Reclaiming Life after Losing Myself

​It was in this house, rented by someone I met in a twelve step program, that I took my first hit of crack cocaine. In the small bedroom off to the right, sitting on the edge of his bed, I waited and watched him.

I had been awake for nearly 40 hours, lines and piles of cocaine to keep me company, and found myself that evening, once again, reaching the turning point of self despair, yearning to either be healed instantly from my affliction, or to find another bump to move wearily through the moment. And the young man, befriended in our shared plight to recover just weeks beforehand, was on my mind. Perhaps he could help me now....perhaps he would offer me the support that the programs of AA and NA had been promising me. Yet when I reached his little yellow house that night, one look in his eyes under the paint chipped door frame told me.... he was just as far gone as I was.
​

Lost.

​​As I sat perched atop the edge of his bed, legs stretched out in front of me, feet restlessly wagging at the ankle with anticipation, I watched him from behind, loading a small glass tube. We hadn't spoken much to one another after I arrived, moving quickly instead to his bedroom, an unspoken understanding that if we could get high enough, we might forget that our common ground as friends was through the program of recovery.

He silently fumbled and dug in his pockets and packed his little tube. I remember the sense of confusion I felt, that I never saw anyone prepare a glass tube to use cocaine before. Too embarrassed to admit my naivety I sat silently, still waiting, foot still wagging.

All these years later, I'll never forget the moment that he moved the small clear pipe into my mouth and I noticed the fully formed rock at the other end....with crisp clarity I see that moment in my mind, the flame appearing and the little nugget sizzling and cracking and popping, the moment it suddenly occurred to me what I had just done. As if all the years of prior drug use weren't enough to rattle my heart, I knew that moment was the threshold into a new low, a new pain. I had crossed over into a place I had never before been with that one explosive inhale of crack cocaine......I would spend the next six months chasing the physical sensation of that very breath.

Some time later, as the weeks rolled by in a blur, crack steadily replacing all that was meaningful in my life, I experienced a pivotal moment just a few doors down from the little yellow house.

​It was 4:00 in the morning. I was in a trance of infatuation with this newfound burst of warmth and pleasure and excitement that ran through me every time I heard the pipe sizzle. The feeling of cocaine magnified exponentially.
​

A twisted, misguided sensation of enjoyment, I was merely in a drug-induced haze, resisting being fully alive, covering old wounds still gaping open.

​That early morning in the company of two men I had met just days before, the time came, as it always does, when the supply ran out. That easy warm high sharply becomes overtaken by a nagging anxiousness, foot wagging restlessness, an underlying sense that each moment remains somehow bleak and hollow without the burst of powerful thrill that one tiny inhale can provide you.
 
Over the 10 years I spent using drugs up to that point, I was quite familiar with this phase of the roller coaster. I was unprepared, however, for the stronghold that crack cocaine has the power to exert until I found my nose hovering inches above the ground. Eyes wild, knees shifting themselves across the dusty, neglected floor below me, I searched......tirelessly, relentlessly, carefully separating the woven fibers of each floor rug with my fingers, I searched......holding hopeful to the possibility that one small rock had escaped our hands while loading the pipe that night.
 
One of the men I was with joined me. Mostly in silence we weaved in and around the furniture and one another. Periodically, in frustration one would stop to light a cigarette, to exchange a word or two through the thick haze of hopelessness. Hopelessness alongside a sort of repressed shame for the depravity of our circumstances, too raw to even be felt, bubbling below the surface.

Hours passed....hours.....with this very scene unchanged, while on the other side of tightly drawn curtains, the sun welcomed a new day.

Hours lost to the possibility of just one more fleeting burst, one unlikely fragment to have slipped through our fingers, a phenomenon that never truly happens when you're as vigilant about each pending hit as a drug addict usually is.
 
Eventually, the pivotal moment arrived that would etch this span of time into my memory for years thereafter. At 7:00 am, my cell phone rang. The voice on the other end, fast talking and always with more exuberance than anyone else in the room, was of my boss, days having passed since I went MIA from my position in her office. My voice cracked out the word hello, convinced that with every utterance, with my very inflection, she would somehow know how deeply entrenched I had become, that my guilt and self loathing would be palpable. And with the anticipation of an accusatory, disapproving tone, my eyes widened when her words landed...in typical bubbly fashion, her voice rang out, "Happy birthday!!"
​

My heart sank.

​
​I could've dropped the phone. I could've burst out into instant sobs.
 
