Letting Go

Madly in love with him as ever, the red flags were a-flying. Never underestimate the power of denial in a situation like this. I didn’t want to admit or accept what was really going on, but the red-light indicators were all there. Sketchy meeting attendance at best, mood swings, late-night bike rides, small lies about certain things like who had called and when, etc…

I tried confronting him a few times, telling him what I was seeing, making suggestions that he find SOMEONE, ANYONE to talk to about what was going on in his head. I watched him show up at meetings and share that his head was all fucked up and that he didn’t understand it, nor did he know what to do with it, and that he needed help. I watched at those same meetings as nobody, not one person, reached out to him. I watched him call his sponsor three times…and receive no phone call back. Then, finally, his sponsor called him back to tell him that he didn’t have time to sponsor him anymore because of his busy work schedule. Add to this the fact that some kid in his aftercare group was offering him heroine on a weekly basis……..and you have the perfect storm. Really, it was only a matter of time before he was gonna use.

I didn’t know what someone on heroine looked or acted like. I’ve never been around it. So, I didn’t know it was happening…right under my nose. I know now that he got high about five times in a two week period, scoring the dope from this kid in Holland. And then he graduated to contacting an old friend and getting good dope from Grand Rapids. He’s lucky to be alive, and he’s lucky all of this only lasted a month.

One day, as I was getting ready to take him to his work for a dinner shift, I noticed a mark on his arm. “What’s that?” I asked. “Don’t know.” He said, “Must be a bug bite or something.” I made jokes on the way to work that he had better hope that his boss didn’t notice the “track marks” on his arms….hahaha. Again, never underestimate the power of denial.

After work that night, he was undressing to get in the shower. I asked to see his arm again. And then I asked to see his other arm. “Oh my fucking God.” I said, “You have track marks.”

My heart broke.

I couldn’t move.

I couldn’t breathe.

It took him a little while to actually admit that he had, in fact, used. At that point, I really believed that it was the first time and that it would be the last.

In true addict form, I took the initiative to educate myself on heroine, it’s chemical make-up, and the symptoms of opiate use. I also proceeded to obsess over every moment that had passed over the previous couple of weeks in a desperate attempt to put the pieces together and figure out what was really going on. This is where the insanity really began.

The month of June was a “fuck-show” of insanity, attempted but failed control, desperation, despair, broken hearts (mine and his), obsession, depression, isolation and withdrawal, confusion, frustration, powerlessness and unmanageability. As it turns out, I am, in fact, powerless over people, places, and things. Not just dope. And most of all I am powerless over someone else’s disease. All of this affected me physically, mentally, emotionally and spiritually….also affecting my friendships (ultimately costing me one of my best friends), my sponsorship relationships (both with my sponsor and with my sponsees, and also ultimately costing me my former sponsor), the serenity of my household; including that of my roommates, my parents, my work, my finances.....the list included everything and everyone connected to me in anyway. I was in full blown addiction.

Addicted to him. Addicted to love. Addicted to trying to save him, to stop him, to teach him, to break him, to love him clean. None of it worked..

I tried ultimatums, crocodile tears, boundaries, rules, desperate pleas, threats. In the end, I begged him. “If you love me like you say you do, and you can’t stop using….please let me go. 'Cause I can’t let you go and this is killing me.”

Looking back on the experience from this side of it, I have immense gratitude. Gratitude for the learning experience, the spiritual brokenness and subsequent growth, the further insight into the cunning, baffling and destructive nature of my disease, the strength I have gained from the struggle, and the empathy I am now capable of…..but is it really over? Will it ever be over?

To my knowledge, he’s been clean for a few months now. Ultimately, he came to his own conclusion that he didn’t want to continue getting high. Go figure. He says he hit a spiritual bottom that he had never hit while dealing with the consequences of jails and institutions. For a while there, he was the one dragging ME to meetings, forcing ME to get outside of myself, to participate in my own recovery.

Today, I am more in love with him than ever. We have been through hell and back, and the insanity still slips in every now and again. My stomach turns when his phone vibrates. I find myself asking, “Who’s that?” I get a little nauseous when he leaves the house and I can’t be sure where he’s going or with whom. I think that, in the interest of my disease, I would be quite content keeping him in a glass box on a shelf in my home, in constant view, or implanting a GPS/camera device under his skin to record his every move…..His eyes sometimes look funny to me, and I get a little pang of discomfort when he itches any part of his body, or stays up too late, or goes to bed too early, or is too flirty, or too despondent, or too hyper or too calm…OK, so I’m still insane. But I am progressing in the right direction.

In light of all this, incredibly enough, the more I let go of control, the more I pretend to trust him, the more I have faith and hope that God has both of us firmly in His grasp, the easier it gets to accept. To trust. To love. And to let go.

And, that catch phrase that I heard at a meeting so many years ago holds true now more than ever… “If you think letting go is hard, try holding on….”