Recovery Act Two

Before reading this post... I would urge you to read recovery act one, posted directly below this one.

Indifferent of the outcome, here I was digging through mounds of drugs, and bottles of alcohol that outnumber the Persian army. What was I looking for exactly? I was looking for a get-out-of-problems-free card, a make-all-my-problems-disappear potion, a portal to any dimension but this one. It doesn't exist unfortunately.

First off let me explain to you what my problems were: I was struggling to admit to myself that I had found the girl that I wanted to spend the rest of my life with. That is a difficult thing to face when you are only 18. I was recently informed that I was going to be a daddy. Of all the things in the world, I never even thought for a second I would be a young single father. (By single I mean not married.) I was dealing with friends that thought it was possible to get through college and binge drink and abuse drugs 24 hours a day. I was victim to the despair and agony that comes with every young man growing up and I made virtually every mistake there was to make over a course of 3 years.

Anyways, my problems escalated over time and if you have partied enough in your lifetime that you know what the "ripple effect" is, then you understand why things just kept getting more complicated for me. The ripple effect is one or even a series of events or occurrences that you do not have to face the consequences of until later on in life. So here I was taking the tide at 18 years young, every problem nearly knocking me back down and dragging me into an even worse position than I was in already.

I turned 19 and dropped the ball completely. Let loose so to speak. Full acceptance that I was a failure and if I was going to make anything of myself it was going to be a good name in the party scene. Over time, I lost touch with reality and lost my sense of clarity in life. My mind became more scrambled every day, my body was turning into a burial ground for sad mutilated organs, and my thoughts were far beyond obscure and morbid.

Gravitating towards a different crowd, I started to see a more violent side of the party scene. Fights were not only a common thing amongst these folks, it was just another way of releasing tension. "Beat to an inch of your life" is not only a phrase that I heard regularly, but I saw it happening night after night in more extreme ways each time. Broken bottles, brass knuckles, guns, knives, chains, baseball bats, maglights, crobars, hammers, screwdrivers, belts, ropes, and kitchen cutlery. You can try to imagine my confusion coming from such a peaceful, hippy-like, environment with my past friends and I was excited to be a part of all of it. Its a rush. But it gets to you pretty quickly.

At some point in time I had come to the realization that I was drowning my sorrows in alcohol, and sizzling my brain cells right out of my head with every other substance I could find. Realizing and being told something by your conscience is completely different. Realizing is an apparent thing, whereas a thought within your conscience can be covered up with all kinds of residue like lies, drugs, despair, depression, and stupidity. So after realizing all this, I also realized that it was all of this substance abuse that created every single one of the problems for these people fighting and these people who have had it with life, and the people I saw on a regular basis who were wasting away only because one day they decided to start wasting away.

So I took shelter in my parents house. I am still here, camping out so to speak. Making my existence primarily unknown, ignoring phone calls and texts, deleting numbers, avoiding nearly everyone, and clearing my head of clutter. So I am, in fact, still recovering. The drugs and the alcohol will never be a problem again and I know that for a fact. Its the winning of lost trust back that is going to take time and effort on my part.

So back to my original statement, 'is lost trust regainable?" Well, yes and no. Yes because time does in fact heal emotional wounds no matter how deep the cut so long as the right steps are taken to get to that point. No because there are people that are insufficient, lazy, reckless, deprived of knowledge, and people that just don't care and never will. Trust cannot be bought back, trust cannot be forced back into place, and trust certainly cannot be rushed... trust is to be earned and when you get it back, be the genius you always thought you were and don't ever do anything to mess it up again.