Notes from the Edge

(This is true experience. It relates to actual addiction and true prison and life experiences.)

Me at 17

Me running the library in prison – my late 40s

Mid 50s

Late 60s Now, with my wife

Addiction and Sobriety 

If you have lived any kind of life at all you have made
mistakes. It comes with the human territory; I think it probably comes with any
thinking animal’s territory.  Those
mistakes may be small, or they may be large and overshadowing. You may be
ridiculed because of them, or they may be severe enough that you will have to
pay for them. In this country, unless you are rich, that means jail or prison.

You may do time for whatever you did. There is no other
payment acceptable in the United States. This country does not believe in
rehabilitation, just punishment. I realize this country talks about
forgiveness, rehabilitation on the surface, but under that surface it does not
exist. But I am not country bashing today or any other day, because despite the
issues I have with this country it is probably one of the safest places to live
in the world, and one of the fairest, considering that there are countries,
even countries that call themselves democratic where I could be killed for
speaking anything other than praise about the country.

I am pointing it up to help you to understand that when you
make a mistake in life there is rarely forgiveness or forgetting. Whatever you
did will become part of who you are, and for some it is a hard burden to bear:
For some people it seems impossible, but it is only impossible because you
allowed yourself to look past the truth and see things the way you wanted to
see them instead of the way they actually are and you are not alone, many of us
do that or have done that. So, I am not bashing government at all. The world is
the way it is.

Whenever we are outside of normal society we are walking a
dangerous line. We know that. We understand the risks. Is that really true? The
real answer is yes; that deep inside we do understand the risks. At some point
in our lives we have seen people fail, explode with anger, hurt someone or
themselves. We have seen others bullied; we have seen relationships that seemed
solid fall apart. We have experienced loss, sometime on a close and personal
level, and sometimes from afar. We have tried to speak to God and have heard no
reply. At least a few of these things are common to most of us and if ignored
these issues can lead us to very dark places.

What is outside of normal society: Normal is a loose term:
Being normal means that we are with other people who conform to an existing,
unwritten set of rules that govern our lives. They are so ingrained that we
believe we rarely think about them, they have become part of who we are. See a
person with a gun we try to protect ourselves and our family. We move away from
that person. See an injured child we become protective and there are dozens of
other examples. And although we don’t always believe that we think about those
things we do. Everything that questions our beliefs is examined and weighed
against those beliefs. In the blink of an eye, we reject or accept, and so as we
grow, we build our character based on that moral code we have deep inside of us.

Today I am talking about people. And I am pointing up people
from different walks of life for a reason: Inmates or people who have spent
time in a penal institution. Anyone who has ever been bullied, picked on,
discriminated against: Drug addicts, alcoholics and other people with addictive
personalities. I guess if we are all being honest that should include everyone,
yet I know some would never raise their hands and admit to any of what I just
wrote if asked to. So, I will include people that have these problems but are
still hiding them because A: They don’t want others to know about it out of
fear they will be ostracized or B: Because they still believe they are
completely in control of their lives and that they can fix their own issues.

All of these conditions can cause problems. Who is equipped to
go to prison: Or a mental hospital; or to take that first hit of cocaine, shoot
heroin? I don’t know anyone who is. If you are bullied and you do not get a
chance to deal with it, it can cause problems. Many people turn to drugs and
alcohol to cope with the stresses of this world, some to self-abuse, some
become abusers, and some find the revolving doors of jail, prison and mental
health units and that becomes their life. A few others live their lives tethered
to what is familiar. Work to pay bills and ten go home. Rarely socialize, keep
the circle small, do not trust do not love. That is not living it is existing
and I am speaking from experience. We need help.

Here is the issue though. We cannot always fix ourselves. I am
not saying we are not strong enough to fix our problems, I am saying that we
cannot see them. I know that is old news, but many of us ignored it when we
heard it and we should not have. It is true and it should not be so hard to
believe. Can you see the back of your shirt? No, we don’t actually have eyes in
the back of our heads, and so if we want to know if there is a stain or a tear
or some other thing wrong with the back of our shirt, we ask someone to look.
They look and tell us. That is the only way we can know it. And we trust what
they say and go about our day believing the back of our shirt is fine. Maybe it
is, maybe it is not.

I say maybe it is not because many of us have people in our
lives that facilitate our addictions and our weaknesses. They do it for varied
reasons. Some because they believe that were we capable of deciding certain
things, or being sure of certain things for ourselves we wouldn’t need them. To
them their usefulness to us is tied up in enabling us to be who we think we are
and that includes lying to us, helping us to get drugs when we need them. Many
enablers love the people they enable. That does not mean they are truly helping
that person. Men and women have committed murder in the name of love. Most
often that sort of thing starts slowly, a lie here, a little lie there, and
then suddenly you find yourself in a position where you are ignoring behaviors.
I myself have looked to others asking them to endorse my behaviors when I knew
they were out of line completely, and they did. I had surrounded myself with
people that would tell me what I wanted to hear or who had an investment in me
that they would be in danger of losing if I were to straighten up and fly
right.

There was a time when I drank and drugged constantly, yet I
made a tremendous amount of money. Stop the medicating and I would fall down;
the money would go away and the people I had surrounded myself with knew that.
The money was good. The money allowed them a lifestyle they could never had
lived: Reason to lie to me; reason to enable me and I am not without blame for
that because I knew from the first time that I tested them that they would
support me until the end, whatever that turned out to be. And they did. I think
many of us who have become alcoholics, drug addicts, abusers, who allow others
to abuse us came to be there because of things that happened in our lives.
Things we were not prepared to deal with. Maybe because we were too young or
maybe because we had no way to deal with whatever was occurring, or maybe
because we were in a position where we were forced, where our choice was taken
away.

I want to qualify that. I do not want to give anyone a way
out. By forced I mean you were actually forced. I mean you were in a position
where you were forced to do something that was against what you would normally
have chosen to do. I do not mean situations where you or I made bad decisions
and we want to put that off on Bob, the bad guy that was with us, who talked us
into this or that. No: Those are our own bad decisions. You cannot blame them
on others. This walk we are taking requires honesty, so things like that have
got to go. If you can agree on that we can make some progress.

