In many ways, I gave Penn State an abbreviated version of my fourth step. A fourth step in recovery is a moral inventory of your past, or, in other words, a written depiction of all the things you did in your addiction that you need to make amends for—whether those amends are with yourself, your higher power, or other people in your life. It is usually done within the first year, but it can vary depending upon a person’s willingness and emotional and spiritual growth. Many people dread this step and avoid it like the plague. It requires you to take a painstakingly hard look at yourself and your actions. Being the big old nerd that I had become in early recovery, I didn’t shy away from this task at all; in fact, I was excited about it. One of the things that really clicked with me early on when I was in the rehabilitation center was that I had to revisit everything in my past and dig up all my issues and deal with them if I didn’t want to relapse. The fourth step to me was to be a huge scooping out of myself all the crap I had allowed drugs and alcohol to do to me. I sat down one night and began typing. I used a recovery book to help guide me in format, and just began to write. It was then that I fell back in love with the art of writing and realized how much I had missed it. I used to write all the time as a young person— poems, short stories, etc. I actually still have the first short story I ever wrote when I was fifteen (I got an A!). By the time I was done I had typed over ten pages, single-spaced. It was emotionally exhausting, and I learned more about my past than I thought I knew. It was another cleansing. When most people think of a moral inventory, they think of some dark and scary task, but it actually left me feeling light and free, as though a huge burden had been lifted from me.
After having done a fourth step, the college essay was easy for me. I mailed the essay and application with no expectations at all. I didn’t fear judgment, because I knew that today my life was good and my past mistakes only made me stronger. I didn’t obsess about whether or not I would get in; I just kind of sent it off into the universe. If it’s meant to be, then it’s meant to be, I thought. This was another gift of recovery that was so strong in my life by this time. I just knew things would be okay. I knew I wouldn’t always get what I wanted, but somehow I would always get what I needed.
Lo and behold, several months later, a letter arrived in my mailbox. As I tore through it, I saw the wording: “Congratulations, you have been accepted….” I almost fainted! Never in a million years would I have guessed that I would be going to college. The pride that began to swell up in my heart was overwhelming. I did it. I was worth something. At least to Penn State University, I was someone; I was a student.
I immediately called my parents to tell them the good news, and they shared in my delight. I could hear the pride and joy in their voices as they told me how proud they were of me and that it was so exciting. I hung up the phone in amazement. My life had done such a turnabout. These types of conversations were becoming the norm with my parents, and that in and of itself was odd. I usually disappointed them and made excuses for my behavior. But lately it was the other way around, and I began to feel proud of myself and excited to share my daily activities and achievements with them.
I started to feel valid, as though I actually might have a purpose after all. No one in my family had ever come close to going to college, let alone gotten into a major top-ten university. A new chapter in my life was about to begin; I was to start college in mid-January, and I couldn’t even put into words the thrill I felt.
Yet I had all the fears of any person starting something for the first time. Could I handle classes, tests, and homework? Had I fried too many brain cells to excel? To deal with the fears, I shared my concerns in my meetings. The great thing about people in recovery is their unconditionally supportive nature. I was able to place my fears at the feet of my peers, and they picked them up and held them for me. They reassured me that I would make it and that I deserved to be in college. I still was battling internal self-worth issues, which are so common in early recovery. People in recovery believed in me, sometimes before I believed in me. I had become good at verbalizing my fears when I needed to, before they festered inside me and became issues. I had been working so hard at getting myself emotionally healthy, and I felt ready to take on a new challenge.
20
MIXED MESSAGES
I WAS SLOWLY FORMING A WONDERFUL NEW BOND with my parents. They were becoming so important in my life. My relationship with them before recovery was built on falsehoods and manipulations. I was always trying to hide my true self from them, and they were always pretending not to really see me. We did this uncomfortable dance around each other that never allowed us to get to truly know each other. By avoiding the land mines around us that none of us wanted to talk about, we avoided any form of intimacy other than the rare glimpses when I invited, or should I say pulled them into the hole I was living in by sheer desperation. Like when I got pregnant at nineteen and needed to tell them. They helped me make a tough decision, and my father walked me through my abortion. Or when I tried to kill myself, and it was their answering machine that blinked with the horrible news of my nearly successful suicide attempt in 1997.
Now that it was 1999 and I was in recovery, almost all my skeletons were out of the closet and there wasn’t much my parents didn’t know about me and my past—except for one thing. Sometimes I would borrow my pseudo-girlfriend’s nice new SUV and drive it home on the weekends to see my parents, and they would question me as to whose car it was. I would just say it was a friend’s car and blow it off. I wasn’t quite ready to tell them that I was in an emotionally safe, nonsexual, pseudo-lesbian relationship. It was best that they just believed I was happy and working on myself and making new friends in State College. I am sure they noticed the rainbow on the back of the car, or the fact that many of the friends who were at my one-year lecture were oddly butch; but if they did, they didn’t say a word.
