That’s the thing I have to remember—that it’s worth staying sober. Not for anyone else, for me. That’s something I had never considered— never for one moment—and I feel that that was my real spiritual awakening.
Hopelessness is knowing that you can’t control yourself. You feel alone; you feel that you’re not worthy of asking for help. You’re not worthy of being alive, basically. You have nothing to offer. You know you’re a drug addict, you know you’re an alcoholic, and you hate the person in the mirror. I really felt that before I got sober. But on the eighth day of that second rehab, when I thought of myself as that four-year-old boy, I decided to stay for myself—not to get people to like me, not to get my fiancée back, not to keep my job, what ever. I decided that just maybe there was the possibility that I wasn’t a piece of crap and maybe I deserved a better life.
Even in sobriety, I’ve had divorces and failures and those feelings that creep up on you if you isolate, if you don’t reach out. That’s why I try to be of service as much as I can. I think when your mother leaves when you are young, there’s always something inside of you that feels unworthy. It’s something I work on in therapy. The more I’m left to my own devices and my own thinking, the more the hopelessness creeps in. But when I reach out, and it’s hard sometimes, but when I reach out to someone else, it’s always worth it. I get out there and hear other people’s stories and get out of my own head.
I just got back from this camp I have for kids who’ve had heart transplants, out on Catalina Island. There’s no air-conditioning, it’s dirty, there are bugs, it’s not the Four Seasons in Maui. And yet it was really the greatest experience of my life, because I truly cannot think of myself there. Every day I was there, I tried to think of myself—I tried to worry about work, I tried to worry about money, I tried to worry about me—and I just couldn’t, because you’re around these kids that are living life today because they have to. They know what it’s like to not be sure you’ll wake up tomorrow.
Velvet Mangan
Velvet has turned her experience with addiction into her life’s work. I first heard her story at an addiction conference, and I was so impressed by how much she’s accomplished, just surviving what she did. Then, during her own recovery, she realized that there weren’t nearly enough places for women, especially women with children, to get the treatment they needed. With no money, no experience, nothing but the awareness of the need, she started Safe Harbor, which has helped thousands of women find their way to recovery. She talks about that here, and it’s one of those examples of how taking one step after another on the right path leads you to amazing places.
I
think of the path I’ve traveled and I think of the people that have traveled it with me, and it’s kind of like that Verizon commercial where you turn around and all those people are there behind you. Every day,
I remember every person that has come into my life, has held out that hand to get me where I am today. And I think of the miracle of God and the grace of God. I know that when I do spend that quality time, when I do keep up my relationship with my higher power, I am so awake to the world. And I just want to be awake for all of it, even the scary moments of it. I just want to be awake.
My dad died when I was fourteen, and then my mom tried to commit suicide, so they institutionalized her. That was how I ended up homeless. The foster care wanted to come, but I ran because I’d heard horror stories about living in the foster homes and I just didn’t want to end up there, so I ran.
The only thing that my dad left was a car, and so I took off in that, which is how I ended up homeless living in a 1970 Buick, doing a lot of cocaine and sleeping with a guy that was about forty. He was helping me out with my habit, and we were drinking a lot. And I was so depressed that I just wanted to die most of every day. The hopelessness of my life . . . I was illiterate and hungry and alone. Every once in a while my friends’ mothers would let me stay on their couches and I’d kind of get a reprieve, but for the most part it was a dark, dark time.
I remember going to visit my mom and driving away from her feeling like I had no other option except to take my life, because the addiction and the depression were just so great, I had no way out. I got as much drug paraphernalia as I could, and I was kind of planning my suicide. It was dark, and it was real late at night. I was in this car parked by the road, and I’d been up on coke for days. I just couldn’t make the pain go away, and the fear that my life was going to look like this forever was just too much. I didn’t think I could live through another second of this unbearable pain. I was so desperate and my soul was so empty. I didn’t have a mustard seed of hope.