I do understand the need to push off some of that
responsibility, I have felt it. I have done it. Part of my life was spent on
the streets and for the longest time that was my excuse for my bad behaviors.
“Well, I grew up on the streets.” Or “Well, I didn’t have a father around when
I needed one.” Or “I spent part of my life poor, living in the projects.” Yes,
those things truly did affect my life. They hurt me. They made me angry, but
they did not think for me, did they? They didn’t. I did that. And because I
didn’t really want to think about my life, I adopted a workable solution. At
some time in my early life, I realized that I was a big kid. I also realized
that when I raised my voice and came at someone, they most usually became
afraid: Even older boys and a few times men.

Raising my voice and being willing to bluff or even get into a
fight became my first line of defense: In other words, violence. It worked. It
kept others away from me. It became my go-to response. I stopped worrying about
solving problems or dealing with situations. I had a secret weapon, the threat
of violence. I was safe. All I had to do was react, not think about it. And so,
I lived my life that way for a while and as I lived that way the person, I had
the potential to be drifted further and further away. And as I practiced the
threat of violence to keep others away from me it was only a short leap until
actual violence became another weapon in my response arsenal.

My point is we accumulate damage from the things we become or
try to make ourselves into when we are not really dealing with life. When we
are aimless, unconnected to society and the rules everyone else has to live by.
When we enable others and are enabled by others to stay in our hatred and
addictions. Ignore reality.

Prison: I had been in prison a few years, long enough to be
transferred to a medium security prison. Two men had been at each other most of
the day, back and forth, the larger man taunting the smaller man. I was housed
in a dormitory setting, 40 men housed in one area watched over by one guard. No
doors, no cells, those were in the past when I was in a Maximum-security
prison. The last count of the day was taken, and the C.O. stepped out to wait
for the sergeant to pick up the count slip. I caught a movement out of the
corner of my eye as I began to lie down, a shadow raced silently past me,
heading away so fast I was unsure I had really seen it. I stood and looked in
that direction and caught the shadow slip into the end of the line of beds.
That told me all I needed to know. A second later a man screamed, a second
after that the one man was shadowed as he leapt up and both shadows began
fighting. It was clear to see that the smaller shadow was making stabbing
gestures as his hand rushed at the other shadow.

Maybe the entire sequence of events lasted ten seconds. I
would be surprised if it did. The smaller shadow suddenly separated from the larger
one and a split second later raced past me to the bathroom: Breaking up the
home-made knife, in this case a pen casing that had been shaped and flushing
the evidence. The larger shadow stumbled to the open doorway. There had been so
little noise that no one, not even the C.O. standing just outside that door had
been alerted.

There are lessons here or I would not have told you the story.
The events actually happened just as I said. I told you we had heard and seen
the two arguing most of the day, yet none of us did anything. The bigger guy
was a bully, stopping him would mean that we night get drawn into a fight,
becoming involved in a fight means that we might have lost our parole dates, a
thing an inmate lives day to day for. Sometimes that date is all that keeps you
sane, and so it is always foremost in your mind. A few minutes later the lights
came on and several C.O.’s rushed in. The entire company was locked down for
several hours. During that time, they found the pen which the smaller man had
not broken up sufficiently and bloody clothes he had somehow managed to conceal
in that brief time. They also questioned all of us, but no one had seen
anything.

What does this have to do with enabling? It is clear cut. When
you don’t speak up about the things that are wrong in your world, you begin to stop
seeing them for what they are. Living in a violent society such as that one you
are subjected to so much violence day in and day out that you become not only
accustomed to it you do not even speak of it, and you then deny its existence
in that way. You truly turn a blind eye to it. It didn’t happen. I didn’t just see that. Doing that enables the
bully, gang members or whoever is perpetrating the violence to continue, and it
will continue: Get worse, even more violent as it did with the smaller man
being bullied by the bigger man. That is an example of enabling you may not
have thought about.

For others it is a need to control others around them. If
people can be unpredictable or have been unpredictable in the past they could
be again, but controlling what they see, what they believe via what you tell
them limits that possibility. It protects that person, not you, you are a means
to an end. And of course there are people that have a need to control other
people to get them to do what they want them to do. This could be as sinister
as a pimp controlling a woman he wants to earn cash for him, or as simple as a
man or woman manipulating their spouse or significant other into something they
don’t want to do. In either case, or any others you might envision or might
have seen, the issue is not the reasoning, the issue is that someone is being
manipulated against their will. They may know it. They may even think they need
it, but it is not free will.

Let’s say you do that time, or maybe you don’t, but you’ve
made your mistakes, and you are trying to pick yourself up and move past them. Admirable
and that is not sarcasm. Moving forward in life is a big deal. Many people just
bury their mistakes, and they never deal with, acknowledge or learn from those
mistakes so that they won’t do them again. They seem to skate through life,
meanwhile there you are, regretful, doing what you can to make amends, sure that
you will be forgiven if you do the right things because that is what you were
told from childhood. But it isn’t true.

I started this purposely telling you that there is no such
thing as rehabilitation in this country and that is true. Maybe I irritated a
few people immediately with that statement but hear me out before you start
protesting or whining about what I said.

Check out the law. Take a look at reality. Check the
statistics and you will see I am right. It has never been anything else.
Confession, admission of guilt will get you past the parts of what you did that
supposedly must be answered for, but from there it moves you into the punishment
phase, not rehabilitation, and there will never be forgiveness of any kind at
all.

Look at the way this country works, not in a critical way,
just an impartial way. We say one thing, we do something different.  We imply absolution, we give none. We imply
forgiveness, we again give none. You may be starting to think I am being
hypercritical, but bear with me; I have an end and a purpose for these words in
mind.

My purpose is to get you to take a breath, realize the way the
world really is, not the dream world we all want to live in, but the real world
we all do live in. That is important because even though I said all of that,
none of it has to be true, because we as individuals make our own
reality to a very large extent.

Yes, just shake your head, clear it. I wanted us to all be on
the same level playing field and now we are. The key is, we can shape our own
destiny, and we often don’t. Instead, we allow others to shape it for us. We
allow others to tell us what their reality is. What they perceive our reality
as. We find it easier to go with the flow, to join with the rest of the people
that do accept the status quo and just jump in and follow blindly. Swim little
fishy, swim. But it gains us nothing at all. It means we gave up our
individuality to feel like we are part of something even though we know it is
not really what we want to be part of at all. What we really want is to be part
of what we believe. We know there must be others who believe as we do also, and
there are, that is true. There are many others who see that better way. Dream
about it. Almost touch it, but they do not have the resolve to see it to
fruition. There is not enough belief inside of them. They are afraid, and fear
is a stronger motivator than their desire to realize their own goals: To be
individuals completely.

