Stream of Consciousness Sunday! {Too Close To Home}

This whole Whitney Houston media circus is hitting way too close to home for me this weekend. Here are a few of my thoughts. I’m sharing this with you in hopes that someone is reading that can relate. Maybe you’re in the beginning stages of this fight, stumble here, and this reality is what you need to read. Addiction is a disease, there is no cure, just choice, and there’s a very fine line between the two. Addiction, most often, wins out. I get it though. You want to help, you love them, you don’t want to give up, you don’t want to fail… You’re a fighter. (And holy shit are you in for the fight of your life.) You’re battling an age old disease with no cure that is so complex and so baffling and so unique to each individual addict. Some people crave power, others crave exhilaration, painlessness… You’re fighting something you have absolutely no control over. If your person decides to seek help and they become sober and stay sober, they are not in the majority. Understand that going in. I didn’t. My story is not unique in that I had to walk away for my own safety, and if you’re reading this and feel you are in danger… Get. Out. “But she/he was drunk when she/he hit me/threatened me/yelled at me.” is not a good excuse to stay. If she’s/he’s not getting help, they will hit you/threaten you/hurt you again. You’re the one in the front line, their first obstacle, and if they want to get high and you’re in the way, you’re the first one they’re going to hurt. They may very well love you with all of their heart, but they want their drug more and will until they admit they have a problem. And there’s no assurance in that either. Don’t fool yourself, your person will do that enough for you.

I first realized he had a problem when I found bottles under our mattress. I was pregnant at the time, and still in the phase where I was so sick I couldn’t even keep down a cracker. This revelation didn’t help. I didn’t understand addiction then, and definitely not the extent of his. I’d heard about addiction, like we all do, on TV and usually in conjunction with some has-been celebrity who was unable to grasp the enormity of their talent (or slight lack there of), so they drank and drugged their way out of emotional feeling (Amy Winehouse) or into feeling powerful (Charlie Sheen). “But that was them… Not my husband.” I thought, naively.

I’ve learned a lot about addiction since then, and even more about his. Addiction is cunning, baffling, and absolutely heart wrenching. It’s an invisible cancer of the mind that destroys families, friendships, and any other relationship that happens to get in the way of what the addict is searching for. It’s a sickness. The most important lesson I’ve learned, or at least the most important principal when dealing with an addict I’ve learned is this: YOU can’t heal them, YOU can’t help them, and YOU can’t save them. You can support them in their recovery, but you can not do it for them. It seems like an easy enough principal, but nothing about addiction is black and white. There is nothing about it that makes sense. There is nothing about it that is easy. It’s not simply a choice to be better or to do better. It’s a life sentence to fight every single day of the rest of their life.

Addicts are great at talking the talk and walking the walk, especially when they don’t want to be sober. They know how to go to meetings and say what everyone wants to hear and how to still be doing the very thing that landed them in that cold metal chair. You can drive them to the meetings that they wouldn’t  find on their own, so you helped them and did it for them. You can drive them to the psychologist that is doing you a favor by seeing them, but they’ll just manipulate their way out of it. You can remind them to take their medication every day, day in and day out, and they might take it. You can speak positive thoughts into their lives. You can remove day to day responsibility from them. You can keep an open line of communication going. You can remove temptation. You can encourage them when they go through bouts of sobriety. You can pour out love in gallons. You can make it “easy” for them.

But it’s not going to work.

All addicts have their rock bottom, some meet with their rock bottom several times before they get sober, and even more reach the end of their lives before they reach sobriety.

“Well, with a good counselor, they can get out of it.”
“Maybe if they weren’t stressed out, they’d have a better chance.”
“If they had the support of their family, things would be better.”
“Well, if they really wanted it…”

No. No. No. NO!

My husband wanted it.

Over and over I watched him struggle, I watched as he was tormented by this inner frustration with himself, I stood by him and every time he fell, I’d help him back up, because that’s what you do when you love someone. It’s what you do for family. You don’t give up. I watched him physically tick sometimes with anxiousness. It was depressing! Watching someone struggle with addiction, when you love them, is like watching someone asleep with a bomb ticking down to its final seconds strapped to their chest. You try everything you can to disarm the bomb, you try to help them wiggle out of the straps, you can’t wake them up to get the code, no matter how much you shake them or scream at them, and at some point, you have to walk away before the bomb goes off and destroys you both.

