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.

 

Peer-Led

I’ve just sat in a lovely peer-led group with us all each facilitating the meeting because Brian the SMART leader was off rambling around Welsh mountains. I think SMART stands for Self-Management-And-Recovery-Training. It was an informal gathering and we continued talking until well after our time was up. There’s a lady there named Fiona who I quite like a lot. She’s about 52 or something, and a drunk. Drunks are a bit boring, I think, compared to addicts, especially with the no glorification rule, which forbids them from telling us about all the wild outrageous and brazen scandalous funny times they’ve had on the booze. Still, I learn a lot from them, which is why I attend AA (Alcoholics Anonymous). They can still hallucinate, and they can still know that familiar overwhelming murky gloom which at times can flummox the addictive brain.

I shared about my current predicament, being addicted to a porn star. I said that I watch it via a live-stream portal, so that we can see each other. They asked me do I love her and do I want a relationship with her. The answer is no on both counts! It is not love at all, it is merely sexual desire. Part of me thinks and knows it is disgusting and gross, yet the sinful members of my body are attracted towards such lewd carnality because it is entertaining and pleasurable. I mentioned my protective spirits which watch over me at all times, and said that I was having second thoughts because of them. How would you feel, if you were an angel, sent to protect someone, and they were fapping over the devil all the time? It would be quite infuriating, wouldn’t it? I don’t know how I can find it inside me to do it to them. It’s just sheer lust addiction. I’ve always said that nothing else matters when on the coke and porn.

We were brought free pizza in halfway through the group as a gift from the cooking group here at CGL (Change Grow Live). CGL is a big rehab constitution throughout the country, they have centres everywhere but Warrington’s services are regarded as up there with the best of ’em. It’s widely regarded as a scummy place for druggies and a magical palace of recovery and strength and hope and faith in equal measure. I choose to perceive it as a bit of both. All I know for sure is that I’ll be getting a phat dollop of dopamine dumped in my brain come payday, with my porn star and my drug of choice, thank you very much. I know, that is defeatist mentality, I should be saying that I’m going to batter my addiction and never use that crap again, and to stay far away from pornographic tarts, but there you go, I’m just spitting the God’s honest truth about proceedings.

Even on a perfect day, after maybe say making a 147 at The Crucible Theatre, scoring the winning goal at Wembley, skydiving, white water rafting, winning at a poker game, even killing a man-eating lion with nothing but torches and spears with a gaggle of Neanderthals; nothing compares to the dopamine buzz on coke and porn. That’s why it’s got me by the short and curlies at the moment; you can’t attain the same feeling anywhere else in life, and life is a big place. I don’t know what I am going to do, maybe just one last time, it is always just one last time; walking on the dark side, burning the midnight oil, sabotaging my bridges. May it one day end once and for all…like maybe when I’m dead Lord.