So what good is it all if no one makes it to the end? I never
said no one makes it. People do make it. My illustration is that it is a hard
road. You have to want it badly. More than you want to fit in. And that brings
me back to my beginning. The major force, fear: That which holds us back. It is
wielded by others whenever we make a mistake. You will meet people who will let
that pass, but you will meet people who will not. Unfortunately, there is always
something about that other person that keeps us with them. We find things that
are redeeming in them, about them, all we need to do is change, and give up
that dream, maybe all we are really doing is growing up, after all. And so why
not do it. Look at what we can have.

The problem is blinding. It is so hard to reason past, see
around, that we give up completely more often than not and join that
irresistible force that compels us, but the entire premise is flawed.
Forgiveness is not a human trait. Neither is forgetting, and those are the
things we really require moving forward if we have invested in their answers,
their ideals. Forgiveness and forgetting are supernatural things, things we
assign to divine beings, and we do that because we know deep down, we are not
capable of them ourselves. Yet we still expect to receive them from others.

To me that is like believing in the Easter bunny, or Santa
Claus, but if you give it some thought we are a race of beings that love to
make up fairy tales, tell stories, weave fiction into reality and so we subvert
ourselves because some of us never stop and lay it all out. Tell ourselves what
our truths are. It can be that simple. It certainly doesn’t need to be
complicated, it only needs to be explanatory, and it only needs to be for us,
because although there are physical laws that equalize all of us, our
motivations, goals and dreams make us capable of being vastly different from
one another.

So, we do not have to become someone else to realize our
dreams, in fact that absorption into someone else’s dream is what will kill our
own dreams, usually for good. All we need to do is stay the course and let me
explain why.

One of the things you will notice when you step back to really
look at your situation is that after a very short period of observing how
things work you will see that your protagonists, the ones who want you to
change so badly, to see the world as they do, are very insecure themselves.
They need you to change to reinforce them, not to help you. You can easily see
this because they give up very easily and move onto someone else if they don’t
get results and if you happen to see them change someone to their thinking you
will see the positive reinforcement this gives to them. That doesn’t mean they
will never try again to change you, they will, it only means that like you they
need positive reinforcement to move forward the same as you do.

Positive reinforcement: It is undeniable, powerful, and it is
most often the reason that powerful people exist at all. The intoxication they
feel when they bring someone into their line of thinking, make them see
something they did not see before, did not conceptualize without them showing
it to them. That is a feeling that is not unlike a drug: Once they taste it
they will want more of it. Whether they are on a true path or destined to
become wreckage may no longer matter to them. Think about that. They are bringing
you along, who knows how many others and they don’t even have a pilot or a map.

So what to do? It is obvious that not all of us are leaders.
It is equally obvious that some of us do need to follow. I am not questioning
any of that. Leaders and followers is the natural order of things. There could
be no Gods if there were no people to follow them. No great men or women. I
believe it is inside of us, lead or follow. I know there are those who say
there is another way, the ‘Go my own
path’ way, but that is bull. The go my own path people have their own
branch. How could that be if they are all alone? It couldn’t be. It is just another
path to be part of a whole, while attempting to deny the need to be a part of
something when that need is undeniable. Water the grass and the trees and they
will grow. Withhold sustenance and all will die. If there truly were a path
alone, you could withhold all there is and they would continue unaffected. So
while I understand that need to be an individual, it can only go so far. In the
end you follow, or you lead.

The choice is not to do something outrageous. Yes, some do
choose wild paths, and some do succeed on those paths. That is not what I am
saying. Outrageous implies spontaneous reaction, and reaction means you gave it
no thought at all. I have watched some of what appears to be outrageous, and it
is sometimes, but there are times when it only appears outrageous to you or I
because we have never seen it, never considered it: That does not mean it is
outrageous.

In my experience there are those who do those outrageous
things with no planning and they always fail just as we know they will as we
watch the outcome or the events leading to the outcome play out. We say to
ourselves, “I saw that coming.” And you did, so did I, but what about the times
when we say we didn’t see that coming? When we turn to the other in awe? Have
you ever jumped into those times and asked questions: How did this happen? How
did you get here? Maybe you have, maybe you haven’t, but I have, and I have
because I have seen it happen a few times and I didn’t ask any questions. I
assumed it was luck, but have you ever really looked at luck; the odds of this
thing happening over that thing, for instance winning the lottery. The odds of
winning are so far against you that you may as well not even try. Now if you
were calculating the odds of losing that would be a pretty good bet. Say if you
chose to bet that you would lose: No book would take the bet, odds are you will lose. Weighing those odds, it is
easy to see the other end of those odds, how wildly hopeful you would have to
be to expect to win. Yet some people enter into everything they do believing
just that: That they will win. And when they do all the bystanders will be in
awe, just as we are when that person wins the lottery out of the blue.

So, what is the secret then? How do we live life in a world
that is weighted against us? How do we trust, who do we trust? What do we hope
for and how do we know we will get it? The first thing we have to realize is
that our destiny is in our control. We are the ones responsible for our
ultimate destination.

Break the law and wind up in prison? You made that decision.
Yes, I know that there are men and women who sometimes end up in circumstances
wrongly. I get that. I have seen it, but the percentage is low. And most often
when I hear that argument it is a last hope argument. It means “I have not
taken any responsibility for my own life, and I know it and so I need to put
that blame off on someone else because I can’t function under that load.” Or
the reality would be that the person is completely unaware of their
circumstances. Very unlikely, very unlikely. And I am not speaking about
an experience of some other person. I am not guessing. I am talking from my own
experience. What I have done, what I have tried to do, and what I have seen
that other people have tried to do.

There is a point. Maybe not when we take that first step, but
there will be a point after that first step when we know we are wrong. Not
where we should be. Not following the path, we wanted: Even doing something
illegal and there will come a time in that walk where we will say to hell with
it and walk it anyway. I know that because I have done that, and I know men and
women who have done that. And if I am completely honest, I have done it more
than once. I was more than a little thick. It took me time to realize that
although I thought I was just going with the flow: Along for the ride, I
wasn’t. I was moving my feet. I was making choices every second of every day
that led me toward that bad end. I did that. It was me; no one else.