As Christmas approached, I went out shopping and bought all types of little gifts for Lynn and a beautiful, sappy-as-hell card that expressed my undying love for her. It was a little over the top, but I was just thrilled to have someone to spend the holiday with and wanted it to be really special. I allowed myself to get all wrapped up in the holiday spirit and what it means when you’re in a relationship. I did the same for everyone in my family; I wanted to give cards that really expressed how much I loved everyone, and I took special care picking out each card. Lynn and I decided we would exchange our gifts upon my arrival home from spending Christmas with my parents.
I went home and had a wonderful Christmas with my parents and saw my brothers and niece. My brothers were still looking rough; they had been partying hard and it was still all the same drama with them. But like always in our family, no one ever misses a Christmas holiday. Christmas in our house was a monumental event, and we were always overly spoiled. We all opened our cards and presents and it was wonderful in those moments. I only stayed for three days, and that was just enough to get my dose of home and the drama that came with it all. I drove back to State College in excited anticipation of my first Christmas with Lynn. As we sat in my apartment with our individual piles of gifts ready for presentation, we handed each other a card to start. I read the one she gave me, and it was a beautiful, flower-filled love note as worthy as the one I’d picked out for her; but when I lifted my tear-filled eyes to look at her, I was immediately struck by the contorted, confused look on her face.
She just looked up at me and said, “Umm, I know I am older than you, but this card says, ‘To My Loving Parents.’” My heart dropped and my eyes widened. “What!” I yelped, ripping the card from her hand. Sure enough, it read, “To My Loving Parents” on the front. As the realization of what had happened sunk in a little deeper, my heart was now occupying a space in the bottom of my shoe. I must have mixed up the cards as I was stuffing them into their respective envelopes. I quickly picked up her envelope, and sure enough, her name was on the front in my handwriting, but the card was for my parents, which meant the card my parents op
ened… “Oh my god,” I stuttered over and over again. She tried calming me down, but I was in full-blown panic mode by that point and trying to replay every second of my visit home. Surely my parents would have said something if they saw that their Christmas card was really a mushy love card written out to another woman, wouldn’t they?
I was totally freaking out, and Lynn’s attempts to try and calm me down weren’t working at all. A ton of questions were flying around in my head and coming out of my mouth in rapid fashion as I paced the floor of my living room: “They would have said something, right?” “They must not have really read the card.” “Maybe they were just being nice and didn’t know what to say.” “Oh my god, what if they think I am gay?” I was hyperventilating, and needless to say, the mood was killed and we spent the rest of the night analyzing every potential scenario that could have happened and might yet happen.
I could tell Lynn was slightly put off by my reaction of utter disgust and fear that my parents might find out about her. Even though she understood the issues of coming out to parents and the realities that major decision held for most people, I could still tell she was hurt and took it personally. I felt terrible about it and tried to explain to her that it wasn’t about her, it was just that I still had no idea what I was doing and who I was, so there was no way I was ready to try and explain it to my parents.
Over the next days, I called home frequently, checking in, making small talk, and mentioning how nice this Christmas was with all the cards, presents, etc. They never said anything or let on for a second that anything was off. After a week or two with no confrontation from them and no indication whatsoever that they knew, I began to breathe a sigh of relief. Maybe they just didn’t read it that closely, which then kind of pissed me off since I had taken amazing care picking out the card, and then they never read it.
I talked about it in my weekly therapy sessions and began to look at my sexuality a bit deeper. I was trying to figure out exactly what I was doing with Lynn. Again, my therapist was gentle and nonjudgmental and let me talk freely about my confusion without having to come to any concrete solutions. She said that sexuality is sometimes fluid and what I was exploring was totally normal and okay. It was so nice to have someone so incredibly unconditional to talk to.
21
SMOKE SCREENS
NEW YEAR’S EVE WAS QUICKLY APPROACHING, AND I decided it was time to end my one lingering, nasty addiction: smoking. I had smoked cigarettes since I was eleven years old. Day in and day out, those little tobacco-filled tubes were a part of my life. Never in a million years would I have thought that I would give them up. However, recently I had noticed that I was getting out of breath just from climbing a small flight of steps. I was also becoming more aware of the stench of smoke, and I didn’t like what I smelled. I had said early on in my recovery that I would wait at least a year before I would consider quitting smoking. I knew trying to quit everything at once would have been way too hard, so I kept the habit as long as I could.
My life was becoming so clean and so pure that the whole smoking thing just didn’t fit me anymore. The cigarettes looked odd in my hand as I carried them around. They no longer matched the person smoking them, and I began to feel slightly hypocritical each time I would light one up. Here I was with over a year in recovery, trying to live a life of brutal honesty and integrity, yet I was still addicted to a drug that I used every hour, if not more. It didn’t feel right to me anymore, and I wasn’t enjoying them like I used to. I wanted to be totally healthy, and smoking no longer fit into the new lifestyle I was living.
