Early Recovery

The early days, weeks and months of recovery are some of the most scatter brained times I’ve ever had. You may not have gone to the lengths and depths I did in my use of drugs, but no brain suddenly plunged into abstinence is going to perform at it’s best. We may never no what our best might have been. We still have to deal with what we’ve got at the moment.

I wanted to tell people what I did to compensate for the lack of functionality I faced. There were two main problems I was having. One, my head was filled with nonsense. Untruths, dumb stories, unworkable (unwanted) ideas. Just filled to the brim with goofy crap. One of the assets I enjoyed was - I knew it was filled with crap. During my life I spent a fair amount of time studying things. I even spent some time in college. (I couldn’t come up with anything worthwhile to do) So the one thing I wasn’t confused about was that I was nuts. I even knew, to some extent, why.

Two, I couldn’t remember anything. I’d forget why I stood up. I’d stand up and…what the hell did I stand up for? Must have had something in mind….No? Just…short term memory holes…the size of rooms in houses. Couldn’t find anything in them. So I had to get some system for walking around everyday.

As for the old crappy nonsense filled brain I went on an information campaign. Somewhere I had learned that to end a thought I had to replace it with another. That’s a different system but I applied it to the whole “goof ball brain” syndrome. I just started entering data. I got on the torrent sites and downloaded every documentary I saw that I thought might have good data in it. I watched, something like 34 hours of Krishnamurti. I watched a whole college science course put out by…I can’t remember…probably Cal Tech. I set for days and absorbed Richard Feynman. I watched around 14 hours of film on ancient symbolism, astro-theology and the occult. Mythology, cosmology, astronomy. Noam Chomsky, Joseph Campbell, Mark Twain, Samuel Johnson….on and on and on I just crammed it in. I read Pema Chodron, Chogyam Trungpa, Alan watts, Eckhart Tolle…crammed it in by the fist full.

My plan was that as I fed this data in through the front - the crappy data would be forced out the back. The other thing I did was to keep a pen and pad with me. I wrote things down that I wanted to remember. Not the - get milk - stuff, well that too. More the - Watts, on the ceramic model. Stuff I thought would be good to have on me all the time. I put Tolle’s word “breathe” up where I couldn’t help but see it. I put Pema’s word “Stay” up. All clues to what I should be focusing on. My new, intentionally chosen, reality. My “crappy” brain was stuck on a sex and money loop - ways to salvage my ego.

I also found me some binaural beats and subliminal meditation audios - then glued the ear bugs to my head. I knew I wouldn’t survive being nuts and I didn’t know how much time I had. So I treated it as a life or death situation. I lived. I’m here