them. It no longer hides behind a glamorous facade like it did when I was a teenager.  

It can’t.

While it ultimately led me where I needed to go, it should go without saying that I would recommend it to no one. And if you’re reading this now, odds are that if you’re not already living a meaningful life of some sort, you’re well on your way to getting there.

Now, with that out of the way, let’s continue.

The year was 1997. I think it was late spring, maybe early summer. I was thirteen years old and sitting in my friend’s basement while we listened to The Doors. Pink Floyd may have been in the rotation too, but I definitely remember “Riders on the Storm” playing that day. We had an intention that afternoon, and the intention was to get stoned. I remember I’d come by his house a week or so prior with a bag of some brown dirt weed, with a poison sticker slapped on the outside of it. It was something I’d bought from some older kids at the mall. We smoked it, he said it wasn’t great (I didn’t know any better and thought that I was getting high), and he told me that we’d smoke “the good shit” soon. 

And “the good shit” was right here in front of us.

We threw together a makeshift pipe using an empty can of coke (would not recommend), he pulled out a bag of weed and we got down to business. I lost track of how many times we passed that thing back and forth, but I distinctly recall sitting there and sort of coming to, realizing that I’d been zoning out to the spinning digital display on his home stereo system. 

And that’s when it hit me. 

Wow, so this is what it feels like to be high!

And this is how my spiritual path begins. 

Now, let’s fast-forward to my early twenties. I don’t like smoking weed anymore. At this point all it does is make me entirely too analytical, paranoid, and self-deprecating. 

What I do like to do is drink.

 A lot. 

And it just so happens that whenever I drink I become very fond of the way cocaine smells.

I also dig the hell out of ecstacy. The blue astronauts were a personal favorite. This is well before the days of molly, kids. 

I would add meth to this list but a rookie mistake with the stuff cost me a week's worth of sleep and a trip to the hospital with meth-induced psychosis, and while the experience itself was not exactly something I would describe as pleasant, I am ultimately grateful that it steered me away from becoming too fond of the stuff. 

So while in the midst of destroying my life in this fashion, I come down with a pretty nasty case of the flu. And while this happened nearly twenty years ago, I can still remember it clearly. I was lying on the couch watching Superbad when I experienced what I can only describe as an escape hatch opening, followed with not only a moment of clarity, but a sense that I could really stop doing this to myself right this instant.  I decided right then and there that I was done with alcohol. I didn’t factor in the drugs, since, at the time anyway, I figured that drinking always preceded the drugs.

And so it went. 

I went back to work after my bout with the flu, announced to anyone who would listen that I’d quit drinking, and I figured that was the end of that. 

Well, you see, that was before I’d ever really touched painkillers.

 A guy I worked with offered to sell me some Norcos. He told me it was a lot like having an alcoholic buzz, just with more clarity. Since the blackouts were what made my drinking especially hazardous, I figured I was safe with these and I went ahead and bought seven. I went home that night, popped a few pills and sat down in my chair to watch reruns of “In Living Color” on a shitty little 27-inch TV I had at the time. 

Then it hit me.

I felt good. I felt relaxed. I felt euphoric.

I once again felt the glow that alcohol had afforded me, but without the antisocial behavior, the slurring or the blackouts. 

While in my deluded state I thought I’d found the holy grail, what I’d actually done is chuted down another rung in Dante’s Inferno. 

Fast forward a few months and I'd gone from swallowing Norcos to snorting Oxycontin. And when I couldn’t get my hands on Oxycontin, then it was black tar heroin. I preferred Oxycontin to heroin and people tell me that’s only because I’d never tried shooting up heroin. This is because at that time there were a bunch of news stories going around involving IV drug users dying from pretty nasty bacterial infections, and so what little self-preservation I had steered me clear of that method of administration, and I’ve a sneaking suspicion that if I’d made the choice to go ahead and stick the needle in, there’s a good chance I wouldn’t even be sitting here writing this.

But, needle or no needle, that didn’t stop me from getting hooked. 

The tumble into opiates happened at a breakneck speed, and it was only once I’d already been using daily for months that I stopped to ask myself, 

Wait, when was the last day I didn’t get high?

This question had never occurred to me until the one day I couldn’t find anything, nor did I have the money to make anything happen.

Panic washed over me, and withdrawal came right on its heels.

