100

I have 100 days clean today.  Coincidently enough, this is my 100^th blog that I have written.  Susan says I should end my blog here.  She says I am too wordy in my blogs.  She asked me if I was writing a novel.  Perhaps.  Maybe not a novel, but maybe it could be a book someday.  I don’t know.  For now it is a blog.  I’ll try to keep this one short.

I have now written 100 blogs.  97 of those blogs were posted on MySpace.   I posted blogs on MySpace from September of 2006 until September of 2010.   I took about a year and a half “break” from Friday, March 13^th, 2009 until July 25, 2010.  I switched my blog to BlogSpot three blogs ago.  It has been a nice change.  It is much easier to post on BlogSpot than it is on MySpace.  Plus, I have heard MySpace referred to as an abandoned amusement park, and it seemed my readership was declining.  It was a good home for the blog for a while, but I like BlogSpot.  I guess I like the link to FaceBook also. 

My life has become somewhat of an open book over the past few years.  This doesn’t mean I share all of my insanity in this blog – believe it or not.  My addiction was pretty insane.  In fact, I believe I started writing because I heard rumors that that there were rumors about my drug-using activities.  I know that some people close to me were concerned and some people knew some of what was going on.  When I started hearing about these rumors, I decided that I wanted the information to come from the “horse’s mouth.”   Whatever the rumors were, they probably couldn’t come close the in insanity of my reality. It also occurred to me that whatever was going on out there was so amazing to me that I had to share about it.  I also thought that perhaps someone might hear something from my experiences that could help them in his or her life. I thought maybe it could help someone who was struggling in life to have hope.   I thought it might help a young person to not follow in my footsteps.    I once wrote a blog called “After School Special” to discourage young people not to follow in my footsteps.  Finally, I really just needed a place to let go of all I had been through.  I had lost my dad a couple of months earlier and was pistol whipped on the street at 4:00 in the morning a week prior to my first blog.  That’s pretty much how this all began 100 blogs ago.     

I stopped writing about a year and a half ago, in part, because Susan said I was worrying people.  The other parts were that I was just so hopeless and I seemed to have lost my spiritual connection.  The insanity was becoming common place to me.  I was insane.  I also thought it wasn’t really helping to keep telling people, “I used again…”  When I started writing this blog in 2006, I truly believed I would never use again.  I had just gotten pistol whipped and ended up in the emergency room.  That was pretty scary and I believed I would never use again after that.  I did not however work a program of recovery.  But, I lived a good life and I was grateful to be alive.  I started getting honest about my reality.  I started writing this blog.  I eventually relapsed and in time, my insanity convinced me that you all knew everything about me anyway, so all I had to do was be truthful about my reality and I would be set free.  The truth is, full disclosure about my reality to others has not always worked in my favor.

I also imagine that a lot of people figure “Oh great, the junkie found God.”  Well, I actually found the devil.  It seems God found me.  I felt I needed to share about this amazing universe and this great force I seemed to have stumbled upon.  Still, I have lost my spiritual connection many times and failed to live in a “Good Orderly Direction” because of my using.  For the past 100 days, however, I have lived the “Good Orderly Direction.”  I have prayed so hard every day that God relieves me of the obsession to use.  So far that prayer has been answered.  This doesn’t mean I don’t struggle at times, but the gut-wrenching obsession that leads me to tunnel vision, and eventually relapse, has not returned.

 I have 100 days of recovery under my belt.  This is the longest I have ever gone while working a recovery program.  I know I had 90 days at least once in the past while working a recovery program.  I think that was in 2004.  I stayed clean for over 3 months by writing this blog.  I also got about 4 months clean by selling my photographs and writing this blog.  (I am not certain the exact amount of days because I was not counting them).  My work helped to keep me clean those record four months, so did this blog.  However, I did relapse.  After relapsing about two and a half years ago, I started attempting to get clean with recovery because I didn’t want to lose everything I had worked so hard for.  I lost a lot of it.  For the past two and a half years I have really struggled.  The longest I stayed clean was 57 days while in an inpatient rehab program.  After failing at that, I had little hope that I could ever stay clean.  I really wanted to stay clean more than anything in the world, but really had no idea how this was going to happen.

This recovery business is hard work.  Nothing good comes easy.  I am grateful that I have a disease that I can work at, however.  At least getting clean is a possibility.  I do believe it to be a disease.  It has all of the characteristics of a disease - that’s for sure.  I just have to take my medicine in the form of recovery.

My 100^th day clean was nice.  It rained.  It has not rained here for many months.  In fact, the rain reminded me of my using days.  The last time it rained, I was using.  It doesn’t really rain in San Francisco from the months of March or April until November or December.  It rained a lot earlier this year.  I was out in that rain a lot because I was using.   In fact, I found a flyer in my rain coat pocket today that one of the Sixth Street Community Guides gave me.  After seeing the flyer, I remembered pathetically sitting on the corner of Sixth and Mission Streets when the two Community Guides approached me and offered me some water.  They also made some suggestions for me as far as shelter and rehab.  They wrote down some addresses and phone numbers for me.  About a month ago, I saw those two guys and told them that I was doing much better now and thanked them for their help and concern.

Front and back of that flyer

This is the first time I have ever counted my clean days to 100.  I have looked forward to this day.  It has been a hard day in some ways, but it feels really good.