End Of A Era

I’ve just been ‘discharged’ from Pathways, my local Drugs & Alcohol rehabilitation clinic. They prefer to call it ‘graduated’. I think it’s complete and utter BS. They don’t understand that I really need the place, although I wasn’t about to start grovelling. I can still go to certain classes, but some of them will be missed. Now it will be more difficult to fill my days and it was hard enough in the first place. The afternoons and early evenings in my life have just gotten an awful lot more problematic to navigate. What am I going to do now?

They go on about Pathways as some sort of magical hub of wellbeing and recovery. It makes me think of Russell Crowe in the movie A Beautiful Mind (2001), when he is still attending the local library to educate himself as an old age pensioner. I mistakenly thought Pathways was like that, somewhere which always made you feel welcome and would never turn you away. I was wrong. Now I’ve been kicked out into touch with no support.

Apart from this it’s been the usual old codswallop, up all night tweaked out of my mind fighting demons until the morning and beyond. And I mean literally fighting them, this isn’t a figure of speech. I’ve taken a major step and deleted all my numbers, so I now have no access to chemicals. I’ve only ever done this once in my life before, as I believe the only feeling worse than using is wanting to use but not being able to. Wouldn’t you know it, but as soon as I delete them, a dealer turns up outside the pub last night. I ignored him.

Pathways did a party last night. I got a certificate for attending the walking groups, which I’ll no longer be able to frequent. We walk up mountains every other Friday or so. There were disco lights and raffles and turkey barms, it was all very jolly. The day before I attended a musical and drama performance in Holy Trinity church done by a number of people with learning disabilities. It was all very heart-warming, watching young girls with Down’s Syndrome pretending to be Lady Gaga and playing the air guitar. Very pleasant indeed. It raised up a number of uncomfortable questions, as it usually does when I am around those poor yet blessed souls afflicted with learning disabilities.

Partly because that’s how I see myself. Some of my behaviours around porn and drugs are very peculiar to Aspergers, Autism, Catatonia and general Spacca and Mong deficiency. Pardon me for my political rudeness with those last two descriptions. Social services were involved with me as a child, and I also had an Identity Crisis as a child, and I’ve also always been unusual and odd in certain ways. So when you put me with these kinds of people, I feel very uncomfortable about myself. But once straighten out this awkwardness and sense their true light, and how innocent and pure they are, I start to get over myself and enjoy their company.