One Year Ago Today...

One year ago today I woke up in a dark room...with a plastic smother proof pillow under my head, a locked bathroom, and the smell of hospital antisceptic in the air. The night before was etched into my eyelids, into my still spasming muscles, as I looked around my room in Station 22---the dual diagnosis mental health and chemical dependency unit at Fairview Riverside Hospital.

I was still in the grips of a meth use binge induced paranoia...which I didn't realize until I opened my door to find two security officers passing by...one of whom looked at me and said that he thought that the nurses wanted me to stay in my room. I thought...this is it...they are coming for me right now today. I went back, sat on my bed, held my pillow and cried and cried. When the announcement came over the speaker system that we could leave our rooms...I immediately called Noodle and told her that they were most likely going to take me away that day. I put her through three kinds of Hell. Anh and my Mom too. But they went through it...and helped me get through it as well.

I remember sitting in the common area, watching the other crazies shuffle into the room...and looking out across the Mississippi River to the Washington Avenue Bridge...the bridge that just four years before I had hated having to cross in the middle of winter...to run from one class on the West Bank of the University of Minnesota to another class on the far side of the East Bank. I remember thinking that if I could have gotten out of there right then, I would have run buck naked across that bridge ten times in the middle of January. Which would probably have ended me right back where I was sitting. With frostbite in some of my favorite places. I was a guest of the psych unit for a week...which...was a miracle...most of the folks there were there or had been there for a month or more...and I was one of less than a handful of first timers.

That day marked a turning point in my life. The last year has not been all fun and games and parties. I've done sobriety allright, but in no way perfectly (none of us is perfect...it's progress not perfection). I've had some of the best days in my life and some of the shittiest in the last 365. I've made at least two new friends that I couldn't really imagine life without...Munkis and Chris.  And my friendships within my loving and caring community were deepend exponentially. Like 3 x 10 to the 8th power. Most of all I have learned so much about who I am, who I have believed I am, some of my crazy core beliefs about myself, and some new and refreshing ways to look at the world.

Stay tuned for another post today...a new poem. And...please please please consider a donation to YouthAction today http://www.youthaction.net.