I don’t think that is an uncommon situation. I think many of
us do just that. We follow when we should lead, because there is a part of our
life where we absolutely have to be a leader, and that is when it comes to
direction: Choices, destination, plans, goals, hopes and dreams: The things
that really matter. And yet many of us fail to do any of that. I never did. I
truly believed I had no choice at all. Then when I realized I did have a choice
I truly believed I was making decisions when all I was doing was reacting,
putting no more thought into the situation than I would be about not stepping
on a crack as I traversed a sidewalk. Deciding? Yes, after I got myself into a
bad situation: After I quit my job; after I married that woman, I had only known
a few months. After I decided to go for a ride in that car when I knew bad
things might happen: After I had a beer or two and then decided to argue
knowing that alcohol affected my thinking processes; lowered my inhibitions.
Then I took time to think, and that thinking went something like this “Why did
I do that? Or “What the hell was I thinking?” or “How am I going to get out of
this one?”

The fact is, just a few minutes of thought beforehand could
have changed everything completely. Where might this lead? What are this
person’s true intentions? What could happen? Am I prepared to take those
consequences if that thing happens?

The fact is almost all of us wish we had made that time for
thought: Bounced some ideas off someone else if we had, had the chance, or just
thought it out in our heads. Are we stupid? Did we really never give any
thought to it at all? I can’t answer for you, but I can answer for myself, and
for myself I did not give anything like real time to myself to think
things out ever. I felt I was worthless. I had grown up worthless, I would
always be worthless and so why should I bother to do anything at all? Make any
decisions at all?

The answer is evident, because I am not worthless any more
than you are, or anyone else. We all have purpose, and that purpose shouldn’t
be tossed away, spent in the backseat of a car, or wasted in the passion of
some violent crime, or thrown away on an unremarkable life. It only takes a
little thought. Sit down: By yourself if you have to, with a friend if you have
one you trust well enough. And if you do it with someone else you don’t want
someone who enables you: Someone who tells you what they know that you want to
hear. You are going to be bouncing real things off of them, so you want someone
who has their head together. You might want to observe your friends and family
for a while. Who seems to have it together and who seems aimless? You probably
have had enough aimlessness, which is not what you need. What you do need is
sound advice if you ask for it.

That brings you to what you need to do once you have sat down.
No rocket science here at all. You simply need to be completely honest with
yourself. I am not saying be mostly honest with yourself but be completely honest with yourself: All the
way. That does not mean you need to bare your soul to someone else too. In fact,
I would not recommend that at all. Is there a time for that? Yes, there is,
after you find more of your own kind. The people who are like you, and then
from there someone you love. Not lust, not find yourself attracted to, love. Then go ahead and bare your soul.
What if you have done something truly horrible? I will have more to say about
that. For this time all you need to do is be honest to yourself in your head.
Lay out the truths about you. What motivates you; what is dangerous about that
and what is good about that. What you have to watch yourself about.

For me it went like this: I am an alcoholic. A good drug will
sidetrack me too. There are times when I feel I cannot resist a woman. I can be
compulsive. I tend to stuff anger and then explode. I can be impulsive…

There were more things. The point is, get those things out of
you. If you are in a place where you can write them out and you feel
comfortable doing that, do it. It is not a big deal to tear up or burn your
list after. I mention writing it out because that is exactly what I did. I want
to remind you about the people in the world that will use you, use information
like that against you, and so you should take this step seriously. Don’t jump,
remember, this is about thinking and every step of it requires you to think.
Weigh the danger of what you say to another person. Yes, some things need to be
said. I personally put myself in a position of honesty about some of my life,
the drinking, womanizing, drugs, because I knew where those particular things
had taken me, and they were very bad places I did not want to find myself in
again.

Compulsions, impulsive behaviors, giving no thoughts to what I
was doing or where I was going, reacting instead of thinking. I laid all of
that bare because I knew I had no choice if I wanted to find my way. No choice
at all. I was at the edge of “It is all
over” and I knew it. So, honesty is what matters here, no half measures
will do. Think it out, write it out. I wrote it out because you cannot argue
very well with the truth that came by your own hand. That is if you are being
honest, because let’s face it, if you are lying to yourself, you are dooming
yourself to fail. Let me repeat that, you will fail because you have already
doomed yourself. How can you win if you have lied to yourself? And, more
importantly, how do you think that you could lie to yourself: You can’t.

Let me touch on truly horrible things. I have met a few men in
my life that I believe were true sociopaths. They had no regard for others at
all. I didn’t believe that at first, but after observation and prolonged exposure
to them I realized it was not a crazy act; in other words, an act by them to
convince me that they were crazy: They truly were disconnected from feelings,
caring, compassion, and empathy. Their lives centered around themselves and
nothing else. That is a horrible place to be. And there does not seem to me to
be a way back, at least I have not seen any of the men that I met in that
situation come back from it. Yes, I have heard them act; say the words, but I
have seen no real change in their actions, lives, feelings, mindset.

Truly Horrible Things: An exception to my keep it to yourself
rule, and I will tell you why, it can make you a person you will grow to hate.
The steps to get from who you are now, hiding that truly horrible thing, to who
you could become are short. One day you are not and the next you are starting
down that path because in order to keep your world okay you have to hide that.
Every day in all ways, and maybe there are compulsions that come along with
that, you have to hide that too. You cannot truly love or trust anyone because
they might find out, sense it, feel it, figure you out, and that cannot happen
because you have denied that behavior or even to yourself, left it
unacknowledged because you don’t want to face the consequences of it.

This path will kill you, or someone else, or both. These
horrible things may not seem so horrible to someone else, maybe only you. On
the other hand, they may be horrible to anyone who hears about them. We have all
done things that are horrible to us. All I can tell you is that it is best to
pull the plug on those things. Get them out in the open. This isn’t Hollywood,
there will be no happy ending despite these things; these things will instead
destroy you. So do what you should do. If you need to confess these things,
confess them and deal with the consequences, because removing the blocks in
your life is essential to moving forward. One cannot be without the other.

Maybe your concern is the punishment: Prison, ridicule, maybe
you will be laughed at. But circumstance can be overcome, guilt cannot. That is
because you can fight against your circumstances, learn, find new paths, but
guilt is locked away inside and can never be changed unless atoned for
according to the moral standards you were raised by and that were set in your
mind. There is your judge: Your own moral code.

That is where I believe sociopaths are born. Somehow the moral
code inside of them is vastly different from you and me. Their moral code says
things like Another Person’s Rights Do Not
Matter or There Is No Guilt
Associated with The Things That I Do. This is not a place that you want to
be, is it? Were you raised so differently from me: The person next to you?

I was raised in a torn family until the age of about 11. At 11
I found others who had the same kind of pain I had and had no real ways to
survive with it and so we were all looking for solutions. No, at that age we
were not thinking in those terms at all. We were wondering, questioning why me, when will this stop? And we were
out late at night having sneaked out of our homes, trying to find answers,
although we didn’t know they were answers, any more than we knew that those with
us were very nearly the same as we were.

