Leave the Light On Read online

  Two things hit me simultaneously: I was alive, and I was safe. These two things I must constantly remind myself of, and they still feel slightly surprising, especially when I’m awakening from the nightmares of my past. God, the nightmares had been awful. They are little reruns of the horror show of my addiction, my fear, and my desperation that drove me to the last night I used. These mini-movies danced around in my subconscious, and I would have given anything to cancel the upcoming repeat performance.

  I was living in Matthew’s home. Matthew was a guy I met in the rehabilitation program I had been in for twenty-eight days. We weren’t supposed to be dating because the rules of recovery dictate no intimate relationships or major changes for the first year. I was still breaking rules. That much hadn’t changed. I moved in with him and his father in State College, Pennsylvania, after leaving the halfway house in Lancaster and lived in the room that was his sister’s until she moved out when she got married. Matthew and I were dating, if that is what you want to label it. I had no idea what we were doing because I had no idea from day to day or moment to moment what I was doing. What I wanted and who I was were total mysteries to me. I was catapulted into this new life and these new surroundings, and I felt as awkward as a newborn fawn trying out its legs for the first time, all wobbly and unsure. At least a fawn has its mother’s safe underbelly to retreat to when it is unsure. I was here virtually alone.

  I swung my feet over the bed and stumbled out toward the hallway. I heard the clanging of coffee mugs in the kitchen to my right, and I knew Matthew and his father were most likely getting ready for work. They had jobs, purpose, and something structured to look forward to. Me, I was twenty-two years old and still floating around in this bubble, this “pink cloud” they call early recovery. I had yet to find a job or purpose or anything other than my daily twelve-step meetings and Oprah to keep me sane.

  My days had been pretty boring as I adjusted to living outside the daily grind of confinement. I went from having every hour structured with activities that I had to complete or else, to a freedom that didn’t quite fit yet. I felt incredibly vulnerable and naked all the time. Like a snail slowly poking its head out into the world for the first time, I realized the world was way bigger and scarier than the comfort of my shell, and I quickly retreated back. I would normally just crawl back into bed and pull the sheets over my head like the snail; but unlike me, the snail doesn’t have a horror flick waiting inside its shell. Best to avoid sleep. At least while I was awake I could stop most of the nightmares or quickly disengage them when they flooded my memory like flash photography, quickly blinding me and shifting my balance.

  Anyone who tells you early recovery is easy is full of shit. It is the hardest transition and transformation I have ever made in my life. And it never ends. The processing, the talking, the crying, the feeling never stops or I will stop—stop being clean and in recovery, that is. And for me, that would mean to stop living. I was saved somehow from the desire to use and from the survival instinct to run from everything. Now it was my job to maintain the new life that I had been given and to build upon it—to stop running. I felt like that new life was a direct gift from God, and violating that gift by using would be like giving a big ol’ middle finger to my higher power, and I was not willing to do that. Even though I was not sure who my higher power was, I was pretty sure I didn’t want to piss off him or her just yet.

  Recovery is the biggest commitment I have ever made. It is a lifelong changing of behavior and a full shift in thinking. I had to become willing to set aside all I ever thought I knew and open my mind to new ideas and approaches and a completely different way of thinking. It required a deep level of humility and willingness to accept that my ideas and my thinking weren’t the best at times. These are tough things for the ego to deal with and let go of. I was more comfortable being right and being stubborn about how right I was. I liked to argue, and I was creative and quick in my intellectual debates. I could make a case for anything and have it come across sounding accurate. I have the gift of bullshit, like most addicts and attorneys. The beauty and sometimes-annoying reality of recovery is that I am not unique in this gift, and, as the old saying goes, “you can’t shit a shitter.” I had to be willing to put that aside and try to be open to accept that I was wrong and then listen to someone else tell me what was right. Well, that was just exhausting. But it was a process, and one with a built-in learning curve. I had a “get-out-of-jail-free card” to make mistakes and have someone guide me through those mistakes and show me how to do it differently the next time.

  I finally figured out in rehab that my problems and my pain stemmed from using alcohol and drugs. That was a huge admission for me. I never wanted to look at using as the problem—in my mind, it was the solution. But after I tried to kill myself, it became abundantly clear to me that using would eventually kill me. Then, as the clarity kept coming, it became easier for me to look back on my destructive years and realize that the majority of bad things that happened in my life involved drugs and alcohol in some way. My actions were at the root of all the evil. These revelations began to light up in my head all at once, and it hit me: I am an addict. I made that admission rather quickly in rehab. I realized I was powerless over drinking as I sat thinking about how often I was actually able to drink and not get hammered. I think I counted about five times. I remembered them vividly, because every time I had obsessed over wanting to drink more. By the time rehab came to an end, I’d had so many lightbulb moments that I felt like a Lite-Brite toy, walking around with all my knowledge beaming out of me. I was glowing with new information that began to transform itself into actual strength within me. They say knowledge is power. What a truth!