I’d never had the balls to go out and steal or rob, and so I dealt with the cold sweats, the nausea, and all the other nasty withdrawal symptoms the best way I could, feeling sorry for myself on a couch and staring out the window at a bright summer day that I was far too miserable to enjoy, all the while knowing that I had no one to blame for this but myself.

While this was a miserable experience, it did pass. And to my credit, I never allowed myself to become fully strung out again. But, needless to say, whatever ego inflation I’d experienced when I’d seemingly conquered alcohol was entirely destroyed by this encounter with dope sickness, and so what did I do? I picked the bottle back up. 

This is also when I had my first brush with panic disorder, but I’ll save that for another story.

The next couple of years were spent in a foggy sort of purgatory. I still did drugs. I still drank. And despite the fact I never got back into daily opiate use, I still did them often enough to remain in a constant state of feeling mildly like shit.

Another thing I will add is that because I feared committing felonies, I still held down a job, even if it was by the skin of my teeth. And during this rather depressing period, I’d managed to go from a shitty job to a slightly-less shitty job, which allowed me to convince myself that I was still doing reasonably okay, even if things remained mildly shitty.

Then one day I was at work, and a friend that had recently sobered up and was attending AA sent me a passage from the big book of Alcoholics Anonymous,

‘He is a real Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. He is seldom mildly intoxicated. He is always more or less insanely drunk. His disposition while drinking resembles his normal nature but little. He may be one of the finest fellows in the world. Yet let him drink for a day, and he frequently becomes disgustingly, and even dangerously anti-social. He has a positive genius for getting tight at exactly the wrong moment, particularly when some important decision must be made or engagement kept.’

This felt like a personal attack, and while I bristled a little, I envied this friend of mine that had seemingly attained something that had eluded me for years. And that was freedom. 

And freedom was exactly what I had always been looking for with the drugs and the alcohol, and it dawned on me at this moment that none of these things could ever provide that for me. 

It just so happened that during this low point in my life I’d made an acquaintance that made me look like a choir boy in comparison.

This guy was a loose cannon, someone I’d have never associated with if it weren’t for his seemingly endless supply of pills and (as far as drug addicts go, anyway) generous nature. I will detail one example of the kind of guy we’re talking about, here. One time we’re at his apartment, and out of nowhere he whips out a pistol pops off some rounds into his neighbor’s (thankfully unoccupied) van before proceeding to offer me the gun, asking me if I’d like to give it a go.

Needless to say, I politely declined, grabbed the pills I came for and promptly went home.

Then, around the same time, in January 2009, my dad proposed a challenge of sorts. He suggested that he and I stop drinking for a month. Just for the month of February. This sounded doable, and I needed a break. So I agreed to this challenge. 

The acquaintance I mentioned earlier, the one with the pills, it wasn’t long until he got into some serious trouble, and part of his court agreement was that he had to go to 12-step meetings.

I found it strange that both he and the friend I mentioned earlier were now attending these meetings. And way they would describe them to me sparked a mild interest.  I’d been to a couple of meetings when I was in highschool. It wasn’t my idea (I got busted smoking weed during lunch), and I was far too young to appreciate the need (being told you’re going to either get clean or die by a bunch of old crack smokers when all you do is smoke weed felt pretty drastic) I’d have for them later, but the seed was nonetheless planted.

I’d decided to stop drinking before February, and actually remember that I was watching Obama’s first inauguration with a massive hangover when I decided I was going to stop drinking right then and there.

And a couple days later I attended my first (willing) meeting.

I can still remember it. I was high as a kite on pills, but I genuinely enjoyed being there. There was a glow about these people. They had something that I seemingly lacked, and had lacked for as long as I could remember. And, if we’re being totally honest here, there were also a lot of women. 

I remember asking some older guy for advice, and what he told me was, 

“Don’t drink and go to meetings.”

Now, in my guilt-ridden mind I was sure he could tell I was loaded. So I just nodded along and said thank you. In reality I think he meant to go to meetings and don’t drink in-between. I actually enjoyed this meeting so much that I stuck around for an hour waiting for the next one to start. This particular church was basically a recovery mecca, hosting various 12-step meetings all throughout the day, and I imagine it still does.

When the next meeting started filling up, I remember lying to an old timer (someone with a lot of sobriety) and telling him that I was in withdrawal and felt like shit. He told me something like, 

“You’re going to feel like shit, man. Just push through it.”