From the age of 11 until 14 I might have appeared in school a
handful of times. No one did anything or raised any alarms. The few times I was
there, there were incidents, sometimes violent. I felt apart, as though I did
not and could not belong, and so I fought everything about it. At 14 I wound up
on the streets where I found even more similarities between the street people
and the person, I thought that I was. My moral code had been changing, adapting
to my circumstances. The truth was I had never adopted a moral code, or so I
thought. Yet inside of me I had real conflicts. I can’t do this; I shouldn’t do that, so obviously there was a
moral code in there at work, even though I didn’t believe it.

I spent two years on the streets and the moral code I started
with broke down further as one by one my objections to the parts of my life as
it was fell away. I left the streets with a modified moral code, one that said
at times I will do this to survive. A lie, because they were not things I did to
survive, they were things I did to stay in that situation:  That situation where I did not have to take
any responsibility for myself or my actions; that place where the world and my
view of it never changed and I could always point to my succession of failures
and point out that it was because the world was against me, society. If not for
that who knows what I could have been.

All bull, all lies and that is how we keep ourselves in our
circumstances. Lying to ourselves, but I already told you. Lying to yourself is
impossible, so what is the truth? The truth is that we ignore the truth. The
truth requires sacrifice, action, real work. A lie is right there on the lips.
It rolls off. All that it requires is your own willingness to stick to it. I
spent two years on the streets where I did things that were completely against
my moral judgment, or so I thought, where I used drugs daily, drank alcohol
daily, engaged in risky circumstances daily, and I did it because I did not
want to admit that I was there because I had led myself there. Because I
wanted to be there, or I believed that I should be there. That is my upbringing
and that is not so different from yours, is it? Are there things you can relate
to? Have you engaged in risky things to get the drug you wanted? Broken the
law? Gone to jail, prison, and mental institutions? I have also. Overdosed,
tried to commit suicide, sold your body to a stranger? I have done those
things.

I have known many people in that same situation, and I never
met one person that had arrived there alone. Yes, they did bring themselves
there, but they also had help, the same way I had help. A deadbeat father, no roots at home, and early drug and alcohol
dependency, low self-esteem, strangers who were more than willing to take
advantage of me and lead me down paths that would help them to use me. In that
sense we had help getting to those places. Don’t think I am not acknowledging
all the people that steered us, but you are the captain of your own vessel, and
your feet; one in front of the other led you there. You could have walked
another way or even walked away, and you did not. I know that is the truth
because it was for me. Unless someone kidnapped you and held you slave or
hostage you could have walked away; like me you did not.

The reason why I keep bringing it back to you and I is that
there can never be any real, lasting work done until you acknowledge the fact
that you made your own decisions. Yes, it is embarrassing. Yes, it means telling
the truth after many lies and it means it may not be believed. Yes, it might
even mean there will be consequences over and above what you expected or
thought you could handle. Yes, it might also mean you will lose some things.
Yes, it means that many of the relationships you now have will end.

This is not a joke. This is not just another reaction to your
problems. This is sitting down with or without help and working through the
lies and deceit in your life to get to the truth, find some answers, set a new
course, and believe me, if that truly is your goal this is one of the things
you should prepare yourself for, loss.

Loss will come. Loss will begin the instant you begin to pull
away and it is the major reason so many fail: Whether it is pulling away from
an addiction, an abusive relationship, a risky lifestyle; or the edge of a
thousand-foot drop. It means changes are coming. It means you will lose the
comfort of sameness, of being with others that also suffer, of suffering
because you have come to believe you deserve to suffer. That sameness, that
suffering, is sometime all we have allowed ourselves to keep from the wreckage
of our former lives and to lose that it must seem to you as it did to me that
the world is ending, and in many ways that is true.

When you throw out the poisonous stuff there will not be much
left. When you throw out the relationships that help to keep you in your
situation, that entire world will be gone. When you go to work to earn a living
instead of flagging down cars, shop lifting, selling your body and soul, it
will be a world that you might know nothing about at all. So in that sense your
world is ending and the one that is coming is one you will fail in unless you
are prepared for it. Unless you have sat yourself down and had that talk,
figured out where you want to be and told the truth about where you are and
where you have been.

Are we all equally lost? No. That is another misperception. We
all have different temptations; we all have different demons, compulsions. All
of us have commonalities too, but that doesn’t mean we should lump all of our
circumstances together and make common decisions for all of us. I have been in
treatment programs where I have seen that approach used and it is hopeless. It
is breaking down with your car and then walking down a road that parallels the
main highway. You can see the main highway and cars zipping by. Help is there,
but there is a twenty-foot-high fence topped with razor wire in between your
road and the highway. You will never get there. That is because what you need
is not the same as what I need. Your wants, goals, future, will never be the
same a mine. Think about it. If that were the case, if we were all that common
in our needs, marriages would never fail. We would understand each other. One
trip to jail, prison or rehab would be enough and it isn’t. That is why you
must sit down and have that talk with yourself. Figure it out. Get it straight
in your head before you ask for help to make the changes you are going to make
and there are reasons to do it that way.

The first reason is you may make some decisions based on what
you think you know that turn out later to be wrong. They become wrong because
you learn as you change, and we come to realize that what was right yesterday is
not right today. And you will change. You will change because even in your circumstances
you change every day: Every minute. If you tried to stay the same, you couldn’t.
Everything that touches you changes you. You think you are static because you
do not acknowledge that change. You stay in your circumstances because at some
point in your life something happened and you froze, slapped a coat of paint on
who you were then and called it good enough. It wasn’t good enough. Not even
close.

At around the age of five I was molested by and aunt. I don’t
say that to shock or disgust you I say it to illustrate my last point. The
abuse was ongoing and at some point, in there I stopped growing. I considered it
everything I could do to survive what was coming each day and so I stopped
growing mentally. I slapped up a few defenses, whatever a five-year-old can,
mainly to cave in, admit I am worthless, go through the pain and get it over
with. I stopped my path to the person I was supposed to be and became that
little person I was at that time for many years: With just those basic defenses
to protect myself. My views of women stopped developing and became based on her
actions and so the hatred I felt for her dominated my feelings about women. I
became a man who acted like a child; thought like a child, behaved liked a
child. A child cannot live in an adult world where they are expected to be
adults. So I was rejected. No one was going to stop and take the time to talk
with me, get me to see what I had done; was doing. I was rejected and that was
all that I felt. The world made no sense. I had no mechanisms to help me
survive. Alcohol and drugs seemed to provide answers and so that is the road I
took. I had relationships that did not last because I was a child playing at
being an adult. I had chances to prosper, trust was placed in me, and I failed
again because a child is not up to those tasks.