The only thing I could do was remember my Aunt Eleanor. She was a reverend, and she had told me that sometimes it helped her to write to God, and so I thought, “Well, I don’t have much to lose.” I wrote this letter to God, and I just said, “God, if you exist, can you help me? I don’t know what to do anymore. I don’t know what my life is supposed to look like. I don’t know how to get help. I don’t know who to call.” That was it, and I still stayed up tweaking on drugs into the next day.
Then I thought I would go to my high school to tell my coach good- bye. I was in special education classes, and there was this football coach named Coach White who taught the special education kids. He showed interest in me, like he cared for me, and he’d ask me how I was doing after my dad died. I didn’t show up at school very much, but the times I did, this coach was kind to me. He was just an amazing guy, so I wanted to say good- bye to him and thank him before I killed myself.
I weighed about 98 pounds, I had black eyes, I’d been up on coke for days so my body looked horrific. I mean the drugs were starting to really take their toll on me and my daily health. He saw me, and he still says he doesn’t know what happened to him, but something in him took over. He grabbed me by the shirt and he said, “You know what? You’re going to get help and you’re going to get help today. I’m calling the authorities and I’m going to get you put away. I mean if you can’t help yourself, this is just not going to work.” There was no way that he was going to let me walk out the door.
He dragged me, physically dragged me, through the campus of the school. I was crying and screaming. I mean that was the last thing I thought was going to happen. That was not the plan. He’s dragging me through this campus and he opens this door. There’s this little lady with this little bob cut, and her name is Jane. She was at this place called the Stop-In Center, and it was something that they had developed in my school that I didn’t know anything about because I was hardly ever there. He opens up the door and interrupts a meeting that they were doing on campus that day. He says, “Jane, if she leaves here, I want you to call the police. We need to get her some help, today.” I was just stunned and completely out of it. I couldn’t have been any more shocked. I sit down, and there’s my friend Shannon and my friend Judd. Judd said, “You know, Velvet, you can stay with us. There’s this young people’s recovery support group on Tuesdays. You could sleep at my house.”
I said all right. He was a good friend of mine. And then Shannon said, “What ever you need. Just name it.” I don’t remember much. I remember kind of waking up to that Tuesday meeting and feeling just a glimpse of hope that there was maybe something that could happen. Maybe there could be some other plan for me, because all of a sudden people cared. All of a sudden somebody said, “We care about you and we don’t want to see you kill yourself.” I thought, “How did they know I was going to kill myself?” I didn’t know that this was a common feeling of depression and anxiety that all of us felt. That day, I felt myself relaxing. An ease came over me. I don’t even remember what I heard in that first meeting, but I was interested. I was interested, and they promised me a place I could go.
Before the second meeting, I crashed because I’d been up on coke, so they just put me on a couch, and when I woke up the next morning, there were all these young people talking about being clean and sober. I never really heard that befo
re. I mean my uncle was an alcoholic and so he’d take me sometimes to this recovery meeting, but they were all, you know, old guys. They didn’t look like me.
When Judd and Shannon took me to this other meeting, it was like all of a sudden everyone did look like me, and they all seemed to have a good time. Everybody was laughing. All of a sudden I felt warmth. I didn’t feel all the anxiety I always had. It was like somebody put their arms around me and said, “It’s going to be all right.” I didn’t fight it. That was as close to a feeling of comfort and ease that I had felt in a very, very long time.
I know it was God and it was grace, because I didn’t even give myself time to think myself out of it. I just let it all carry me. It carried me into one more day and then to another day, and then I was introduced to a recovery club. And that’s where I met another saving grace, my friend Dave, who was like the Marlboro man. This man was just amazing, and he believed in me. He didn’t believe that I was this hopeless little kid. He made sure I got a home, and he made sure I was fed. It wasn’t like they just said, “Go to meetings.” It was like they knew that wouldn’t be enough. They said, “Come with me, Velvet.” It was a group effort, and I just think it was kind of a moment for all of us.