I started smoking like a chimney—not that I wasn’t smoking that way to begin with, since I smoked about two packs a day—but in preparation for quitting. I forced myself to literally chain-smoke for the week leading up to my final day. I had heard of people doing this before quitting to make themselves just sick to death of smoking. So I fired up one nasty butt after another while sitting in my living room watching TV. As soon as I would crush one out into the ashtray, I would immediately light up another one. My ashtray was overflowing, and after a day or two of this, I swear my face was turning a gross shade of green. On New Year’s Eve, Lynn and I went to a party with a bunch of recovering people and played games all night. Lynn was a heavy smoker too and decided that she would quit with me. We made our pact that just before midnight, we would smoke one last cigarette and then flush the rest down the toilet. I was determined not to smoke again. Now that I had made the decision, that was it; my mind was made up! Lynn wasn’t as committed, and I think she was doing it more for me than for herself. I knew that once I quit I would never be able to date a smoker again—I just knew the smell and taste would make me want to throw up. I knew Lynn would have a harder time doing this, which could have been my subconscious way to sabotage the relationship. But for now, we were doing this together.
So at midnight, we both sucked away on our last cigarette. I pulled hard off my former best friend and inhaled deeper than I ever had until the red cherry burned all the way down to my fingers and all that was left was a brown filter. “That’s it,” I said as I dumped my pack of cigarettes into the toilet. Watching the loose tobacco freeing itself and rising up in the water like tea from a bag that had just burst open in a cup of water, I realized my love affair with smoking was coming to an abrupt halt. I reached for the lever to flush the toilet with a tinge of sadness. These were my first vices, my first drug, and my first rite of passage into the destructive path I ended up stumbling down for years. Cigarettes were always there, no matter what, through thick and thin. I could light up a cigarette just about anywhere and get at least a hint of a high when I needed it. You don’t realize how much you smoke until, well, until you don’t. Smoking is the most socially acceptable form of drug abuse in the country, and up until recent years, you could smoke everywhere. It was universally accepted and embraced, making it one of the deadliest and most cunning manifestations of addiction to try to break away from.
But I was determined, and as I was beginning to learn in my recovery, my determination was actually quite fierce. Once I set my sights on something, I went after it with every fiber of my being. This newfound sense of empowerment and accomplishment was strange to me but quickly became one of my favorite things about recovery. I could do things. I could dream. I could achieve. I followed through. These were all things I never believed in my addiction. I couldn’t or wouldn’t have even tried to follow through with anything that seemed worthwhile because I never believed in myself enough to give anything a fighting chance. It was just easier to be self-defeating about things than to challenge myself and risk failure. So, after having a over a year of recovery under my belt and a letter from Pennsylvania State University that said I was worthy enough to at least be on probation with them and become a student, I was ready to tackle anything.
It was hard—harder than I ever in a million years would have imagined. It wasn’t the kind of craving that went away. It was as though someone had pushed the fast-forward button on my thoughts. Everything was flying around in my head at a speed that was physically exhausting. I had an energy surge that ripped through my body and made me physically shake from its impact on my skin for days. I was vibrating. I was a maniac. This is apparently a common side effect of quitting smoking. I had no idea and was totally unprepared for this reaction. I hadn’t had any major physical withdrawal symptoms from alcohol and drugs.
My thoughts ran across my brain so fast that my mouth felt like a court reporter trying to keep up with an overly articulate judge. I would stumble over my words as I tried to speak to people or in meetings. It was embarrassing. I couldn’t get the words out fast enough, and just as I would say one thought, another one ripped by like on an accelerated marquee.
I decided it was best to stay home as much as possible, but when I tried to just sit and watch TV, the vibrating started and I would get up and start cleaning or organizing. I can say this with 100 percent certainty: Quitting smoking had a highly positive effec
t on my apartment. I cleaned every inch of it. It had never been so squeaky-clean! On the fourth day, I decided to cleanse my whole apartment of the damage I had done by smoking. I had all this energy so I figured I might as well put it to some good use. I began with general tasks like vacuuming and dusting.
While I was scrubbing the kitchen counter with some bleach cleanser, I made the mistake of scrubbing a little mark on the wall. I was living in a standard apartment, so all of my walls had been painted white. So when I scrubbed this little section of the wall, it revealed a bright white patch of paint that apparently was suffocating underneath the layers of toxic, yellow smoke stains that had clung to my walls from my heavy smoking. I just stared at the little patch of whiteness blaring back at me from the nasty wall. It made me sick. I thought of what my lungs must look like and began scrubbing harder and harder. Before I knew it I was plowing all my manic energy into these walls, and I was on a mission to get them back to the bright white they once were. I scrubbed and scrubbed for hours until every inch of my apartment’s walls was cleansed, and once I finished the last of the walls, I collapsed onto my couch and took in my work. My apartment sparkled like they do in those great Lysol commercials. It smelled sanitized, not dingy. I was finally physically exhausted, the vibrating stopped, and I was able to just breathe in a deep and cleansing breath. It felt amazing.
Lynn wasn’t doing as well as I was, and she quickly lit up a cigarette after a couple days of not being able to stand not smoking. I told her she couldn’t smoke in front of me or in my house. There was something about having cleansed my home and my body that made me feel refreshed, energized, and ready for change. She was bitter, angry, and beginning to become a real drain on my energy to be around.
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