Duty-free collectibles

You ain’t a gangster… this is recovery…

You ain’t a gangster… this is recovery…

You ain’t a gangster… this is recovery…

Someone in my Bible study spoke about this man he knows that has been limiting themselves to two airplane bottles of liquor a day as a way to quit drinking. The one talking about his friend said that as much as he knows that is not how it works, he also does not understand. He mentioned that if someone told him that he could never have another drink again then he would be fine with that.

I began nervously stretching my body and not being able to stop my foot from tapping, gritting my teeth wanting to just say that I wish it could be that fucking easy; some people don’t have the fucking luxury of simply putting it down and walking away from this bullshit.

I told him, as politely as possible, that when you’re knee deep in airplane bottles and pocket vodka then there is really nothing to walk away from because that kind of life is total and complete darkness. Honestly, its fucking bullshit. What the fuck did I want to say?

I just grinned while he, very empathetically, talked about not being able to understand that type of mentality, but how could he? How the fuck could you possibly understand this fucking bullshit, dude?

You have no fucking clue what it’s like to walk around engulfed in that fucking stupid goddamn darkness and loneliness. You don’t know what it’s like to break into houses to smoke salvia, accidentally get dosed with PCP while being held as collateral for your friend on a gun-run; you have no idea what’s it like to steal freon from the a/c unit to huff yourself stupid because it’s Saturday. You have no concept for watching the light leave your cousins fucking eyes as every bit of hope left in his soul is dragged out by the devil methamphetamine.

How the fuck could you understand what it’s like to drink overly-ripe wine that’s been forgotten in your closet for a year, but tonight’s just been fucking brutal, and you need some bullshit to get through it?

Fuck!

I’m a little on edge these past few days since I have more than a few friends or close acquaintances talking about getting sober and finding it sooOooOoo hard during their first few days or months of a substance-free life.

Yeah, you’re having a hard time after putting down the bottle for a few days?

Fuckin’ tell me about it, dude.

Get the fuck off my porch with that bullshit. I cannot help you. My God, I’m doing my best listening to this kid tell me about his problems with drinking: how he started re-evaluating his position after blacking out twice last year… Lord, have mercy.

Only twice?

One time I blacked out onstage during a feature set and woke up in a comedy condo sweating out Jager. But this isn’t a competition, of course not, what kind of maniac would I be if this turned into a competition for those who shot themselves in the foot?

But come on dude… Let’s get it together a little bit. I can’t deal with another breakdown in my life because you decided to have one too many at Christmas, you know what I mean?

What’s more important is that I cannot, nor should I, try to help someone who doesn’t want to get help, but would rather seek conversations with me to make themselves feel better. That’s not how this works. You’re just dumping bullshit on me and, because of the illusion of a lighter load you get to conjure up some pink cloud that you’ll ride off into your next relapse.

The people who are non-addicts don’t seem to understand and the people who are taking their first steps into sobriety don’t seem to, either… yet.

You ain’t a gangster… this is recovery…

You ain’t a gangster… this is recovery…

You ain’t a gangster… this is recovery…

The old head in the Recovery Dharma group I attended before getting kicked out after corporate meditation kept saying this as people began sitting and adjusting into group recovery mode. He kept going on and on…

We’re not friends… this is recovery…

We’re not friends… We’re just people who found each other in the fucking storm and some of you aren’t going to be here when the clouds part and the blue sky and sun shines down on us all… You’ll be back to your bullshit, trying to smudge yourself out of existence with your fucking substances and I just can’t be there for you anymore… You’re not my responsibility and we’re not friends…

The thing stand-up prepared me for more than anything else is this idea that, when you’re doing what you’re supposed to be doing then people will come into your life and most of them, ninety percent, leave… or you leave them behind. Guys who are great and don’t want to work at their craft, guys who suck and have a hard head about what is or is not funny, guys who become your best friends… They’re not forever. None of this is forever, but my fucking recovery is… And I’ll be damned if I let anyone take that from me.

