Death in Recovery Part 2: Pot, Dogs, & Friendship

My Problem With Pot

After the passing of my friend’s mother I had a period of mourning for her. A dull ache that I had one less person on the same team as me. That pang of disappointment visits me when I think of her or see her name pop up in my contacts list of my phone. I fleeting brief excitement to call and connect with her disappears when I have to remind myself that she is unreachable while I’m on earth.

A few months later I was celebrating my 10 years of continuous sobriety. I go to two different fellowships and so I went and collected two different chips, one celebrating abstinence from all substances and the other fellowship focuses on one of the hardest drugs I had to give up: Marijuana. Back when I still used, I LOVED pot. I had a love affair with pot and when I left to go to treatment in Arizona, I had zero desire to end my marijuana use. When I got into treatment, the councilors all tried to make it very clear that I was an addict and therefore needed to stop using all drugs in order to get better. And I thought they were all fucking nuts! I kept thinking: you want me to go back to wine country, CA, the beginning of the green triangle and not smoke weed and drink occasionally? My plan was to get off the hard stuff, mainly opiates, so why were these councilors making such a big deal about smoking and drinking? As I progressed through my 40 day treatment program I became more and more depressed. I had my first 420 away from my friends and wouldn’t be participating for the first year and I felt like nothing in the world could make me better inside.

My whole identity focused around being the best stoner there ever was. For a few years, on 420, we rolled a quarter pound blunt with toilet paper roll crutch, all rolled up in a Cheech & Chong blunt wrap paper from their Big Bambu album, sealed with honey hash oil. At Thanksgiving time I created a celebration called Special Thanksgiving where we collected donations from friends made green butter and then I proceeded to make an entire Thanksgiving meal with it. After the first year we realized we needed to make a second Thanksgiving dinner so after people got high they could move on to normal food instead of munching out on more green food. It was like all I lived for, getting high and finding ways to get high. It was a lifestyle and that kind of tradition and celebration only made it harder to leave.

Once I entered recovery and began talking to folks in the Marijuana fellowship, the biggest problem I heard from pot addicts was that they felt like they had wasted decades of their life. It wasn’t the fast bottom they were hitting that can happen with alcohol and harder drugs, but they said they had bought into this illusion that they belonged to this lifestyle and that they sobered up one day and noticed that 20, 30, 40+ years had gone by without them. When I returned from treatment and talked with my friends that mostly smoked and drank they couldn’t even entertain the idea of stopping bud for a month or two. They defended it and made excuses as to why they couldn’t stop and I eventually gave up trying to change their mind about it. Their using wasn’t my responsibility or job to control and I understood their reluctance. Things changed so fast and I began learning and living in ways I never thought were possible, and I wanted that for my old using friends. I was once in their shoes and then I found a way out, I hoped one day they would also find the freedom from addiction.

The Dog Who Hated Treadmills

I received a keyring for 10 years of abstained abstinence and threaded it onto my bulky set of keys. I chatted with friends I’d known and loved over the last 10 years and got into my car with plans to Netflix and chill for the night. This night was particularly exciting because my mom took my 1 year old son overnight so I could celebrate my recovery milestone in peace, and my husband had left California to drive to his friends bachelor party over in Moab, Utah. I was looking at a night of complete freedom! I drove to In & Out to grab dinner and while in the drive thru line, I get a call from someone I hadn’t received a call from in many years. This friend and I used prescription pills before there was an epidemic. We had no idea what we were doing at the time but it eventually led us both down a difficult path that brought us both to our knees. Im going to give him the name of Garrett. He got clean from opiates by moving away and I got clean and sober by going into treatment.

Garrett and I were close back in the day and he was one of my very favorite people. He had a dog with his long-time girlfriend, Angie, and they gave me a couch to sleep on when I was in the very early stages of my addiction. The dog was a little terrier with unlimited energy and personality and I grew to love her because she loved me when I felt the most unlovable. She had funny trigger words like “rats” and “treadmill” that would cause her to go apeshit. There was a treadmill in the house and if it was on she would viciously attack it. If you said “rats” she would go hunting for them until she was called off. She loved people and parties. When I started getting a lot of tattoos I asked her parents if they would care if I got a little portrait of her on my calf. They thought it was hilarious and agreed.

When I got this call from Garrett he sounded stoic and sad. I invited him over and when he arrived we sat in my backyard and talked, reminisced. He got serious and then told me that his beloved terrier was getting too weak, too blind, and too fragile to keep going and he knew it was time for her to be put to sleep. He could barely get the sentence out. He said how much I loved the dog and he wanted me to know so I could say goodbye or be there when the time came.

The Amends

When I picked up my chip I was in the midst of completing a 9th step, actively making amends to those I had harmed, and there was a small financial one I needed to make to Garrett that he didn’t even know about. I walked inside and grabbed a $50 bill and my newly acquired MA chip. I sat back down with him and began with the amends, something small but very necessary for me in my recovery. Then I gave him my chip. I wanted to honor everything I had learned after first meeting him. Garrett and Angie took me in and gave me friendship. They taught me how to be in relationship with others, and how to honor friendship. They taught me how to have fun and let loose when all I knew was control and anxiety. They loved me unconditionally when I couldn’t love myself and they trusted me in their home, alone, and with their dog. I felt my worth through their eyes at a time I literally self loathed and self harmed to disappear from the world. I took drugs and harmed myself to not feel, they held my hand through that time, we loved each other.

When Garrett left to get off pills he did something most people can’t. He white knuckled it through the horrible withdrawals and the emotional and psychological anguish of detoxing. He suffered, virtually alone, and came through it alive. My path was much different but essentially it was the same. We got clean around the same time, I did it through a program which required abstinence from all substances, he stayed off opiates but didn’t need the hard boundaries like I did. That night I gave him my chip because I wanted to honor his accomplishment and I wanted him to know how thankful I was that he’d made it. I didn’t care the specifics on how he’d gotten there but I was so grateful to have someone I loved out of the grips of opiate addiction.

Garrett called me that night to tell me that our dog friend was nearing the end of her life, and he thought I would be destroyed by it because of my love for our dog friend. What I don’t think he understood was that my love for the dog was a reflection of the greatness in them (and also myself). I told him that I did love our doggie friend but it was all she represented that made that I loved the most and wanted to honor. That dog was the mascot for our group of friends and she represented joy, connection, and fun. To me, she represented the love I had for my friends, and that love they showed that me kept me alive through my darkest times.

Remembering the Journey

While we grow through our recovery it is so important to remember where we started and how we got there. It is important to honor the whole journey. My job as a member of a recovery program is to stay in my lane, love, and live my life to the best of my ability while holding boundaries and caring for myself. My job is to not harm others through my character defects, and if I do, to clean it up right away by being accountable and conscious. My job in life is to create depth and love wherever possible and to foster imagination and creativity in order to make life on earth special. My job is to stand up for myself and continue to develop a relationship with myself. My job is to evolve and grow and lead by example and love others where they are. Cheers to 10 more years and all the surprises in store!

Feel free to comment with some of your lifelong connections through life twists and turns. What has your journey looked like?

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