Good morning from Bridge House Coffee and Café in the
beautiful, frosty town of Delano, MN. Many of you know who I am and have
followed me from the very beginning, I call you my stalkers. Some of you are
new to the blog and have only recently started following and/or reading my
recent posts which generally follow a message of life after the bottom. I like
where this blog has been heading as it chronicles my daily life in the position
of an accountable male, new to the world of children. There are trials daily, and
some days are better than others, and I am still figuring out how to live with
another adult, but my worst day in sobriety is better than my best day of
addiction. So I continue on because love is the new answer to my old problems.
I said all of that to say this: infrequently, I like to return
you all back to the beginning, especially if you’ve never been there. I haven’t
read the old stuff for about a year now, but every now and then I get the urge
to remember what it was like in confinement. Not because I want to be there,
but because I don’t. Here is a
link to the home page of the original blog. It started nearly four years
ago while I was sitting alone in a prison cell in the E-House block of St.
Cloud prison. I started writing my story before the blog concept was ever
conceived by my mother. I used the five pieces of lined paper and my two
flexible three-inch safety pens which are both part of the “welcome to Prison”
packet to write out a brutally honest version of the beginning of my addiction.
It was graphic, sarcastic, and maybe a little over the top. I was writing to
shock, but I had nobody to write to. I threw the original version of the beginning
of life away. I sat and contemplated life for a couple weeks until I was moved
to B-House.
B-House is where I lived when my mom approached me with the
idea of telling our stories respectively, but interwoven through time. Maybe
the time jumping was my idea, as it seemed to fit the life well. I told her I
loved the idea and I had already started but would start again. And I did. My
first envelope I believe contained 17 pages—back and front—which made up the
first few posts from my side of the fence. It was such a great concept. I kept
writing, and eventually it was published and I got to start reading my own
stuff, which is great for somebody who lives a self-centered life. What I didn’t
consider was the other side of things—addicts never do. I started reading and I
learned a lot about what I was putting others through, namely my mom.
In a cell, alone one day, I read a
post about a particularly frustrating situation for loved ones of those
incarcerated, and I really started to understand the beginning of what I would
learn over the next few years: accountability. I am fully accountable for my
thoughts, feelings, and actions, and all of those have consequences—good and
bad—and they affect others.
These days I need to be fully aware of all of my actions,
words, and even my body language. Things I do and say have the capability of
setting the mood for others, and I am no longer in control so I constantly ask
for help from the thing I don’t comprehend that I call God, and what I ask for
is the ability to make the next right move; ask Him to remove selfishness,
resentment, dishonesty, and fear, so I can only put good things into the stream
of life. I have to do this constantly, along with everything else I do to continually
fight this demon inside me that never wants to stop fighting. I WANT TO BE
SELFISH! I LOVE BEING DISHONEST! But I can’t be those things anymore if I want
to be happy and loved.
The link above will bring you to the beginning of all of
this. When I started, I still held onto my character defects. I wrote to become
famous, not to heal. I told stories that I thought people would want to hear,
and even though they were good and they really happened to me—that was part of the
problem, I was doing it for me.
These days I’m part of something that helps others. When I
write each post my only hope is that I inspire hope in somebody that is just
beginning their adventure in recovery. I hope somebody with a loved one who is
suffering finds the courage to reach out and help. I am no longer part of the
problem. I am part of the solution.