Those fucking airplane bottles.

Goddammit.

What doesn’t he get? What the fuck is so fucking hard to understand about this bullshit?

There is light and there is darkness, and if you live with darkness you cannot understand the light, the darkness cannot comprehend the fucking light. So, you’re stuck in your own fucking suffering forever and everyday feels like forever, everyday feels like fucking eternity because it’s so fucking dark. You can’t have a relationship with darkness because the darkness knows only one thing which is to take and take; all it can do is take and take and take: use and consume. And when that’s your life then that’s all you can do, too. That’s all I’ll ever be is a fucking taker… I just take and take and take. That’s all addicts are. We take and we take, and we take. We’re selfish because there is only the next drink, there is only the next hit, there is only the next smoke. There is nothing else.

There is nothing.

Fuck!

I’m so fucking afraid of becoming the dark again. I’m so fucking afraid of taking and taking… It makes it hard to reach out. It makes it difficult to ask for help.

I am right, though. We are not friends. I have my friends, thanks. I have three, four friends and everybody else is just someone else who will be in my life for an undetermined amount of time until we both go our separate ways and that’s OK. We’re not supposed to cling to one another, we’re supposed to learn and help each other then use what we gather in those relationships to better ourselves and grow on our path.

Maybe I’m just a fucking asshole right now, but the only way to help people—truly—is to make space for them to speak their peace, affirm their feelings, and offer suggestions learned from our own hard-won lessons from our journey as a way to help.

But we cannot cling to one another; I’m not a buoy and neither is anyone else. The light is a buoy, start fucking swimming. Or else you’ll drag the people around you down with you.

And learn your own lessons, too. I have a buddy… He killed himself about five years back and I’ve been fucking plagued with why it affected me so much at the time. We weren’t particularly close when he…

For me, I think, he symbolized hope. He was just a dude who set his mind to things and did it; I used to do a joke about him, ‘I have a friend that did so much cocaine he became a marine.’ He was a good guy and helped me out in a lot of ways that he couldn’t have known at the time, but certainly one of those guys who helps push you to see the world in a different way. I guess that’s why his death affected me in a strange way, because he genuinely helped me see the world differently than I could have ever seen it without him. I mean… He changed how I thought, of course his loss was going to do something to me.

I remember getting word that he passed at my job, I asked someone to cover me and I went to smoke a cigarette, feeling far away from everyone’s need to have mimosas and tomato juice with vodka In it. I didn’t do much that summer. I worked out a lot, I wrote a bit about my eating disorder, lost my job, and drank myself stupid. A friend of mine told me that he found me in my home bar, in the middle of the day, I was perched up at the bar alone, drinking whiskey (if I was drinking whiskey things were bad), and he approached me. I muttered to him something like, “Don’t you ever kill yourself. Don’t you ever fucking do that.”

He left the bar and I stayed.

Then I moved out of my hometown while on a bender and I stayed on my bender until COVID.

I bring it up because my friend, the reposed, told me once that you can’t ever really explain to someone what something is like, you can’t ever explain to anyone why something is bad. They have to learn for themselves, like trying to explain to a kid why touching the stove hurts. The kid can understand in theory, but until they actually touch the hot stove and see for themselves why they shouldn’t then it still lives in this in-between world of abstract knowledge. No one can believe how bad something is until they see it; no one can experience joy by our telling them, either. The patristics talk about this, too; in order to help their spiritual children taste the honey of God’s word they must first taste it for themselves.

That stuck with me, and I could never figure out how to steal every idea he had to use onstage, but I did figure out how to apply it, or maybe I’m still trying to figure that out. You can’t help someone who doesn’t understand what being an addict is like, thank God for that, too. At the same time no one can explain to an addict how flipping hard sobriety is, just how brutal it is to taste the nectar of recovery, but I can say how worth it is to try.

