This past Wednesday (May the Fifth,) marked the 2 month point since I have had any alcohol.
Not a single drop.
As long time readers will know, at the time of my arrest - which precipitated this latest move and life changeup - I was drinking a lot.
But for newer readers lets quantify this and say that since October of 2009, Not a single day has gone by that I didn't personally consume a bare minimum of a litre of wine a day. In the final weeks at the roach motel it wasn't unusual for Lisa and I to drink 8 liters in a 24 hour period between the two of us.
Now, that's a lot of drinking. For months on end, we would drink and drink, and on waking would feel sick and sweaty, and horrible, until the Wine Rack opened at 11 AM and we'd start drinking again.
I don't miss that at all.
And this might be as good a time as any to address and assess the whole subject of my recovery and how that's going.
It was exactly a year ago this week that I went in to detox after having to flee what had become a nightmarish and dangerous crack fuelled carnival at the Woodgreen building in the East End of Toronto
That was a minor miracle - going to detox and then thru a addiction program when I did. If things had continued the way they were going, there is no doubt I surely would have been dead.
My treatment ended and I found myself out and about in the city once again, with money in my purse and time on my hands.
And I started to drink.
I knew that alcohol was a drug as much as anything else is, but it seemed to me that it was better than smoking crack or shooting heroin and so I drank.
When I first agreed to go into treatment I had never inended for alcohol to be part of the deal. Sure, I wanted to quit drugs, but I would (this was the plan,) continue to use alcohol in moderation.
Well, in retrospect, that probably wasn't a great idea, and very quickly that drinking became as obsesive and excessive as any crack run.
And then I wound up in jail, and had a couple of slip ups with crack
I was really just substituting one drug for another and when Lisa and I reconciled and she too began to replace her crack habit with booze she took to it with the same fatal enthusism she always took to any new drug, and we simply stayed drunk all the time.
So now I've realized I'm just not able to drink in moderation, not at this time. I'm just glad I realized this and have been able to stop. As I learned back at the U of T, nothing will cloud your thinking and rob your spirit quicker than drinking will.So how does pot fit into this?
My own personal lowdown on the green is this:
I figure pot is okay. For several years I abused my body with every drug I could but mostly crack and heroin. With crack I would smoke and smoke and be up for days on end - my record is 10 days with no sleep and almost no food. That night I blacked out while out working the corner and the next memory I have is waking up on my dealers couch with a 40 stone clutched untouched in my hand. Who knows what might have happened. The only way I know I broke - that is to say turned a trick - is because I had the money to buy crack. And so I must have.
No matter how much pot you smoke, that sort of thing just isn't going to happen.
People who follow the 12 steps and the Narcotics Anonymous dogma will say that any drug is as bad as any other, and that by continuing to smoke pot I'm setting myself up for a fall. And maybe they're right. But I don't think so.
I think the pot makes me feel good, and it's not a compulsion or an addiction the way that crack or booze is - at least not for me.
So, 12 Steppers be damned, I'm keeping the pot.
In other news, it's now over 10 days I've been on my antidepressants (more drugs,) and thankfully most of the crazy side -effects have subsided. But the good news is in that ten days I've yet to have a despairing, down and dirty, full on episode of those feelings of self-loathing and depression that have plagued me.
Is this solely because of the anti-depressants, or are there other factors involved?
Sure being out of that vicious cycle of addiction and poverty has helped and being away from Lisa is probably doing me a world of good (although I confess there are times I still miss her,) - but there is no denying the Pristiq has helped. And so I continue to take them.
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