"Humans"

Who am I but a small and tumbling speck...smaller than a grain of sand in such an enormous universe? Sometimes I wonder if anything I've ever thought or experienced will matter. Yet, inside me is a universe all its own, bright so bright, a voluminous dream that consumes me with both hope and despair. Perhaps we all wish, as I do, that our inner world, our struggle to exist will not be washed away by time. Does our essence leave a mark? To love, to fear, to fight win or lose, I pray that passion leads me to act with an extraordinary strength to dream an always bigger dream. In this way, my insignificance becomes a state of wonder and the overwhelming urge to never settle for regret.

I once thought the way to joy was intoxication. To escape reality was my goal. Daily living seemed like an endless depression back then, and indeed it was. There's not much to live for when you can't even do basic things like feed or clothe yourself. Maslow knew what he was talking about. In my youth I saw no connection between drunkenness and hopelessness. I thought getting high was what saved me from my misery. In actuality, the cycle of my addiction was the cause. To fly, to crash, to withdraw, to fly again... this is a death sentence that shatters a person one click at at time. Like the deafening tick of an old clock in a silent room, I could hear the coming of my own demise. With each binge came an increasing urgency to recover. But, I could not, at least not on my own.

Addicts and alcoholics are notoriously arrogant underachievers. They revel in being "the worst of the worst". I took pride in any activity that set me apart from being "normal" (whatever normal means). Truth is, I couldn't stand the thought of having knowingly broken every solemn promise I'd ever made to myself. As a child I was loving and insightful. I saw meaning in everything. When I was in kindergarten we lived down the street from a slave cemetery. I read every name on every grave marker to show my respect for the tragedy of the era in which they lived. I even apologized out loud for what my ancestors had done and vowed to never treat anyone with such hatred. To be so passionate hurts and some things should not be ignored. At five years old I felt as if the world was blind. Why, I thought, should the summation of people's lives be lost among the dreary vines of a carelessly ragged burial, their names fading to obscurity as the rain erodes the crude cut limestone impressions that held them? People, anyone, deserved more. With such injustice in the world, why would anyone subscribe to anything "normal"? How does anyone live knowing the truth? In Sonny's Blues James Baldwin wrote "“All that hatred down there,” he said. “All that hatred and misery and love. It’s a wonder it doesn’t blow the avenue apart.” Truly it is a wonder.

Through a train of circumstances, I found the help I needed, the kind of help that brings a person back to life. Sometimes, seeing change in others is the best window into seeing the possibility in yourself. Many people over the years had been my advocate. By the time I sobered up, most people that knew me were becoming satisfied with mere diplomacy. A diplomat often winds up pleading with the dictator of a warring nation, begging them to stop fighting, or at least stop fighting long enough to let everyone have peace for a time. As the dictator of a warring mind, I couldn't stop fighting with the world at large. To surrender meant the admission of a tragic reality...that I had indeed reached the end of my threshold to maintain control over the nature of my situation. My relationship with this deep denial had become almost a state of psychosis. In my mind, I was some sort of profit, a man that had chosen to live a life free of material possessions in order to subvert becoming another Ward Cleaver. As it turns out, even the Ward Cleavers of the world fall prey to addiction.