It was during this meeting that I witnessed a woman collect a nine-month key tag. Now, from my vantage point this woman seemed cured, because I  couldn’t even manage to scrape together two weeks. 

Until I did.

I kept putting one foot in front of the other until I had a little over a year of sobriety. And then I did a whole bunch of incredibly self-destructive things that more or less guaranteed I’d get loaded again, and lo and behold, get loaded again I did. 

I repeated this cycle a couple more times. And then in 2012 it actually stuck. 

I attribute this to two things. 

One, the great people I met along the way. It’s a lot harder to get loaded when you think of all the people you’re going to disappoint by doing so.

Two, actually working through and completing the 12 steps. 

There was only one thing I never paid much mind to up to that point, and that was meditation. I couldn’t “figure it out” and didn’t find it particularly useful.

So, mediation eventually found a use for me.

There were a couple of things that led to this.

One of my coworkers had recently gotten into meditation. He was leading mindfulness sessions at work, and I tried them a couple of times. I found them relaxing, but never really considered it as something I’d do regularly. After going through a particularly nasty whirlwind romance, I decided that in order to avoid this behavioral pattern, I needed to go deeper.

So I went to therapy.

My therapist suggested I start meditating, so I took her up on it and downloaded a meditation app. I wasn’t doing it daily at this point, but I found myself doing it at least several times a week. I especially dug the ‘loving kindness’ meditations. They were not only relaxing, but every once in awhile they would bring on a state of euphoria that was akin to getting high.

While all of this was going on, I met a guy in the meetings who was into what we’ll call ‘western esotericism’. And something about it piqued my interest in a way that I can’t properly explain, even to this day. I happened to mention something about the western esotericism I was studying to my coworker and he was familiar with the material. It shocked me because I’d always taken him to be a fervent atheist, which he was up until shortly before I’d taken this interest in “spirituality” (which is quite possibly one of the most meaningless words in the american vernacular), and so just like before, when two people I knew were both mentioning recovery to me, the timing struck me as interesting. 

I took this as a sign to keep pressing forward and so I did. 

The only issue is that I placed myself into something of a false dilemma. I became so heavily invested in meditation and esoteric philosophy that I’d convinced myself I had to pick either meetings, or my newfound interest, and that I couldn’t do both. 

There was of course zero truth in this, but hey, hindsight is 20/20.

The meditation practices seemed to provide a much more intense experience than simply going to meetings and reflecting, and so that’s the path I took for a while. I spent the next couple of years as a “spiritual tourist”, with adventures in everything from Buddhism to Sufism. And after much trial-and-error, I did find my niche. 

With that said, let’s fast forward to more recent times.

It wasn’t long ago that I had a dream in which a prominent spiritual figure of days past told me that it was important that I go back to meetings. I’ve begun to realize that my unconscious mind often times knows better than my day-to-day thoughts, and so I figured, well, why the hell not? 

It didn’t take me long to get re-established in 12-step meetings. And much to my astonishment, the preoccupation of “which model is better, 12-step or these meditation practices?” did fall away when I finally realized that both of them mirrored one another, and that my involvement in both produced something stronger than what either one of them could accomplish alone.

It wasn’t long after this that I started receiving calls from out of the blue, people I hadn’t seen in years telling me they were having addiction problems, and they were seeking direction from me on what to do about it.

Once again, the timing of these events was a bit strange. And per usual, I took it as a sign to keep pressing forward. 

And as I sit here reflecting upon all of this, of one thing I am for certain. 

None of this would have been possible without the decision to sit down and smoke weed with a friend of mine on a warm day in 1997.

I can say with the utmost certainty that if I could go back in time, I wouldn’t change a thing. I would say that the past has been redeemed, but the word redemption implies a mistake.  And how can I say honestly there’s been a mistake when every single one of these decisions I’ve written about have led to me sitting in front of this keyboard right now? 

And there is a catch here. Now I know better. And if I should choose to abandon this path I’m on and turn back to the drugs and the booze, it’s highly likely that I wouldn’t find the same grace that met me back when I was getting text messages about Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. 

Especially not these days, where fentanyl’s shadow looms heavy over any and all street drugs.

If you’re currently walking in darkness, and that opportunity for freedom comes knocking (which I think it does for most, at least once), my advice would be to take it. Life may be hard sometimes, but it’s never meaningless. Not anymore.

This way just happens to be my way.

May you all find yours. And may you all be well.