So it is the child’s fault. No; that is not why I bought you
here. It is your fault. I am giving you an answer I found after I sat down and
had that talk, and after I participated in groups and spoke to counselors, and
after I had some time away from those behaviors I had practiced and achieved
some clarity. And I started these particular verses out say we are not all
alike, and we are not. I do not know what led you to where you are. I do not
know your circumstances. What I do know is that we do have similarities. There
are common areas we can explore, learn from each other about, identify with and
there is hope in that, because if there were no common ground we would be lost.

Common ground: The human experience; addictive behaviors and
substances, past abuse, anger issues, prison time, jail time, psychiatric
hospital time, time on the streets, coming from a large family, coming from an
abusive home, being sexually molested… The things I have listed are only a
list. It is to illustrate what you can write about yourself. This is a way to
find common ground and, in my experience, common ground is important.

I opened my eyes one morning and saw the familiar
institutional color of the wall next to me and knew there would be a cell door
of some type before I ever turned my head. After I looked, for a very long time
I laid there and cried: I did not know what I had done on the surface; it was
all lost at that point and some of it I was keeping myself from acknowledging,
but I knew that once again I was in a county jail and I was feeling sorry for
myself, not for my actions, for myself.

 Days slipped by, weeks,
and I came to know what I was accused of, but I did not believe it because I had
no memory of it: Convenient, maybe, bad if it is the truth and in my case it
was. I said way back at the beginning of this that honesty is the only way to
reach the goal of living in the world instead of dealing with the world, and
that is true. As the weeks slipped by, I began to acknowledge the fact that I
did have some memories and although they were only partial, they supported what
I was accused of. I also realized that no one would believe me no matter what I
said. Not about what I had done, but if I said I wanted change. That fear kept
me undecided, but the truth is it doesn’t matter who believes you. No one has
to believe you and if you have lived a life of deceit and lies, most likely no
one will. This is a personal journey. There are no passengers on this train. It
is that simple. You have to decide to tell the truth and live by that knowing
full well there may be few people who believe you or believe in you. If you
cannot do that you are setting yourself up for failure. The common ground came
after I admitted the truth to myself. I felt isolated. Who was like me; who
could help me, what should I do next?

Next was a drug and alcohol meeting where men and women came
in from the outside and talked to the inmates. They held them on the weekend
and so I had to give up church to attend. Church was I was doing my best to
persuade God to help me. Could I afford to take a day off of talking God into
helping me? Don’t get me wrong. God can do miracles, but I have never seen God
set a drug addict or alcoholic, or both on their feet in one setting. That is
because we aren’t quite sure about God and what God can or cannot do. We have
lied all of our lives maybe God lies too. You can convince yourself of
anything.

I went to the meeting expecting absolute salvation and
deliverance from drugs and alcohol in one setting and then the judge would hear
this and release me and I would get a real job and enter smoothly into the real
world, the world the straight people, the squares lived in, and life would go on
forever so happily, and I would be so grateful: All bull. I also went there
thinking this is a waste of time. I
went. I had to sign up for it and so I was on the callout, and they cracked my
cell; I got in line, and I went.

The speaker was so-so. He talked about drinking, losing his
wife and home and job. I listened but it meant little to me. Then he said, let
me introduce you to two men who have been down some of the roads you have.
Something like that; I paraphrased it, but I’m pretty sure I got it right since
it was a very important day in my life.

The two men came up looking embarrassed to be there, same as I
would have been a little overweight, normal, not super stars, not polished
like the counselors always seemed to be, but real people. They had my attention
because of that and here is why: I had heard they were beginning, in counseling
and mental health facilities, to use ex addicts, ex alcoholics, people who had
been abused and others that understood the situation because they had been in
it rather than people who had gone to school and really did not have a clue
what it was like to turn a trick, or score some crack, meth, hustle, sleep in a
doorway. That impressed me, and it impressed me because these were men like me:
Men that had looked into the eyes of the same monster I had been staring at for
years and had managed to look away.

As they talked, I found I believed what they had to say. They
spoke the same language I understood, and as they went on one of the men began
to tell a story and I realized I knew that story. Not that it sounded familiar,
but that I knew it. I knew it because
I was one of the people in it., That man told a story about me when I was
younger. He was talking about his own circumstances, but he described it so
well that I knew it was that time and place from my past. The year, the time of
night, the place and the crowd of kids that was there. I was one of those kids.
In fact I was the one that was showing out the most the way I always did to
impress the people around me, to be noticed, to get attention and a funny
thing: I could not remember a single name of any of those others I was with
that night, or much about them, but I remembered the one guy who was now
talking in that concrete block room in the county jail, his circumstances and
that night, that place perfectly well.

That was all I needed: The beginning of the end for me; I
believed him. I believed his recovery; his transfer back to society, how he
learned to be a man. How he put the past behind him. Not covered it up, but let
it go, dealt with the consequences and began to live. He finished and asked if
anyone else wanted to share and I found my hand shooting up and he called on
me. I froze I knew what this moment was and what it could mean. I stopped and
thought, I really thought and then I spoke. I told him who I was and what I was
there for, accused of, and then I admitted I did it, broke down and thanked him
for his story and what it gave me.

When I finished, I thanked him again and although a few guys
had tried to make me see reason; that criminal moral code reason, never be
honest, he had encouraged me to speak, and I had. You never saw so many guys
reaching for pencils to write down what I said, but they had none. You cannot
bring anything to those meetings. When we got back, I saw those same guys calling
their lawyers, looking to trade information on me for a deal. For a second, I panicked,
but my resolve was good. I did not know what this new road was, but I was on
it. I had found my common ground.

Understand this was a process. There was no flash of light and
then I was absolved of all wrongdoing. I was only taking that first step. I
was still a criminal, still hated and still a liar in many respects. No one
began to love me because of that, many people even seemed to think there must
be an angle I was playing. Guys even came up to me at recreation and asked me
what that angle might be. There was no angle. I had my common ground. That man
and I may have had nothing else in common, but we were both alcoholics, meth
users, and we had been on the same path. Apart from that he had found his way
out before I had, his life was in a direction I didn’t know or understand, and
he could not help me in my choices or walks or even talk to me apart from that
one conversation.

