Sobering

Three things to be thankful for:

Study nearly over…

I am 500 words into a 2000 word essay that is due on Saturday (my last for the year). I have broken through my procrastination and made a start. I have tomorrow night and Saturday morning to complete it. It may mean that I don’t sleep again on Friday night but at least I can sleep in on Sunday morning before I take out my little brother.

Wanting to connect with people…

I am feeling the desire to connect with friends again for the first time in years. I miss my friends and I am even making the effort FOR THE FIRST TIME IN MY LIFE to contact people and to initiate social arrangements. Perhaps being the initiater of these events, I have more control over where and when they will be and who will come along. That is, not big groups, more one on one. Perhaps this is a way of me conquering my social avoidance. By setting up the contexts that enjoy.

My most dear friend asks for my friendship… 

Finally and most importantly, I feel thankful that my longest and dearest friend B texted me this afternoon to tell me that he was wracked by anxiety and scared about what he was going to do. I texted him back to ask him if he wanted to catch up. He called me immediately and I asked him where he was. He said he was sitting in a part in Redfern on his own. We talked for 2 hours until I think his mobile phone battery went dead.

It made me realise how hard it is for anyone who has spent all of their adult lives in a drug stupor to return to the world of sober reality. He can’t spend time with people from his past because they may be a pathway back to temptation. He won’t spend time with "normals" as we call other people because they just have no concept of what he has been through. This makes him incredibly isolated and spending all of his time with 15 years worth of hidden thoughts,anxieties, self-reproach and guilt exploding to the surface.

I am just so glad that he can call me. I asked him what I could do to help. He said, would you buy me a gun. Would you help me kill myself. I told him to stop it. I kept him talking, allowing him to feel for some small moment that someone cared. I told him to keep writing. He said that he is finding it hard to focus on completing an idea, that he might need some help.

I told him you better write a goddamned book before you cark it because otherwise all of this fucking thing, your whole life would have been a waste, no meaning. That he had to hold on for his son’s sake. (I used the guilt card – I was grasping for anything that would hook him).

That I would help him write that book. He told me that a book wouldn’t redeem him. I told him he didn’t need redemption, he just needed to make it through the intensity of these feelings. Like being in the ocean, being dunked by a wave, drowning. You know when you get up again that you have survived and just as you get your breath another wave comes but perhaps, just once you will be better at anticipating the wave of emotion and will find away to surface more smoothly.

I sent the following e-mail to a group in Sydney who hopefully will give me a glimmer of hope:

Hi, my oldest friend B is 34 and has spent half of his life on a combination of narcotics, prescription & over the counter drugs, and alcohol that beggars belief. He has spent the last 3 months taking the arduous journey of re-entering reality after managing to get off all of these things (however, I believe he is still on methadone). At a job centre recently, he met with someone with enough compassion to ask if he had anyone at all that he could call to talk to and that is when he re-entered my life (our mums are best friends, so I was aware of his circumstances but only had seen him 1-2 a year up until recently).

I think he would have overdosed over 30 times during the past 15 years and somehow has always managed to be brought back to life. He has had some minor court appearances which were for petty criminal activity at the beginning of his drug career, through to things like loitering charges (when he was found to have overdosed) as he was older. He had been working 7 days a week throughout most of his adult life but recently quit his job so that he could focus on getting off drugs. He has since (partially) separated from his partner and child and is spending the rest of his time at his mother’s place.

I have seen him once but he contacts me regularly by text or phone when he is unable to cope. Today he contacted me and he was immobilised by anxiety and overwhelmed by guilt. He is talking about ending his life as he doesn’t think things will ever improve for him or that he will find a pathway back into society. Finding places to live and work are difficult with the stigma involved. I have asked if he wants me to help him be admitted to hospital, where at least he will be safe and secure as he goes through the next year. I think in a way that this would too restrictive for him and would probably see him find his way back to drugs as an escape.

I’m not a psych but I think he has an underlying mental health problem that started to emerge at around 14 about the time that his father died. Prior to that, he had been the school dux, incredibly creative, intelligent and very sporty. I am sure that in some senses that helped him find a way to drugs in the first place (initially to feel better) and then continued on to mask those mental health issues through medication. Even before his starting on drugs I would notice both in his discussion and his writing, thick layers of thoughts that did not follow a logical pattern. I think this is making his recovery so much harder to fight. I have suggested at the very least that I take him to a doctor to see if there was any medication that he could be taking regarding the obsessive nature of his thoughts, his anxiety and depression.

It did occur to me however, that there must be therapeutic halfway homes where people recovering from addiction can spend time with people that have been through similar experiences and survived, as a way to show that it is possible to find meaning in life again. I wondered if you would be able to provide me with any information about whether this type of services is offered in Sydney. He lives in the inner west at the moment. I think that if there isn’t anything that the weight of what he is fighting will kill him before a return to drugs does.

Thanks in advance for any help or advice you can give,

Blue

I

haven’t slept all night. It is 4:53am and I am just going to get ready now to leave for work at 6:15am.

 

If you understand, things are just as they are;
if you do not understand, things are just as they are.
Zen proverb