Everyone has their own opinion and their own path in matters like this and I hope not to make this a launch pad for the kind of unproductive discussion that this topic often precipitates. My path and my recovery has included medical care and psychotropic and other medication.

The one that has been most important is currently in phase II clinical trials for treatment of methamphetamine dependence. It has long been used off label for treatment of ADHD. It’s tough to be ADHD and a speed freak. There hasn’t been anything available that really works that isn’t a stimulant before. This…

Whatever 12 step program (or programs) we come from, we are a fellowship; “an elite group of experienced people who work together as peers“*, sharing our experience, strength, and hope with each other in the pursuit of a solution to our common problem and to help others to recover. The price for admission to our little society is higher than for any I know of. The price we pay to walk into the rooms truly sets apart from the rest of the world.

My sponsor/mentor/adviser/friend, a man who has been sober for 38 years, told me that there have been times…

The first tool they “lay at our feet” in DA is tracking; carefully recording all income and expenditures. It is pretty easy to track total abstainance, but in a program for something you absolutely have to use, tracking becomes very important.

I had some money in my pocket since I got paid for a little side gig I do, so I set out to go buy the little spiral notebook they suggested I get so I could write down everything I spend and everything I take in. Of course I only became willing to go shopping for the notebook after having…

One time they had this raccoon name Cookie and I used to spend hours watching him try to wash a cracker. They’d put a little pan of water out in the backyard, and then they’d give him a soda cracker and he’d wash cracker after cracker and never could figure out what happened to it when it disappeared.

Fried Green Tomatoes at the Whistle Stop Cafe, by Fannie Flag

I love that little bit of Ninny Threadgoode’s story. It appeals to me because of the delightful way it informs us about the character; her temperment, her place in time, her sense…

So with a new program comes a new language and I find that slightly weird. And you know me. I’m so intellectually proud that asking for clarification is the last thing I ever want to do. In Debtors Anonymous, at least the way it is practiced here, the introductions are a little complex. The menu of identifiers is pretty big and nobody picks just one.

Hi, I’m Chris. I’m a compulsive debtor, spender, and popper.

That’s what they said. Popper. At least I could swear that’s what I heard. I have been racking my brains for three weeks trying to discern from…

I heard the coolest thing at a meeting last night.

“It’s like you and God are in a rowboat, and God is like, “You can steer or you can row.” Just keep in mind that God doesn’t row.”

I think I’ve written before that I always seem to get results when I’m willing to take action. We always talk about “doing the footwork,” and “doing the next right/indicated thing.” But I love how the rowboat analogy encompases both the requirement that we take action and that the outcome is not up to us. I like how simply it communicates all that and…

No one should consider it a huge surprise that I am a bit of an Abba fan. It seems to be part and parcel of being a gay man of a certain age.  For me the ‘disorder’ is compounded by the fact that I spent 1981, Abba’s most commercially successful year, living in Sweden.  I remember Abba in fantastic and magical ways.

I think of recovery in fantastic and magical ways, too, but let’s face it, “life on life’s terms” can be terrifically difficult; especially for someone without many effective ‘life skills’. Life’s terms have improved for me lately, but they…

It was quite awhile ago now, so long ago that I barely remember, but I got to experience the Northridge earthquake in 1994. Now that earthquake, at a magnitude of 6.4, was approximately 31 times greater than yesterday’s earthquake in Chino Hills. When I saw news coverage about the earthquake on the news, yesterday my mind immediately dismissed the event as inconsequential. There are 800 quakes the size of yesterday’s every year.

Isn’t it amazing that one can be pretentious about being in an earthquake? I have such a long way to go. Anyway, having dismissed reports of the quake yesterday…

Whatever pretty word I tried to obscure it with, innocence, naiveté, I was really fooling myself, and no one else. The truth was plain to everyone. When I got it, though, I got it completely. Twenty five years of fooling myself led me to the sudden, and profound realization of the truth. I can never use methamphetamine again without developing the phenomena of craving which sends me down a path of self-destruction. Just like any other complex system, though, when one part of a life is radically altered, every other part is forced to change. When one old idea is…

It’s not the job I want, but it is a job I’ll like and will be good at, and certainly the irony is not lost on me.  I’m designing closets, a space I know well.  (Now that you’re out of the closet, could you step into mine and decorate it?)