  As I became more knowledgeable about my disease—and I do believe addiction is a disease—I was building my strength and flexing my new muscles. See, once I knew and understood my enemy, it would be much easier to defeat it. Now that I knew my weakness was the disease of addiction, I began to build my army to protect myself against it. My army consisted of twelve-step meetings, the recovery text of my twelve-step fellowship, my connection to a higher power and praying, continual education for my brain, talking to people, exposing my disease, and just being honest with myself and others. These little soldiers helped me one day at a time in the big war against my addiction. And the soldiers began winning. They are armed not with my hands, but with thoughts in my head. But like any war and any fight, my resources become depleted quickly, and I often need a ton of support to keep winning.

  Tired and in need of that support, I found it in State College, a little town up on a mountain in Pennsylvania. Until that point, my natural reflex in response to everything challenging in my life was to run, hide, get high, and just escape. This whole idea of facing everything was a new learned behavior, and like any learned behavior, practice would make perfect. But the practice, while exhilarating at times, was also horrifically draining.

  State College is home to Pennsylvania State University and not much else. The town thrives on the university, and if you live there you are a student, faculty member, staff, or an unfortunate townie who was born there and somehow ended up never leaving. I joked that State College was a fairy-tale land, a little make-believe oasis way up over a mountain in a valley—“Happy Valley,” to quote the town’s slogan. The town had very little crime, at least little that the residents wanted you to know about, though date rapes and assaults occurred on campus and were underreported or never reported. The town also had very little, if any, homelessness or poverty, unless you counted the small trailer park next to the local Wal-Mart or the one long-haired dude we called the vagrant who wandered the streets. One lady also wandered the streets; we called her the dime lady because she walked around picking up change all over town. The story was that she was very wealthy but chose to live on the streets because of mental health issues. Otherwise, students, professionals, and a bunch of drunks and former drug addicts made up the population of Happy Valley.

  The
re were no drug dealers or prostitutes on the streets at night. I learned later that they hide in the fraternity houses surrounding the campus. After all, there are always drugs to be found; you just have to have the ability to sniff them out like a trained dog. I’d always had that uncanny ability. No matter where I was, I could sniff out a drug user a mile away and would find myself migrating in that direction. It’s a gift, really—just one I no longer have any use for, unless you consider the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA). I would be a great drug enforcement agent because my nose for drugs is ten times better than any trained bloodhound’s. Actually, if the DEA agents were smart, they would recruit at rehabs, because who better to hunt down drug dealers than their best customers? Perhaps ironically, you cannot be in the DEA, FBI, or CIA if you answer yes to these questions:

  Have you done illegal drugs in the past ten years?

  (Okay, if I wait this one out, maybe I can enlist.)

  Have you smoked marijuana fifteen times or more in your lifetime?

  (Ummm, I’ve smoked that much in a day.)

  Application DENIED!

  Guess I won’t be joining the force anytime soon. Regardless, State College was a quaint, peaceful town. It truly was Happy Valley to me upon my arrival. I was more than four hours away from my former life in Allentown. Walking the streets, I had a freedom that felt incredible to me. Bad memories and potential dangers weren’t lurking around every corner. Everything was fresh and new and clean, like a crisp piece of white paper just waiting to be filled with adventures. I would later find out that avoiding downtown on Thursday, Friday, and Saturday nights after about 10:00 p.m. would serve me well, because at those times the streets were filled with drunken students and alumni celebrating the latest football win or drowning their sorrows over the latest loss—reactions that looked oddly the same. Otherwise, it was the perfect place for me to start my life over. It felt safe, for now.

  I was flying high on what they call in early recovery the “pink cloud.” The pink cloud is a common place for many newcomers to land in the beginning of recovery, because it really is a different type of “high” to discover how wonderful life can be without chemicals. When you accept the realization that you never again have to live the way you were living in that utter darkness, it is amazing! You begin to feel alive again. For the first time, your skin is breathing. Your senses are awakened in a whole new way. Food tastes different, flowers smell pretty, the sky is just a little bit bluer, and the possibilities begin to seem endless. Everything is so new, so bright, so exciting that you feel like a little kid again, and in many ways, most of us are. Learning to walk and talk again in recovery is such an amazing gift. Tears are genuine, and they flow freely like rain. Feelings are actually felt in their fullest states. Music floats differently into the ears and sounds crisper, and lyrics make sense on a deeper level. Laughter is the real, heartfelt, stomach-hurting kind of pure laughter. Life is lived. A day has a definite beginning and end. Morning gives way to evening and all is remembered and experiences are wholly felt. Lips actually enjoy touching the cheek, while smiles splash across the face and are felt deep inside the heart. Blackouts aren’t an option; missing pieces of the night before isn’t a possibility.