I say that to tell you that it is not an easy road to honesty.
It took me some time, weeks in fact, but I also say it to come back to common
ground. Although I was becoming convinced that I had a drug and alcohol problem
I would not allow myself to consider what that meant. I am sure that you know
what I mean. Your thoughts start down that path, and you stop them. You stop
them and begin to think of something else. That is what I was doing. I had not
taken the first step because there was nothing compelling me to do it. Honesty?
Honesty is a lot of work! Who will believe me? Who even cares? Why should I do
it? I’ll have to pay for that, there will be serious consequences; and so,
honesty is not a possibility. I found I could deny everything I saw and heard because;
after all I had been doing it for all of my adult life.

But an encounter that happened to me changed it all. It made
me able to take that first little step. And a little step is all it was. I had
taken a step that was going to cause me to spend a very large portion of my
life imprisoned, maybe all of it: I did not know. What I did know is that I was
being honest. I didn’t matter if people thought I was playing an angle. It
didn’t matter if people hated me; it only mattered that I could stop at that
point and begin to think instead of simply reacting, clear my head, all because
I had found some common ground. So although we are different there is common ground
we can meet on; agree on to begin to accept and give help to get one another
moving in the right direction. It doesn’t mean you are agreeing to become just
like everyone else, it only means there is common ground we can meet on and
begin to address our lives, what matters.

We are back to our original argument. We do know the things we
do are wrong. We pretend they are not wrong, or we simply react and think that
saved us the decision, but that is bull. We know exactly what choice we have
made, and again if you are reading this my assumption is that you want to
change. I cannot change you, nor would I want to. That goes back to being a follower
again. And you may end up following someone, but the point is to follow
someone, something worth following:
So, no, this about you changing yourself; you, not allowing others to do it. Not
just living and thinking it is all fate, but you are being responsible for you and
the choices you make, so me saving you is not on the table. The information I
have is. And I believe that information can help you. It is you that will have
to implement that information and the changes it can bring into your life.

I hope that you are not disappointed, but if I did what I set
out to do you should not be. If you are honest, you can sit down and do this. I
don’t know what you will sick up, and it isn’t my place or anyone else’s place
to know that, except you. You are the one that needs to know. You are the one
that will know whether you are once again blowing smoke or if you are being
honest. I hope for honesty, and I believe you do as well. Even so, sometimes we
can believe we are too weak. We can believe that since we live in this country,
this world where forgiveness is not a given that everything is stacked against
us and we cannot do a thing about it. I can only say, go back and read this
again and compare the things it says to your own life. You should see some
truths there. No one can stop you from doing this except you.

In closing: Let’s go back to the beginning. When I started
this, I was speaking about the world, how unfair it can be. How there is no
forgiveness, no forgetting and I don’t want you to forget that, because the
fact is that that is the way it is. Family, lovers, and people you meet. Very
few people will truly forgive the things you have done. Forget the mistakes you
have made. As long as they are in your circles, around you, maybe as long as
you live, they will still feel that way. In short there is nothing you can do to
change that. Yes, you could run away from that reality to another reality, but
there will be new people who will discover your faults, mistakes, crimes,
because things like that tend to continue to turn up until we take care of them
permanently: So new people will feel the same way. You will have done nothing
except set yourself back in your goals and dreams. The answer is not to change them: To make them see you differently, the answer is for you
to see them differently.

Have you ever hated something someone has done? Not
necessarily something someone has done to you, just to someone else in general.
I always used the analogy of what if it was something that happened to someone
you love. What if it was your brother someone killed, your sister someone
murdered, raped, how would you feel then? Don’t just dismiss that. Think about
it. There really are people you love and if someone hurt them, cheated them,
you would have emotion tied to how you felt about it. The line I am drawing
shouldn’t be hard to see. You have done things. Maybe they are minor things
compared to what I just mentioned, maybe they are worse. No one has gone
through life without impacting someone. You sometimes have to hurt one person’s
feelings to save another person’s feelings.

Life is like that, so no matter who you are you have not come
through this life unscathed, there are people that do not like you, and,
surprise, there are people that don’t like you because you are different from
them: A different sexual orientation, a different color. Right, we know all of
that. I say it to make you think about it. There are people in your world that
will never let you alone about real or imagined things they do not like about
you, and there is nothing you can do about it. So, you can let them push you,
shape your life, bow to their idea of what you are capable of, what you should
be, or you can sit down and have that talk with yourself. Make the changes you
need to make and start guiding your life to the place you want it to be.

The other side of that coin is the reason that you may decide
that nearly every person now in your life may not be in your life much longer.
Not only will they continue to remind you of what you were, they will be a
constant reminder to you of what you were and could be again. Many of them may
also be enablers. They have known you and your needs. Maybe that was good for
them. Maybe you changing would take away their stability, their need to fix you
so that they do not have to look at themselves, fix themselves.

That may seem ludicrous, but it isn’t. You may passionately
love someone who is also an addict, alcoholic, involved deeply in the criminal
life, or a dealer, or your main enabler. How is maintaining that relationship
going to help you recover from your own problems? It isn’t. Sure, you can go to
them and lay it all out. In fact, I encourage you to do that because it is the
only way to break that bond: If that person means that much to you take that
time, in fact you truly do owe them that time, and it is a cowardly act to
simply walk away without explanation. But having said that you have to know
where you are, how strong you are. Can you have that conversation right now and
not cave in; maybe not you, you are not me you are an individual and this is
walking alone not in a crowd. My only point is there is a reason why these
relationships we had in our addictions and compulsions do not very often come
through with us. They are part of the support network we have built around us
to continue in our life of lies. We could not do it as well as we did without
them, but if we are truly on the path of change, we do not need them any longer
and if you cannot face them without fear of failing and falling back into who
you were and understand so well, the explanation will have to wait until you
are strong enough to give it.

That does not mean we run crazy and screaming from that life.
Reasonable people, people who live in the real world, handle things
differently. If I have a problem with Jill, Keisha, Johnny, I don’t just drop
them, add them to the list of bad people I have in my head, maybe punch Johnny
in the face because we no longer see eye to eye. Picking up the real world
means we are no longer apart from the laws that everyone else has to live by.
It means we have excluded ourselves from those laws and now we have
acknowledged that we are willing to be held to those same laws that the rest of
the world is held to, and that same loose set of rules civilized people live
by.

