Those cold, always too tight, shiny bracelets had been clasped to my wrists yet again, although hours of drinking and using had blurred my consciousness to the point of vaguely understanding why the cuffs were going on.
Last thing I recollect I was drinking and smoking weed in my car with a couple of people in a completely different city. Here I was now driving while coming out of a blackout, and fading in and out of reality like a phone call with bad reception.
The flashing lights behind me provoked any remaining sense I had and I pulled into a gas station. There I was parked right in the middle of a 7-11 gas station. My car rims scrapped up from ricocheting off curbs like there were bumper lanes, and all of this while being only a couple hundred feet away from a freeway onramp.
Apparently I was planning on getting on a five lane freeway for a 45min drive to see a girl. I learned this after getting out of jail and reading my texts, texts that read more like computer code than English.
With a blurred mind and a drunken stupor I put up no resistance to the arresting office. I rolled out of the car and compliantly leaned up against it as the officer snapped the cuffs on me. I wobbled back to his squad car as his lights almost had me thinking I was being escorted into a night club.
Six or seven hours earlier the night started out great, or so I thought. My boss let me drink to my heart’s content in the restaurant bar right after closing at work, then I drove myself home. But a drunken itch to go find some fun pulled me into the city on this random weeknight.
God clearly had my back before I wanted anything to do with Him.
My idea of fun had landed me in the city jail, as I slurred and swayed through the photos and fingerprints. Then the jail cell, that tiny cold and all to familiar concrete box began to bring me back to my senses ever so slowly.
I wanted to be heard, I wanted to be free, I wanted to be anywhere but trapped in my own skin. The jail cell Instantly became an all to accurate outward explanation of my internal existence. It was cold, it was depressing, and it was restrictive.
I wanted freedom! I wanted it more internally then I did externally, but I didn’t know how to obtain this freedom. My internal confinement was screaming for help, but going about doing it in a way that pushed people further away.
The weight of the situation, the drunkenness turning to sickness, the headache encroaching, and the neon light glaring down on pushed my fragile frame to the breaking point.
I began pounding on the door and screaming, my outward actions matching my inner actions. I pounded at the stone to my tomb until the unforgiving cement door collected specks of blood from the freshly broken skin on my knuckles.
My energy eventually dried up and my headache overtook my dogmatic enthusiasm. I gave up and curled up on the thin mat that rested on top of the cement block, the curtains of my eyelids finally closed as my drunken show was over.
My night of “fun” cost me my freedom and my license, a family friend hundreds of dollars to get my car out of the impound, thousands of dollars in new fines, and barely escaping with my life. Not to mention the oh so close reality of, what-if I had actually made it onto the freeway in that condition?
One would think that the situation partnered with my internal chaos would have me throwing my hands up and surrendering to defeat, but it was rather the opposite. I doubled down on my addiction fueled momentum and things got worse for two more years.
I had a choice to stop then. I didn’t. It got worse, it can ALWAYS get worse...
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If I would have stuck with recovery the first time I knew I needed it I would have saved myself a never ending list of all kinds of problems.
Can you relate to this pattern?
You can stop, you can stop today. You have a choice, join the army of recovery warriors and get help. You are loved by us, and most importantly you are loved by God.
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