I know there hasn't been a lot of challenge posts lately, I guess right now I just feel led to post about some the things going on that I think effect people and their connections to one another. Those types of things are the other part of this project.
Over the weekend, Amy Winehouse was found in her apartment in England dead of an apparent drug overdose. It saddened me to see how quickly people played Monday morning quarterback to her death, pointing out how much they just knew this would happen. How easily people dismissed her as just another junkie.
My guess is these people have never faced addiction themselves or loved someone who has faced addiction.
Addiction, in any form, is an illness. If people with addictions could stop, they would, but they can't. That's what makes them addicts.
So many people I have known and so many people I love have suffered from some form of addiction. Thankfully, many of them work their programs and pursue their recovery and win the battle over their addiction every day. Not everyone is so lucky.
I know what it is to be the enabler on the other side, hoping that you will be enough for them to quit. It's a very hard lesson to learn it's not up to you.
When someone chooses recovery over addiction, most times they have to change their entire life.It all depends on how far they fell in the first place. But I cannot imagine how hard it must be to try and rid your life of something that wants to kill you when people are offering it to you all the time in order to become your pal. This is what many celebrities face as they try and pursue recovery.
And if you have never encountered those with addiction, please know the addiction is often the symptom of something greater. Pain so deep that numbing yourself to it seems like the only answer.
I lived with a Heroin addict for six months. I had no idea what I was getting myself into. He was my best friend and his own worst enemy. He started using drugs very early on to deal with the pain of the molestation that he had suffered at the hands of a family member during his childhood.
The time we lived together was during his second shot at sobriety. And I use the term sobriety loosely.
I would come home to find rambling notes on my door about how Heroin was the only love he really knew and that if he could just "fall in love" one more time, life would be better.
Sometimes he would get drunk and fall asleep in my bed, leaving me to go into his room and sleep in his.
Most mornings I would have to wake him up in order for him to make it to work. And part of that early morning ritual would involve taking heavy stage makeup to his arms so his track marks wouldn't show.
Those are just brief and not too graphic glimpses into those 6 months.It was a very hard time in my life, not just because I had no idea how to deal with what was in front of me, but to watch someone you love slowly killing themselves.
After he moved out, he found out he was positive with Hep C and he made a third attempt at sobriety that I heard stuck. Last I knew he was married and living in Arizona. I think about him often and hope he is pursuing recovery and working his program. I pray that their are no troubled phone calls to his family that only have terrible news on the other end.
My friend is someones husband and someones brother and someones child. He has a name and a life, not just an addiction.
Amy Winehouse along with so many other people who have been claimed by addiction were someones child, sibling and love.
If you have lived with addiction, you can identify with some of the things I am writing about here.
If you don't identify with me, that's fine. But this project is about us being better human beings to one another. We cannot do this if we only treat each other as a condition and limit people to their lot in life.
As a society, we need to embrace people and their brokenness. We need to give people power to reclaim themselves in the face of illness. We need to give people back their dignity even if it they gave it away for a high.
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