Old Dogs, New Tricks

I don’t tend to think that any situation is black and white and I certainly don’t think the world can be divided into two categories: cat people and dog people.  Some people think that you have to be one or the other- never neither, never both.  I am living disproof of that fact.  I have a cat, though I wouldn’t call myself a “cat person.” I love dogs, though I have no desire to stand outside at 5am shivering in pajama pants, seeing my breath as I plead for Edith Wharton to “please go shoo-shoo.”  I may even challenge the common belief that dogs are always a good judge of character.  Are their preferences a decent baser litmus test? Sure.  But a dog may run away whimpering from the Dalai Lama if his scent is a bit off, and zip right over to Joseph Stalin if he’s hiding bacon in the pocket of his fur coat.  My one-year-old nephew terrified a pit bull that was recently rescued off the streets of downtown Charlotte because he tried too hard to feed it Goldfish crackers.  The poor dog hid in the back of the closet all night and it wasn’t because my nephew has no character.  He’s one.  Its not like he has a body count and known aliases, he was just a little too eager for a veteran canine’s liking.  Dog catchers get a bad reputation too- that’s just Animal Control.  Municipal job.  Great benefits.  I’m also convinced that dogs can detect ghosts but that’s another theory for another time.

If sweet, fluffy, hard-from-the-street-and-the-shelter dogs can’t be 100% accurate about the content of a person’s character, what on earth makes us, as flawed, jaded people, think that our judgments are always correct?  We rarely stop judging people on the color or their skin long enough to take an elongated gander at their behavior.  When we do look at someone’s behavior, we see the worst and then stamp, label, file it away as who they are.  I’m not even sure that I believe in Heaven, but I would hate to get to the pearly gates and find out that the qualifications for entry revolve heavily around how we behaved while sitting in commuter traffic… pack your shorts, its warm where we’re going.  To make matters more complicated, there is a third facet to our character outside of how we behave at our “best” and at our “worst.”  Some of us will be forever judged on the ways that we behaved when we were not ourselves- influenced by an outside substance(s). That substance was slathered on top of an entirely incorrect way of thinking caused by a brain that functioned like a tractor whose engine was greased with Elmer’s glue. 

I spent my last post hating on addicts who make stupid excuses for continuing to use, but this time I am going to do some deep defending of myself and my peers.  I hope those of you who aren’t addicts will stick around for this.  My goal in writing about these hard topics is to start a dialogue and make a connection between addicts and the people who have been hurt by addicts so the blame can stop, the anger can stop, the radical acceptance can solidify, and the healing can begin.  The pill that is most difficult for non-addicts to swallow in regard to addicts is this: the person that we were when we were using, is not who we are as a person.  Get a glass of water and choke that down because it is essential, not just in mending fences with the ones in recovery, but for the sake of not giving up on the ones who are still struggling.

Let me be very clear- I’m not saying that all addicts are great people in disguise.  I’m not telling you that behind every crack pipe and every paper bag wrapped malt liquor bottle rests a saint.  I’m simply saying that addiction has the power to temporarily disable all that is good in a truly good person.  When that person finally claws their way out of the depths of Hell that is addiction, it’s because they are revolted with themselves for doing terrible things.  That should be the first indication that their character isn’t foul or missing entirely.  There is a lot of fluff that is stressed upon us in sobriety, usually in twelve step meetings, but one important factor is that there is a difference between being sober and being in recovery.  There are plenty of people who are incorrectly sober; sober because a judge said they have to be, sober because a breathalyzer starts their car in the morning, sober because their wife threatened to leave them, or sober because they don’t want to die of an overdose or liver failure.  Whatever the reason, they are mad about having to be sober.  They fixate on the unfairness of it all from the worst possible perspectives.  “I work hard, I should be able to have a few drinks when I get home,” “it was just one time, I wasn’t even that much over the limit,” “my best friend died right in front of me so I guess I should start trying to quit.”  You see and hear these people pretty frequently in sober society and, luckily, they don’t come back very often.  I’ll catch Hell for saying that because we are supposed to be proud of people for showing up anywhere sober and making the most minimal of efforts, but that doesn’t do them any favors.  They aren’t done yet- they don’t get it.  Their garbage attitude and lack of accountability for their mistakes reflects poorly on those of us who would move Heaven and earth to fix our own mistakes.   The people with no remorse always seem to be screaming over the penitent who are humbled to a whisper, and it widens the canyon between the addict in recovery and their victims.  More importantly, it denigrates the mountains and miles that exist between “I don’t want to stop” and “I can’t stop.”

Let’s talk about the people who do get it, who are in recovery, who are truly, deeply, undeniably sorry for their actions and the hurt that they have caused.  Nothing about the way addiction works makes sense.  Accepting that fact is hard, but it is necessary.  If we could all come together and blame addiction, our common enemy, instead of the addict then a lot of fences would be mended and a lot of hearts unbroken.  I’m not saying that addicts aren’t to blame at all and nothing is their fault- Oh contrar, friends, Oh. Con. Trar.  We made a long list of poor decisions in a series that took us down that bad road and even more poor choices that kept us on that path and turned a bad situation into a dire situation.  But we didn’t ask to be addicts.  We didn’t ask to be played by our own minds to think we needed a substance to get through the day.  We never wanted to compromise our principles to keep seeking something that was ruining our lives and simultaneously being the only thing that made our lives bearable.  It isn’t fair.  If you’re like me, you wrapped yourself in the “its not fair” cocoon quite a few times before you finally realized that nothing gets solved in that swaddle.  People with no character just stay there and complain.  What do people with character do? They fucking fix it.

Recovery demands that you turn your will and your life over to a higher power.  Not “God” as you were made to understand him in Sunday School- you are not asked to turn your life over to the imaginary friend with a beard in a robe, lingering somewhere among the clouds with Grandma and Bowie.  You are asked to pick a higher power or make one up… most recovering addicts choose love.  They choose humanity.  They choose to believe that their problems- the ones that drove them out of the escape hatch of life, into the throws of addiction- are small potatoes and they need to let them go.  They realize that the world has had enough of their worst behavior and needs their best behavior.  Regardless of whether you asked to be an addict or not, the fact is that the devil was running around for years wearing you as a suit and you have to be the one to make up for that.  You may never be able to put enough good into the world to make up for your personal worst, but you have to resolve to make it to the bitter end trying.