It’s like having a prayer practice, it does not come in the first day or even the first few months. In fact, there is no time limit on when the practice will start ‘working.’ It works how much you work it, to take from AA’s axioms, but eventually it becomes like breathing and you cannot fathom a life without drawing near to God through prayer.

The thing my marine buddy made me understand informed my theological apprehension of Christianity from the Eastern mindset of Orthodoxy which is not exactly divorced from the Western intellectual tradition of propositional theology as well as not being divorced from the mysticism of Eastern religions such as Tibetan Buddhism or Tantra.

This model of Christianity is life itself, knowing is only a part of being one with God Who is experienced through His uncreated energies, not sought through treatises, confessions, or summas. God is lived, lived through the heart and comprehended from within, by the nous, not as an intellectual pursuit but one of love and Truth which is becoming a person, like the God-man Christ.

“Man is created in the image of God, but this means that he is created in the image of Christ; for man, Christ is the revelation and accomplishment of this image. The image of the coming Christ is imprinted […] in the structure of man in the union of two natures (spiritual and psycho-corporeal) in one hypostasis […] The fullness of the human race exists from all eternity in Divinity, and this fullness is revealed in the gradual creation of human beings in the course of time” (Bulgakov 139).

I guess… I really flipping lost it because of the section of the Gospel According to St. John that we read in our Bible study,

“The light has come into the world, and people loved darkness rather than light because their deeds were evil. For all who do evil hate the light and do not come to the light, so that their deeds may be exposed. But those who do what is true come to the light, so that it may be clearly seen that their deeds have been done in God” (John 3:19-21).

I don’t know why this caught me in such a stressful way, but the fullness of humanity is tied to our ability to turn away from the darkness of the world, to grow to hate the things of this world in order to better love Truth, Who is Christ. These spiritual realities have significant teleological implications because we cannot grow into the fullness of Truth, by becoming gradually within time if we cling to a misunderstanding of what darkness is… If we cannot agree that we all have some sin that takes us away from God, that dissociates our created spirit from its eternal origin, “The human spirit is created, not in time, but in God’s eternity” (Bulgakov 139).

We all have something in the way that limits our understanding of others and blinds us to the work we must also do within ourselves, because addiction is not something we can measure using airplane bottles but how we behave and how our normative thought patterns allow us to navigate through the world, whether they facilitate or destabilize a sense of freedom within our lives.

We all have things that we hide; it is not that we love darkness, but that we don’t have another way of seeing things. And I just can’t seem to make anybody see things the way I understand them… Not like I would want, not like how my friend, God rest His soul, helped me see things.

But that’s not really the point, is it?

I can’t do anything to help anyone else except by gradually becoming a full human being within time myself. I cannot help anyone see the splinter in their eye because the mote in mine fills the room and blocks out all the light anyway. Truly, what I seek from conversations with people who either do or do not struggle with their own addiction issues is probably just self-validation more than anything.

I need people to know how fucking hard it is to get up and just exist, much less trying… trying, Lord, I’m trying to do what is true.

I can’t offer anyone more than that.

The truth is that this is hard and until you actually take the steps to see for yourself, you’ll never really know how hard, how demanding, and how rewarding it is; you’ll never be able to see a different reality that is waiting for you to see it. You’ll never see the light until you seek it yourself, but I assure you the light is there.

It is real.

I know it’s real because when you take the steps toward the light, you’ll see me. I’m seeking it, too. And I’ll be there to lend you a hand up if you fall. Friend or not we all fall; friend or not we all need help sometimes. When you take those steps toward light from the darkness you’ll stumble, you’ll fall, you’ll trip, but that’s a sign that you’re standing up and moving out of where you’ve been for a really long time.

It’s a sign you’re trying. It’s a sign we’re all trying.

That’s all we can do, really…

So, keep trying to do what is true, because you ain’t a gangster… this is recovery…

Si comprehendis, non est Deus 

Sources: Bulgakov, Sergius. “The Lamb of God.”