Yeah it’s been over 25 years since I put down narcotics. Narcotics use around me has been on the rise, and it only disgusts me now to see people hurting themselves. Occasionally somebody will allow me to be supportive of them, but for the most part… well you know how it goes for us addicts who are not willing to recover.
I’m working on year 10 free from my chosen poison of alcohol. Even though I remember all of this time, it doesn’t seem like it was that long ago. My status as a recovering alcoholic has not changed from living day by day. I’ve just become better at living day by day through the years.
How did I even get this far? I wasn’t supposed to live through this last decade because of my disabilities. I shouldn’t have a lived this far because of my addictions. I’ve barely lived this far because of the amount of violence on the street that I’ve had to put up with for over 20 years, despite my peace loving compassionate nature.
Oh yes and there’s also the time that I was literally beaten to death by Colusa county sheriffs department because I was married to an Asian American. Yes, I went out of my body when my heart stopped, and I was left floating above my body, looking at it on a cold steel slab as the urine and feces evacuated the dying tissues. People don’t live through that.
I shouldn’t be alive . It’s not that I desire otherwise. It’s that all common sense and statistical data say that I shouldn’t be here anymore. I have survived way too many lethal vectors of different dangers.
Yet, somehow I endure, and I’m not busy, trying to blunt my existence by being a dopewhore or a lush.
I shouldn’t be here, and I don’t know why I am other than answers that I find for myself in my relationship with God and those will hold me over but they don’t really explain why I am still here