Is that offensive? It might be, but the fact is when citizens,
a regular Jane or John Q looks at you they are afraid. You live a life amid
circumstances they find disturbing, crazy even. They read about people like you
and I in the paper, hear about them on the evening news. Or maybe you are a
statistic. The point is they go to work. They pay their bills. They contribute
to society. It doesn’t mean they understand every aspect of our society, like
every aspect of it, agree with all of our politicians and politics, but they
are invested in it, involved in it. And overall, they believe it is a good way o
life. You may disagree. Maybe that is why you went down the path you did.

Age 13: I took an overdose and nearly succeeded in my goal
which was simply to stop living. I was serious, but I didn’t know enough about
the drugs I had taken to ensure that they would work. I only knew there were a
lot of pills and they seemed to be enough to get the job done. They weren’t.
They were only enough to almost kill me, ruin my stomach for the rest of my
life and leave me in intensive care. When I was released from intensive care, I
was locked up in the hospital’s Mental Health ward.

In the mental health ward, I learned that depression is
suffered by many people. I was not special; I did not want to actually kill
myself I only needed some attention. That was all news to me because I did not
feel that way that I knew of, but then again this was help from outside of me.
Help I did not understand and help that came from a system that was ill
prepared to deal with drug addicts who were so young. So, they cut me loose and
I went home to my crappy life, my alcohol addiction and speed addiction and a
few weeks later I tried again, taking even more pills. That got me locked up
for over a month in a mental health unit.

I talked to a young counselor there a person who had been
through some rough patches in their life. A week, week two, then week three of
one on one counseling and I decided I trusted that person. I told them then, of
all things I could have told them about, what my aunt had done to me. Later in
life I came to realize why that was the thing that came out, but at the time I
was as appalled as the counselor was. The counselor excused themselves and a
few minutes later I was talking to a psychologist and then to a psychiatrist:
For whatever reasons I never saw the counselor I had come to trust again. I was
not believed and a few days later I was cut loose without any sort of real
explanation.

I think there was fear, I think there was disbelief, and I
think that I should have gotten a better break back then, a better set of ears,
and had that happened maybe I… And what does that line of thought do? Derail
me. I have heard to many criminals, addicts, alcoholic go down that road. That
road only leads to It Was Someone Else’s
Fault Not Mine. It is a dead-end road. It means nothing, it accomplishes
nothing; it goes nowhere. It happened, maybe something like it happened to you,
or something similar, but it doesn’t matter, because we are living in the real
world now and in the real world that sort of stuff is pointless. It doesn’t
solve anything, heal anyone and it wastes time better spent dealing with real
issues.

The other thing is that it scares people, back to that
argument just a short while ago. It scares people because they do not understand
it. Yes, a psychologist or some counselors are trained to understand it. That
is because they have read it, and maybe in a few cases they have seen it in
action and so they have a better grasp of it, but they have not lived it: Even
so they can deal with it without surface fear of the things you are telling
them, the average person cannot. If you think that is a stretch, consider this,
almost everything we do is motivated by fear. I won’t get into a long
explanation about it that has been covered and covered, look it up, read it,
but understand that this is not an abstract idea, it is true. People will be
afraid of you. Afraid of the things you say, the ideals you promote. They will
be afraid because people who are considered normal don’t live those types of
lives. And they will be afraid because they will know that it is like a
disease, let it in and it could infect everything they love. It can do that
because it is the opposite of all they have worked for.

For you and me, if you are an addict or a criminal, it might
not be a stretch at all to witness violent crime and do nothing, say nothing, certainly
we wouldn’t report it. That is part of our moral code, not to call the cops and
we understand that people on the up and up in society don’t understand that.
Their first thought would be to stop it. Their second thought once they
realized they might get hurt themselves trying to stop it would be to call the
police, 911. That thought would not enter our minds. You might think, so what: Big deal; if they were in our
circumstances, they might act the same as we do! Another diversion, because
we do not want them in our circumstances, do we? No, we want us in their
circumstances. We are trying to get away from that reasoning, those moral codes
that we lived by and learn how to live in the real world. Well, that is the
real world right there.

I point that up so that maybe you can get an idea of how vast
the gulf is between them and us. And really, I have to say them and you, because
I have crossed that gulf. I also want to point up that in a great many people’s
minds it changed nothing at all. They still hated me. They still doubted me, and
they are still afraid of me. Don’t harbor any illusions, for the most part that
is the way it will be and you need to remember that because if you come into
this thinking it will all be good and all that old stuff will simply fall away,
you are wrong, it will not; but that does not mean there will not be
encouragement, help, and probably that will come from some of the people and
places you hated the most when you were in that life, the people who are in
charge of that world; authority figures: Police, Parole Officers,
Psychologists, Counselors, Psychiatrists, Mental Health Facilities, Prisons and
Jails.

Authority Figures: My thoughts twenty years ago when it came
to authority figures was like this: Don’t trust them, tell them anything real,
lie to them, hate them just because they are trying to control me. I don’t
think that is exaggerated at all. It was who I was and how I thought. My
attitude now is vastly different, and if that makes you think you should not
believe in the things, I say then so be it, because the world needs to have
authority figures. There needs to be someone in charge that can be the got to
person that takes responsibility. I know that might sound crazy to you, but it
is an absolute. If you are a religious person read the Old Testament, New
Testament or the Quran whatever religious documents you adhere to and you will
see that authority is an absolute. Without it there can be no fairness for
anyone, any group of peoples, religions, small countries, impoverished peoples.
There has to be authority figures to apprehend that thief, rapist, murderer so
that they can pay for what they have done. There needs to be authority Figures
to guide us too. No religion has ever worked without them. This means that you
will have to revise your thinking. You will have to bend to that loose set of
rules I was referring to earlier if you wish to be considered acceptable in a real
society.

Last words: This is not a magic bullet. Just because you put
yourself on the right track does not mean that all the problems you created
just reacting to life are going away. If it were that simple we would all have
done it long ago. All it means is that you have set goals and you are working
for them. You are giving yourself time to think. That is something you deserve.
You are saying no to some situations and you are aware of your weaknesses and
how they can lead you to bad choices, bad places. It also doesn’t mean that
everything you want will be attained. Goals are made to be changed,
expectations lowered. Winners know that: Dreamers tend to believe that things
will rise to meet their expectations instead of them lowering their
expectations to meet life. So, don’t think unrealistically. Make that one of
things that you talk to yourself about: One foot in front of the other, one day
at a time. That is really the way I have lived my life for more than twenty
years now. I think it is the only way to do it and win.

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