The Price of Admission

[varkam]

Note: This is a piece that I wrote for my addiction blog, but I thought it was applicable here, as well.

One of the reasons that I stayed living the hell that was my addiction for so long was because I was afraid. I was terrified that if anyone found out, that I would be abandoned. I was afraid that my parents would disown me, that my friend would leave me, that my friends wouldn’t return my calls. So I lied and I hid, I distorted and deceived.
There eventually came a day, however, when I couldn’t lie anymore. I couldn’t talk my way out of it. When the reality of the situation that I found myself in was so stark, so vastly different from anything that I had encountered before, that I had little choice but to come clean.

And come clean I did.

It is not without difficulty that I have tried in the past to explain how it felt to be at the bottom. As one might expect, it was gut-wrenching. The concept of was ever present in my inner-monologue. It was, as the Buddhists would say, groundless. I had no safety net, no security, no idea of what was going to happen tomorrow.
But also, in a big way, it was freeing. It was liberating. All those years I had spent so much energy lying and scheming, trying to hide this huge part of who I was, and now…well now it was all out in the open. I didn’t have to worry about it anymore.

In addiction circles, you will often hear talk of Dr. Jekyl and Mr. Hyde: two totally different beings somehow, through some cosmic joke, end up inhabiting the same body. That appeals to me as it describes quite aptly how I feel about the many years I spent acting out my addiction. In my day-to-day life I was…or tried to be a decent individual. Behind closed doors and in the shadows, living my double life, I was anything but.

I bring that analogy up to say this – at the bottom, and paying the price of admission, Dr. Jekyl and Mr. Hyde got to have a chat. These two seemingly totally different people became one, after all those years. That was something I tried very hard to avoid previously. I spent a lot of time and energy on making sure that my real life and my “real” life never crossed paths – but here I was, right at the intersection. I think that, for the first time in my life, I realized who I really was, and what I really had done. I cried.

I came clean to pretty much everyone in my life who had been affected, one way or another, by my addiction. Did my original fears pan out? Was I abandoned, disowned, and isolated? No. Surprisingly, that fact was hard to take. I thought that I should have been abandoned, but instead my parents, my friends, employers, and even my girlfriend all circled the wagons to support me. I did lose a couple of friends over it, and while that makes me sad, I smile when I remember something that my father told me (pardon the language), “Fuck ‘em if they can’t take a joke.”

In the end, the price of admission into recovery was, well, admission. It was once put to me that an addict only enters recovery when the pain of being an addict exceeds the pain of admitting that you are one. For some people, it doesn’t take much at all. They can see the writing on the wall. Others, however, have to lose everything before reality can get their attention. I’m not quite sure which I am – probably somewhere in between.