I had forgotten how much easier to get up in the morning when you have someplace to go and something to do -other than look for work.  I actually woke up half an hour before my alarm went off.  I’m aware that it is only a partial solution, but I am…

Chip hesitated.  She didn’t know if we’d even find a topic in what she shared.  Chip has been sober for 12 years.  If she is bringing up a topic in a meeting, even if it is just to let us know the painful details of life, happening, there is a topic in it.

She just got home from Texas where  she attended the funeral of her brother and sexual abuser, who’s carefully planned suicide was likely a result of shame, resentment, and untreated alcoholism.  The minute she mentioned the word suicide, Dennis, a “30 day wonder” and unfortunate artifact of my…

OK. I’ve walked through the door of the first meeting and I lived. Neither of the people who I know to be active members of DA were there, which unnerved me at the beginning. By the end of the meeting I was glad to have been able to have a first time experience that was all my own.

The group is very small. They meet once a week. Once I was there, though, I felt right at home. I clearly belong there. Because there are no other meetings it is going to be particularly important to place ‘principles befor personalities’. Perhaps…

My name is Chris and I’m an addict. By the grace of a Higher Power of my own understanding, strong sponsorship, the fellowship and the program of Alcoholics Anonymous, I have not had to imbibe, ingest, inhale, or inject anything, to change who I am or to cope with the intolerable condition of my physical, mental, and spiritual life, for 18 consecutive months, today, and for that I am incredibly grateful.

Do you have any idea how hard it is to fill out a stupid job application and turn it in?

OK. That was a stupid question. Most of you probably do. My hangups are my own. Lots of people on felony probation get jobs every day. I’m the one who is down on me about it. One of the things that intimidates me most about them is that, I don’t know. Either I’m stupid or retarded or irrepairably brain damaged, but I cannot, for the life of me, remember what happened and when.

I’m not really, absolutely sure when anything happened, or…

You know, every time I come out the other side of one of these things, I’m exhausted. Reenergized and hopeful, but some part of me is just wiped out. Getting back to writing takes a little time. I guess it’s kind of like the feeling one has after a big meal; satisfied, contented, and lethargic. This meal was made out of large chunks of truth about myself.

For one thing, in addition to being powerless over drugs and alcohol, I’m powerless over money. There’s a whole other 12 step program for that. Seems my sponsor goes to that program, too. The…

Just like with drugs and alcohol, it seems to be a natural part of my character that until I have exhausted every other possible means of doing something, tried out every tiny, mad idea about how I can manage on my own power to get my life to work out the way I want it to, entertained every lurking notion my ego can generate, and laid waste to every reservation disguised by unwillingness, I am incapable of surrendering that part of my life to the Higher Power and the principles that got me sober. I simply do not surrender unless…

Really, really struggling. Can’t seem to pull myself out of it, either. Had a few good days there for a bit, but the last two months have been grueling. I am so easily paralized by fear that it doesn’t take much to find myself in a place where it feels impossible to take action.

So here I am, again, in a place where the demands of life are pressing down on my and my response is to collapse. It’s always something that can be solved by throwing a wad of cash at it, not even very much cash. Just more than…

“The only concept of god that I believed in at all, when I got here, was the God of Unintended Consequences,” Robert said, sitting across the table from me eating burritos at a taco stand at one o’clock in the morning. “Every time I drank bad stuff happened. I wasn’t trying to wreck my car, or sleep with my friend’s girlfriend, or get arrested. I wasn’t trying to lose my job or get beaten up. It just happened.”

The nature of consciousness is to sort, order, categorize, label, associate, attribute, and differentiate sensory and cognitive information. Our very brains are structurally…

We often speak about the phenomenan of craving. It is not something that I consider very often. Physical craving goes away after only a short time of abstainence. The deeper work of recovery is in addressing the mental obsession, which is often and incorrectly described as craving, and the underlying causes and conditions which set the obsession into motion, what we 12 steppers call the spiritual malady.

