Run Away (audio) (day 67)

You simply have no energy to ‘spare’ if that makes sense. The wild thing is that it is effortless in some ways once you are sober a couple months (I say ‘a couple months’ as if that is a throw-away amount of time to have been in recovery, as if that is negligible, nothing – it is not nothing). You stop using the drug and that is your sole mission in life, one day at a time. And almost like a miracle or a mystery or magic, you stop wasting your time and energy on all the things that used to drain you to exhaustion. It simply becomes illogical. It makes too much sense to just walk away from the bullshit and so you do. Easily. You realize it isn’t necessarily big things, it’s all the little ways you constantly pissed away your self worth and self respect one tiny gesture or word at a time.

In this new place that is the original you which you had spent your life abandoning but who still (incredibly enough) remains, waiting, all of what you are, all of your new found health and glow and stamina, is invested in yourself. Your own life and saving it. All of who I am is in service of what I need, want, desire, dream, and have to do. Sound arrogant? Sound like I’m not grateful enough? Sound a little bit out of line? Perhaps you would prefer I spread myself as thin as I used to. So thin you could see through me and I couldn’t feel myself at all.

What comes into focus is how desperately you need and love and want yourself to stay. How could you have left. How could you have abandoned the one soul, the only soul, who ever really needed you. How could I have done that. Just kept leaving and leaving and leaving. Everyday. Once it gets going, and it really doesn’t take much, addiction is a runaway train. You become the machinery. It’s poison but what else is there. Nothing else works so perfectly, so smooth, so quick. It hurts but so do you and so does life and so does everything. You swallow the diesel and try to get as far away as you can. Til the train runs out of track.