Life is about choices – and their consequences

Technorati Tags: Drug addiction,Relapse,Narcotics Anonymous,Drug treatment,Drug rehabilitation

I hope to make this a continuation of the last two paragraphs of  the previous post where I got bogged down and was in some mental turmoil.

This will come about whenever we remember regrettable things and actions that we have not fully come to terms with. With me in that one, it is memory of the first dose in 1993 after 12 years that resulted in fullblown relapse. And the natural sequence of that would inevitably be the disasters that were to follow over the years … of damaging, losing and destroying various persons, places and things.

This is the imagery about I that I had written in an e-mail message yesterday: – saat mula relapse, yang kemudian s-a-t-u  d-e-m-i  s-a-t-u  benda-benda yang penting dalam hidup saya mula hilang dan hancur… I saw it all again being replayed…

Try imagining it; drug addiction “like a bowling ball” in slow-slow motion approaching the pins – not knocking down all of them at once, but hitting just one pin at the side near the gutter, which symbolise any one aspect of life. The bowling ball is no longer there, but the pin, which flies and flips in slow-slow motion, and  in dropping down still flipping, now hits and launches another pin which does the same. And so it goes…

Over the years, whether in active addiction or some phase of either treatment, rehabilitaion or recovery, I would emotionally beat myself again and again – feeling something like “I need to be punished” … of self-hatred or scorn for that crucial DECISION and CHOICE despite already knowing about the risks and possibilities from personal  experience of addiction during teenage years. And the condition and fate of contemporaries who had made that choice earlier.

There would always be “what if I had not?” moments; which the regret, remorse and anger created further adding to the gloom, depression and hopelessness … making continuing with it “more tolerable” than quitting, which did not seem like a viable nor sustainable choice . Dismay; zero confidence to think about this attempt to “Rebuild a self and a life destroyed”, much less to try it.

[Folks, perhaps that one might help explain why addicts seem to be caught in an endless loop … perhaps explaining the question of “Why don’t they do something about their addiction?… ngapa takder self-motivation langsung diorang ni.” ]

When at the end of the road we find that we can no longer
function as a human being, either with or without drugs, we all
face the same dilemma. What is there left to do? There seems
to be this alternative: either go on as best we can to the bitter
ends–jails, institutions or death–or find a new way to live. In
years gone by, very few addicts ever had this last choice.

[From: Narcotics Anonymous ISBN 1-55776-025-X; 286 pages. I was given a copy of this one by Mark E, an English recovering addict married to an American and living in Brooklyn, New York in 2000. I consider this as one of the very most important books that I have]

In my case, in that previous post – What exactly was I facing? What did I do? Did I reach that state above?

*UPDATE 25 Sept 3.30PM: Being kept busy at the other `cari makan’ site. This site is more important actually, for it concerns “Life, and what I want to be” … which is why I don’t want to rush with things by writing Posts just to increase the content here. They have to come from the inside…

* 10:40PM: Had added a link to Connie Madson ( “Who’s she?”) under “Self-Improvement”. Someone from the US had visited this site, and had given me the link: From ethics to glamorized investing to humanitarian optimism, to wanting to work with the Russian Prime Minister, Connie Madson is a fish swimming against the tide of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s modern day Jazz Age http://www.connie-madson.com/about.html