My birthday.....my day....one that I took very seriously for all the years prior, family dinners and parties and brunches and salsa lessons and live music. A day I had hitherto used to celebrate myself, that I would prepare for with excitement. There I was, in the dimly lit little living room behind the tightly drawn curtains, doors down from the little yellow house, with absolutely not one shred of awareness that it was my birthday. Zero.

Those two bubbly words symbolized in an instant how lost I had become to my own heart, to the things that mattered in my world. Instead, I chose daily to chase the mirage of pleasure in a small rock that would make me a slave to the very quest of finding it, like a vapor in the dry desert.

​My life didn't change in that moment. It wasn't the pivot upon which I rest my recovery; the turning point was still another six months away. Although I did schedule my first inpatient rehab stay that afternoon, I checked myself out days later, unwilling to face all that lay waiting on the other side of honesty with my wounded heart. The realization that I had let my birthday join the ranks of all the other meaningful parts of myself now forgotten....it was but one wake up call that I would snooze of the many that had come before it and even more to follow.
 
That phone call, that dusty floor, do stand as a marker in time, however, for the last birthday I sacrificed to drug addiction, TEN SWEET YEARS ago today. I was 22, and by the following August I would have just shy of six months clean, and a beautiful baby girl in my womb. 
​

Life would never again be the same as it was the morning I lost my own birthday.

This coming year, as I turn 32 and travel toward my thirty-third celebration of trips around this bright burning sun of ours, I'm vowing to move into the next phase of my growth; reflecting on the ten year struggle with drug addiction that marked my adolescence and young adulthood, and the nearly ten years of recovery that have given me my life back.

It begins with an unwavering commitment not to hide the dark corners of my experiences or minimize the depths of depravity that drug addiction has taken me to, and countless others like me.

It begins with a willingness to share my story, to be a light for others, to empower those that suffer from the despair of any addiction. Because the reality is, although I was once mired in a rip current of Self Sabotage, seemingly unending, it was possible for me to swim ashore.

​And little by little I've learned how to face myself, to trust myself, and to lean on the divine energy of this magnificent Universe, the Source energy that has been supporting me all the while, even when I didn't yet know I was worth it.
​

​Today, I do!
 
Today, I own my success and my struggle equally, embracing the opportunities to make the most of my time here, sharing my heart with others. I can celebrate myself fully on this birthday, having just finished two masters degrees within a few months of one another, building my credentials as a nutritionist and wellness advocate, recently passing my boards, wielding a crowbar during home renovations with my loving husband, nourishing my body and my family with a rainbow of colorful foods, healing an autoimmune disease with patience and grace, all while raising two kindhearted and sweet, smart children.
​

My life exceeds any vision I would've conjured ten years ago, and continues to evolve, despite where I've come from, despite how lost I once was.

​Yet despite all of my past transformation, I continue to heal and process and explore what it means to truly hold sacred this precious life force I have; it's an ongoing practice.

I still face days of using food to hide.

I still grapple with the harsh inner critic, trouble acknowledging my inherent worth.

I still lose patience with my body, with autoimmune flares and cravings and mood swings.

But steadily I fight to move through these truths with Love, and to release the instinct to disappear completely, swallowed whole inside a mirage of living like I've once known. This next year I'll take this fight to its newest peak with a commitment to chronicle a project I've wanted to do for quite some time: 100 Days Of Self Love, From An Expert In Self Sabotage. (update - this project was amended to 21, read day 21 to find out why)
 
Over the next year I'll journey my way through 100 unique acts of Self Love and share my process along the way. I hope to inspire, to learn from others and to fully honor where I've come from and what's possible next. I'm not completely sure what it will look like and I imagine it will be messy at times, but until now I've resisted working on this for fear that I don't quite have all the pieces lined up neatly enough to begin.

The triumph of making it to today's ten year anniversary of that last birthday in the shadows has reminded me that any moment can be your pivot point, even when it's still messy, even when there's still doubt and fear and raw, unmended edges. Recovery is ongoing and unending, ebbing and flowing, but the further from Self Sabotage I move, the more Self Love I expose, and the greater my potential to be a light for others.
 
And so I'll rest my head tonight in gratitude for all the dusty floors
and the little yellow house
and the fear of living that finally cracked wide open
and revealed my fragile heart.

​For my successes and my struggles.

​Today, I own my power and offer each one of you the chance to recognize your ability to do the same, in whatever way that shows up for you. I hope you'll join me on my travels. I'll be posting more in the days to come. It would be an honor to share it with each of you and to reinforce the supreme truth that when one shares their healing with others, the ripple effect of possibilities for all are infinite.

In Love and Gratitude,

​Rachael 

---