I don’t think about the physical compulsion, the craviing, much because my craving for methamphetamin left me long, long ago. I rarely experience the mental obsession anymore, either. I do have the occasional though…

I guess personal relationships just come more easily for some people. At least that’s what it looks like. I’d see them in school. They had straighter, whiter teeth, and shiny hair that lay where it was supposed to. They were good at sports. They knew who to talk to and what to say. They liked the right music and wore the right clothes. They looked comfortable inside their own bodies, I desperately wanted to be one of them, to be granted access to the popular kids table at the cafeteria and all that it symbolized, but I could never seem…

I started working with a new spnsor recently. I started taking the steps again, from the beginning. It is the best thing I could have done for my recovery. I’m not only excited about the program again, particularly about the way of studying the material that I’m learning and the opprtunity to pass this experience along. I had run out of specific instructions to pass along to the men I work with long before I began to become bored with it myself.

I never really lost my passion for recovery, something I see happening to lots of people. I’m grateful for…

I am the oldest of 4 children. My sisters are 2 years and 6 years younger than me. My brother is 13 years younger. Until the day my parents divorced we were raised in a home free of alcohol. Then everything changed.

For reasons of her own, the older of my two sisters, Stephanie, has not spoken to our mother in five years. For similar reasons, even though we live in the same city, I haven’t spoken to our mother in 18 months. Stephanie and I have a lot of stuff to talk about.

We rarely have the opportunity to talk, though.…

It’s no big secret that I practice 12 step recovery. Though I take the program very seriously, I am by no definition a “Big Book Thumper” or a “Boomer” as the strange personality cult in my area are called in honor of their sponsor, but I digress. I take the program seriously. It got me “sober”, but much of my recovery falls under the heading of “God will constantly disclose more to you and to us”.

Having said that, I have a confession. Sometimes meetings drive me insane. Some meetings more than others. Some people in the program drive me insane,…

Did you ever have a day when everything seemed to go wrong? Or a week?

I thought so.

Have you ever found yourself in a situation where you can’t seem to figure out if you’re supposed to be practicing the principle of perseverance or of acceptance? Or have you ever tried to do something that you know you have to do, with fewer resources than you’d like to have to do it and become so frustrated along the way that it takes everything in your power to not give up?

I thought so. Life is like that, isn’t it?

About a week ago I…

Methamphetamine quickly assumed a great role in C’s and my lives. He became a slut. I became resentful. It ended badly and violently.

I was unable to stop using and I continued like that for a year, frequently exchanging sex and drugs for the sound of a heart beating next to me to help kill the pain. It didn’t work, of course. I just continued getting crazier. Somewhere in there I landed in a psych ward again. This time I was taken there by the police. In the end I decided that I couldn’t get sober on my own. I needed…

I’ve been trying to think of the polite way to describe the next part of my story, the PG version, and I can’t seem to do it, so I won’t go into any detail except to say that I had broken up with a boyfriend whom I had loved very much. That whole relationship had been prior to my methamphetamine use. I “sought out sordid places” to ease the pain of the breakup and it was there that I was introduced to meth.

All the feelings of sorrow over the lost relationship vanished. All my shame over being gay vanished. My…

I realized yesterday that I’ve been writing here for over a month and I’ve never told any of my story. I don’t want anyone to think that I’m just some random dude writing about something I know nothing about, so I figured it would be a good idea to qualify myself as a real addict.

I’m the last guy most people would ever suspect would have a problem with drugs or alcohol. There’s a family picture taken in probably 1971 and I swear my little sister and I look like we’re sitting in the laps of the most optimistic young couple…

It’s the sixth month so of course the sixth step has been the topic in many of the meetings I’ve attended recently. “Were entirely ready to have God remove all these defects of character.” That’s a pretty imposing direction. There are two words there that frighten me. Those words are ‘entirely’ and ‘all’.

Entirely and all. I guess a lot of sponsors have the people they work with write the definitions of each of the words in the 1st step. Mine didn’t but I can see the value in it. I’ve actually used the same trick to explore other ideas. I’ll…