It’s as heart breaking and as terrifying as that. There’s nothing at all that you can do.

When you walk away, as the loved one, you’re left to wonder. Did I do enough to help? Why couldn’t they wake up? Why couldn’t they see where they were going? Why didn’t they care about me? Why didn’t they care about our/their children? Why didn’t they care about their friends and family? Why, why, why, why, why….

The answer is: ???

No one knows. Drugs, alcohol, sex, food, gambling… whatever it is.

Drugs are the worst. They chemically change a person, sometimes to the point that a person can no longer control their impulses, no matter how hard they try. These substances can change their personality and their character, and no amount of counseling or medication will help. They become the opposite of “normal”. Cocaine addicts, for example, are believed to become severely bipolar the more they do the drug, a condition they will always have to nurture with counseling and medication, if they attain sobriety. It doesn’t go away.

You can only hope, when you walk away, that something will click. That they will begin to disarm the bomb. Unfortunately, even when they’re sober, they’re still strapped to the damned thing! Every day they have to wake up and disarm the bomb, sometimes every hour, in the beginning. They have to remind themselves every day to not let that countdown clock start its descent. You can support and talk and beg and plead, but ultimately, it’s their choice. The journey doesn’t end when they decide to be sober either! They still have to dig through all of the mess that brought them to their knees to begin with. They have to face their demons, they have to write the hard letters of apology, make phone calls to loved ones and make amends, and when all of that is over, they have to look themselves in the mirror and hope to God that the person they see staring back at them is a person they can live with. It’s not a process that ends. It’s a struggle that they have to live with for the rest of their lives, and if you’re with them, it’s also your life sentence.

Yes, trust can be rebuilt. “Normal” and successful and even HAPPY lives can be lived out, but this doesn’t go away. You will always have the question in your mind. If you’re going through this with a loved one right now, you know exactly what question I’m talking about. That paranoia doesn’t leave. Your trust in the process of sobriety gets easier with time, each day and year of sobriety pushes the question further and further into your head, but when life gets ugly, that question is still there. It might be a whisper and your trust in the person might be so great that it’s easier to push it aside, but it’s there.

I love my husband. I love who he was when we met, if that was even the real him. From what I can tell from his family, he loved me, too, but that’s a hard concept for me to wrap my head around after all of this. My throat is in a constant knot from holding back the tears, it’s physically sore. I’m not depressed. I am terribly, horribly heart broken. We were going to plan our garden this month. We had plans. We had dreams. We had hopes for our life together. All of that is gone, and it’s not coming back. I feel like I’m in some sort of weird mourning, which I know is normal, of course it is. Addiction is a nasty disease that has ripped my husband from me. It makes me so angry, I just want to scream. I’m furious that it’s made me afraid of him. It’s made me furious that he chose not to get help, that he chose MISERY over HAPPINESS.  There will always be a part of me that loves him, but to risk my life for it would only make me insane.

Yes, this is incredibly sad, but it’s the reality for some of us. We don’t get the happy ending. We don’t even get closure. We don’t get answers. We just get to move on, which is both a blessing and a curse. I don’t see the worry ever going away, because we’re connected by these two innocent little girls forever, but I can hope that the worry will be unfounded.

Whitney Houston? Her journey is over. Her pain is gone. I feel sorry for her family. The embarrassment they must feel, the heart break, all of the “whys?”, the anger… I get it. It’s tragic, for them. They’ve all said she was doing so well, and I hear my own voice in those statements.

He was doing so well, and yet here we are.

It’s too close to home and it’s maddening.

~*~*~*~

This was my Stream of Consciousness Sunday post. It’s five minutes (or so) of your time and a brain dump. Want to try it? Here are the rules…

• Set a timer and write for 5 minutes.
• Write an intro to the post if you want but don’t edit the post. No proofreading or spellchecking. This is writing in the raw.
• Publish it somewhere. Anywhere. The back door to your blog if you want. But make it accessible.
• Add the Stream of Consciousness Sunday badge to your post.
• Link up your post at all.things.fadra.
• Visit your fellow bloggers and show some love.

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