Acceptance is the SHIT, yo!

Rented a storage unit yesterday. Funny how places bring back so many memories. I remember when they built this particular storage unit facility. My friends and I used to jump our bmx bikes up a big steep red clay hill behind this place. I was in 7th grade. Used to tool around on my bmx bike and look for girls. Used to do tabletops off of the jump. Later my friends and I moved on to skateboards and we used to skate through the parking lot of the storage unit and pretend we were in Powell-Peraltas Animal Chin skate video. My high school sweetheart lived up the street from here. In the front yard of her house her parents planted a sugar magnolia tree when she was born.

My mom is in Minnesota this week visiting my sister and niece. She called me this morning and we chatted for a few minutes as I drove down I-26 towards my apartment downtown after a night babysitting the beagles. Mom sounded good until out conversation moved to the storage unit and my leaving for WV. There's no going back now though. I've stepped off the edge and I gotta stick the follow through. I asked about how my sister was doing and my mom said she wasn't doing too well with my dad's passing. I don't have the time today to get into a long diatribe about my sister's personality and psyche but it is curious. She's an interesting bird, that one. These thoughts about my mother and my sister in MN made me think about my own mental state after my father's death, my own reaction to this enormous event in our lives.

I can't believe how I've handled this whole thing. When I really think about it...I am astonished at my own levity, my own mental health. Sometimes I look inside at myself and wonder who this person is...this man I've become and am becoming. First I should say that I miss my dad so much. Over the past 6 years he became my best friend. I loved spending time with him. We loved to sit around and just bullshit. We'd laugh about all the adventures and fights and stupid stuff we got into when I was growing up. We'd make fun of ourselves and each other and that laughter was healing medicine for sure. I got to know my dad as a man, as a person, rather than just as a parental figure. I know I am truly blessed to have gotten to know him in this way. I think my sister probably has unresolved feelings regarding my father. For the life of me I don't know why. He was the most loving and caring father a girl could ever dream of. But there are some unresolved issues inside her regarding how she feels she was raised. It really is a pity. I don't mean that in the condescending way it is oftentimes said. I mean it really is a pity.

With these thoughts in my head this morning I began to think of my own journey, my own maturation process. The fact that I am a recovered alcoholic has everything to do with the why and how of my being able to handle my father's passing with such dignity and grace. I can't claim credit for being so level-headed about all of it. All the credit goes to God. When I first entered recovery all I wanted was to be able to stop drinking and using drugs. I thought if I could just stop drinking and using then I could figure out the rest of it on my own. WRONG. The drugs and booze were only symptoms of my disease. The problem was my thinking, my reaction to life, my self-centeredness, my fear. When I began to dry out and get some time away from my booze and drugs things didn't get better...they got infinitely worse. I felt like a fish out of water. I was so uncomfortable in my own skin. I felt like I might drop through a hole in the floor just walking across a room full of people. And I was angry. I was pissed. At first I was pissed at the world (as usual.) I hadn't gotten my fair shake. You hadn't done this or that for me. I hadn't gotten the breaks. The world was out to get me. It wasn't long before I had to abandon that type of thinking, lest I get so amped up with rage and resentment that the only solution (that I knew of) was to get loaded again. And I had begun to realize that getting loaded just wasn't working anymore. The sense of ease, comfort and fearlessness that used to wash over me when I drank and got high went away. I couldn't get there anymore. All I could get from my chemicals was a momentary and increasingly fleeting numbness. After the numbness came horror and vast waves of pain, desperation, loneliness and fear. Through my own sick thinking I had painted myself into a corner that I could not find my way out of. I was stuck. This was the place I found myself when I became desperate enough to give the 12 steps of Alcoholics Anonymous a try.

It's impossible for me to overstate how truly fucked up in the head I was when I first entered the rooms of Alcoholics Anonymous. I didn't want to be an alcoholic but the illusions were falling off that I was anything but. I KNEW I was an alcoholic. It was the first step in a long journey that continues today. When I started going to meetings I listened to and watched other people. I heard their stories. These people weren't writhing in pain like me anymore. They were happy! They were free! But the stories they told of what they used to be like! Jesus! And I thought I was fucked up!! How did they do it? What was the secret? I began wanting it. I began craving it. I jonesed for it every bit as much as I jonesed for that next line of coke or slug of liquor. "Work the 12 steps and live them in your life." That was the answer. I had no other options. It was the only way for me to go. It was either that or drink and use drugs again. And that was getting me no where, that was only bringing me more pain and misery. I was terrified of getting fucked up again. I knew it was only a matter of time before I died or ended up in prison.

So I worked the 12 steps with a sponsor and began to get better. It seemed painfully slow in the beginning but in reality I got better pretty fast. A year after I started I really started to feel it. I really started to grow and trust God with my life. I began to pray all the time. I made a connection to the Divine and that connection keeps me sober and free. This journey began with me not wanting to drink or use drugs anymore but that was just the very FIRST thing that happened in my life. The dividends I've received as a result of working the 12 steps and getting to know God have been absolutely immeasurable.

And THAT is the how and the why of this unbelievable response in me to my father's passing. I trust God today. I know I don't have all the answers today. Hell I don't have ANY of the answers today! God has the answers and I just have to seek Him and open my mind and my heart to receive them. And I have to be humble enough to accept. I accept that my father is gone. I accept that he was here and now he is not. I accept the journey I had with him. I accept the role I played as his son. I'll continue to miss him every single day of my life. No one will ever take his place. But as I've learned on my journey, everything is spirit. We are spiritual beings having a human experience. My dad has gone back to the spirit and one day I'll follow. But for now my dad is with me in my heart. It's like Luke and Obi-Wan Kenobi. It's just like that.

Acceptance is Big Medicine. It's the shit, yo.