  I was loving everyone in the rooms of my twelve-step meetings, loving being alive, and loving my sheer existence. I had the innocence of a newborn and a naiveté that was out of sync with my past “been around the block, don’t mess with me” persona. A new lease on life was what I signed in rehab and it felt wonderful, as though I could breathe a huge sigh of relief because my past was miles behind me. My most horrible nightmares and trashy actions were left sitting on top of the mountain where my rehab was located or were hidden in my sleep or in my mind where only I could see them.

  So I was free—free to begin a new life, to start over fresh and, I hoped, to not screw up royally.

  2

  LYRICAL RANTS

  KATHY WAS, HANDS-DOWN, MY ABSOLUTE BEST FRIEND throughout my early twenties. We met during high school when I had a job at a local low-end clothing store for teens. She was my manager and was a couple of years older than I was. We both had a love of partying that we recognized in each other during early Saturday morning openings when we would both stumble in hung over as hell. We would glance up at each other and exchange the same glassy-eyed, nauseated expression, which made us fast best friends. We attended rival high schools, so we didn’t know many of the same people. It was nice to have a friend outside my inner circle.

  Ours was the annoying kind of friendship where if we weren’t in each other’s immediate company, we were glued to the phone talking endlessly about anything and everything at all hours. The only time we would break from conversation was to shower before meeting up with one another, and I am pretty convinced that if I’d had a phone in the shower, we would have been talking then too. It got so bad that finally my parents got me my own phone line in the house. Kathy also had her own line, so that freed us up to talk incessantly. We talked about everything girls our age talked about: clothing, fashion, boys, friends, relationships, work, dreams, etc. We analyzed everything together and wouldn’t have dreamed of leaving the house to meet up without getting verbal acceptance of what we were wearing that night. At that time, she was the closest thing I’d ever had to a sister. We trusted each other with everything in the way only young girls do.

  I was never physically attracted to her, as I had been with some of my other best friends. Not because she wasn’t a beautiful girl, but because it just wasn’t there for me. She was truly my best friend and that was it. We started hanging out every weekend, then eventually that began to bleed into the week, and then we were partying hard-core all the time. Kathy and I could party it up just as hard as any guy we knew. We held our own in any situation and got hammered together to the point of oblivion.

  One time we decided to hit an all-day beer-tasting festival, where you buy a twelve-ounce glass and walk from booth to booth trying a variety of ales and microbrew beers. It was like a candy store for an alcoholic. Although beer was my main drink of choice, mainly because of accessibility and cost, I wasn’t a huge beer fan, and I had never really ventured beyond the cheap shit we could afford to drink in high school. When we wanted to really be tacky and tie one on, we traded up for a forty-ounce malt liquor, with Crazy Horse or Colt 45 among my favorites. So this was new territory for me, and I was excited! We arrived around 11:00 a.m., about an hour after I had woken up, and we bought our little glasses. I was pissed that they only had twelve-ounce glasses; I mean, who the hell drank from a twelve-ounce glass unless it was to do a shot of something? I never went for anything below sixteen ounces, even when I was drinking wine. Yeah, I was that kind of classy drunk; I drank my white zinfandel from a sixteen-ounce beer stein. I was hot—not!

  We started hitting booths like kids at Halloween, going from booth to booth and sucking down beer, barely tasting the bitter microbrews we were slurping down. After all, we weren’t connoisseurs there to savor the aroma and taste; we were there to get drunk quickly and cheaply. The booths were set up in a circle, with about twenty different breweries present. Intermixed with the breweries were traditional German food vendors serving bratwursts and sausages. That meant for a vegetarian like me there was nothing to eat, which was just as well because I was filling up on beer quickly and the yeast was beginning to bloat my stomach.

  In the middle of the food and beer, a makeshift stage featured several bands playing throughout the day. By 1:00 p.m., Kathy and I had hit every booth and were dancing our drunken asses off in the middle of the festival to a cover band belting out “Sweet Caroline.” Kathy and I were infamous for getting extremely loaded at clubs, pushing our way to the front of the stage like mad groupies and dancing around like absolute fools. We were bouncing off people all around us, but most of them were just as loaded as we were so they didn’t mind. We began our own mini-mosh pit while singing at the top of our lungs: “Sweet Caroline, badda dum, good times never seemed so g
ood. So good! So good!” The band ended its set after the song, and Kathy and I collapsed onto the stage with our arms around one another in fits of laughter.

  The crowd began to disperse back to the various booths around us. The band’s crew was pulling equipment off the stage, and I was shamelessly flirting with a stage crew dude when I heard Kathy’s drunken voice boom out of the speaker next to my head. She sang, “Sweet Caroline, badda dum, Kathy is feeling mighty fine, badda dum, and Storm’s right behind, badda dum.” Kathy had a gift for twisting song lyrics to fit the situation we were in. These lyrical rants always sent me into hysterics, and this time was no different. I was drunk on my ass, lying on the stage, holding my stomach, rolling around, and laughing so hard that tears were streaming out of my eyes. After a verse or two, one of the band crew came up to us and politely removed the microphone from Kathy, who slurred a couple of choice swear words at him before finally giving up and collapsing down next to me.