It took awhile still even after all that to be convinced that I was in real trouble. I still blamed everyone else for all that was happening. After a short time I found myself feeling like I had no place to go. I didn’t feel at home at my mother’s house. I had certainly burned that bridge. I had been thrown out of school for missing to many days. I felt like the world was against me. So I would go from party to party, use what they had, crash, wake up and move on. My grip on reality was getting thin. It came to a head one night at the same house that we held the mock seance. I had been partying for days, I arrived and it didn’t matter how much I drank or what drugs I did I didn’t feel high. So I kept doing more until I had some kind of psychic snap and couldn’t remember who I was. I’m not talking philosophically, I mean I had difficulty remembering my name and who the people in the room were. It was a very frightening moment.
I looked over and seen the one face that looked familiar to me and went up to him. This turned out to be my cousin. Although we remember what happened next differently it ended up with me going to drug rehabilitation . He got a hold of my mother and soon I was in a hospital, then a psyche ward. I was told later that I was in the psyche ward because it was a new facility and they didn’t have a detox unit yet. So I had to detox in the psyche unit. In many ways I think it was perfect. I don’t think it would have done me much good in a detox unit, I was still unconvinced that I had a problem with addiction. It would take some convincing, even in this atmosphere when it seemed like a more hopeful diagnosis.
I'm not sure how long I was in that unit while I was being convinced that many of my problems may be associated with my drug use. I can tell you that I fought the whole thing and was even trying to plan my get out party until the withdrawal symptoms kicked in. I remember it distinctly I was shaking terribly and trying to play a game of solitary. This girl sat at the table across from me and laughed. I looked up and she blurted out, “you're going through withdraw”, to which I retorted “No I’m not” just then I noticed how shoveled the cards were. My hands were shaking so bad I couldn’t even stack the cards on the piles. Still it wasn’t until a medical doctor came in and talked to me that I began to listen.
He asked me the usual questions, then he went into a very targeted dialog. He asked me if I thought I was a drug addict. Of course I said no, he asked me if I thought I was addicted to Pot, to which I said no. He asked me if I thought I was an alcoholic to which I said no. You see, I couldn’t have been any of these things because I switched drugs anytime I felt like I was getting too dependent on any one drug. Alcohol was an old standby, but I thought you had to be old to be an alcoholic. Then he hit me with the big questions. He got real quiet looked me in the eye and asked “Do you think you're addicted to being high?, followed by “When is the last day you remember not being high before you got here?. To my terror I couldn’t remember a single day that I wasn’t high on something. He then pulled out a print out from all the junk they had found in my blood the night my mom took me to the hospital. He started reading down the list and the levels. He then said “You could have died from anyone of these, and you should have died from the combination. You can leave here if you would like, but at this rate you will be dead in six months.” I snapped at that point. As much as I thought I wanted to die, I really just wanted all the pain to end. This man was giving me a way out. I took it, I agreed to be checked into the drug treatment program.
At nineteen years old, I was by far the youngest in our unit. It was a quick way to grow up for sure. I was quite a mess in rehab, I weighed 83 pounds, most of that was hair and was scared to death. The first couple of nights I ended up getting bronchitis and so was running a fever. They let me spend a couple days in bed, but once my fever broke I was to mingle with the rest . I will never forget the way the smoking room in that place smelled. That is where we spent most of our time when we didn’t have to be somewhere. I got along with everyone in treatment, most of them kind of looked after me like a little brother. I met my first openly gay person in rehab, that was important for me to know there were other people out there. At that point I was far from ready to deal with any of that. Although my counselor did make me look at it. Only because he felt it was one the things that I was trying to hide from. He was correct in that, so he just helped me get to a place that I could see that much of it and let the rest go for the time being.
I started experiencing anxiety attacks while in rehab. I remember my first one, I thought I was having a heart attack or something. I came out of my room in the middle of the night, barely able to breath. The nurse that was on staff that night talked me down. She was so wonderful, she rocked me like a baby and explained the whole thing to me. What was happening and more importantly how I could stop it. We talked for a long time that night, it was because of her that I was able to make it through several hundred maybe several thousand such attacks over the next several months. I guess this whole experience humbled me a great deal, it made me teachable. I began to really listen to people and actually made a genuine effort to change. I have tried to keep that level self honesty and reflection with me, not always successfully, but I have tried.
There was a couple of very crucial moments during my stay there that stay with me to this day. The first happened when I was allowed to go to twelve step meetings outside of the facility. I walked down these stairs, still very freaked about the whole thing. I think this may have even been my first meeting, I’m not sure about that. Anyway, a guy stands up with a big smile and starts walking toward me. I recognized him right off the bat. He was from our party circle. He had dropped off my radar and I had kinda wondered where he went. We were not close or anything, but we absolutely had a shared history. He walked up to me and gave me a big hug and said “thank God you made it”. At that moment I felt like I had made the right choice. Although I was still afraid, he had validated the hell I had been through with that one statement. He really understood where I had just come from. We never became super close, but he was a big part of me staying and accepting anything that the 12 steps had to say as valid.
The other important thing that took place during my stay in rehab had to do with me re-establishing my spiritual connection, but in a much healthier way. By this time I had lost any faith that I may have had in the Christian God or the Christian Devil for that matter. Yet, the 12 step programs tell us to find a “Higher Power” a “God of our understanding”. I wasn’t too hip on the idea, because in my mind, God had failed me. After all I had asked for his help over and over and this is what happened! It would be years before I would realize that prayer and ritual almost always work, however, not in the way we may want them to. So I had been wrestling with this idea the whole time, still unable to sleep without either “poison dreams” or an anxiety attack. I was at the end of my rope. I got on my knees and said simply, “God if your real, please just let me sleep tonight”. This was perhaps the most sincere prayer I had ever uttered to that point. It of course worked and I slept the whole night through waking the next morning with a singular thought. Okay, I know there is something out there, this presence I have always felt. Now it is time to find out what it is. That one night would lead me on quest that would span decades.
After leaving rehab, my brother had convinced my high school principal to let me back into school. I only had one semester to go and then I could possibly graduate with my peers. The principal let me back in however it would be awhile before I would find out that it had some strings attached to it. After I got settled back in, he and some of the other teachers began to pressure me to make a speech to the school to talk about how bad drugs were. Now, I went to a small school, everyone knew everyone. The thought of getting up in front of all these people that I used to party with was horrifying. So I declined., they kept pressuring me and those that I used to party with were also pressuring me to go back to my old ways.
One day I was sitting in math class and my nose started bleeding, I felt like everyone thought I had relapsed, the look on my face had to be horrific. I could feel everyone watching me, or at least that is what I experienced at that moment. I was exhausted, going to school all day and 12 step meetings at night, the pressure was getting to me. I truly felt like I was fighting for my life. So I quit school against everyone’s advice. In retrospect I would do it again. I really feel like it saved my life.
At that point I think I made the decision that my spiritual life would be the most important thing in my life. I had to find this God that helped me to sleep, I had to find out all I could about it. That was when I began to stalk God.
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