Up until that point, I had nobody I could go to, nobody who I thought could save me. Nobody outside of me could help me, and I couldn’t do anything to help myself. As a human being I felt, “I’m illiterate. My family doesn’t love me. What can I become? Obviously I don’t matter.” My body, mind, and soul had been so emotionally and spiritually abused, just looking for someone to love me, just looking for someone to tell me I’d be okay.
The only way out was simple surrender. Blind faith. I mean they told me early on, “Just keep it simple. Sweep the parking lot and pray for a miracle.” Okay. I sat at the coffee bar at the club and ate Top Ramen and pickled eggs every day. That was the best I could do. I just trusted these people, these strangers. I trusted that they saw something in me, and I think God was carrying me through the whole thing, and now I know why it all happened. I think I had to see it all in hindsight, because at that point I really, really believed that I was unworthy and that I was unlovable, that even my mother didn’t think I mattered enough to stay alive for.
I know now my mom did love me, she just didn’t have it in her to take care of me. That didn’t mean that I wasn’t worth living for. When you’re a teenager, you’re fighting everybody and everything. That’s just what you do. So I had to fight everybody and everything, and then pretty soon I was just in the dark, fighting nobody. There was nobody there to fight, nobody but me. Then I had to ask myself: Do I really choose to be this? Do I want to be a drug addict for the rest of my life, living like this? I had to go through that struggle, knowing that I was just fighting the dark and losing, knowing that I was done. Surrendering to pain. It was that pain that got me to that new place.
I got sober and my life was beyond my wildest dreams. I got married, I had kids, but there was still a voice in my head telling me I’m not enough. I didn’t do the healing work that I needed to do with my God and myself. You know, you get married for better or for worse, for sickness and health, but nobody ever tells you to take yourself in the same value. Nobody ever says that. Even in your sobriety, they say find someone in recovery that you want to be like, but how about becoming who you want to be? How about loving you the way you are and the way you’re not?
I couldn’t allow myself to be a work in progress, I wasn’t willing to grow in public anymore. So I started to internalize the grief of daily living, and that’s when I started to make mistakes. Then I went bankrupt at twelve years sober, and I was very embarrassed about that. I made bad decisions, almost like I was getting high. I felt a lot of shame and embarrassment and I didn’t know where to go with it. I got filled with resentment and self-pity. I thought, “I have all these years. I’ve earned my right to have my grievances.” Then I got so depressed that I created this really painful disease in my body. They thought I had cancer because my muscles would seize up so hard, based on fear and restriction.
I know I’m a spiritual person, and I know the only way a girl like me lives is through my relationship to God, by being close to my higher power. I know that’s my nature, I know that’s my purpose, and I got far, far away from that. The pain of sobriety, the pain of being in my own skin, became too much to me. I internalized that pain, and so I got this body disease, and then I got so fearful I got agoraphobic. I mean I just created this suffering in my life, in sobriety, because one more time I was rejecting myself. Who I was wasn’t good enough, and so I couldn’t get close to God anymore. I just felt so shut down.
After about nine months of suffering, the doctor said, “Why don’t you just take some Soma?” I took this Soma, and within four months I was completely strung out. I was strung out on fentanyl patches, morphine, liquid morphine, Dilaudid, I mean I had a box full of every pharmaceutical thing I could get. Every day I lay in this bed, and there I was again in the dark, totally suicidal, and I completely knew what I had done. The voice in me was low, but I could hear it, saying, “You relapsed, and you gave up a lot, but you know what you have to do.” But there was that bigger part of me, the ego part that had taken over, that said, “No, you’re sick, and screw recovery and screw all those people, because they screwed you over.” All that sick demented thinking comes and takes over. That went on for about four months.
I was lying in my room, wanting to take my life again. My little seven-year-old son comes in, and he lies down on my bed and he starts to sob. He says, “Mama, when you believed in God you were healthy, and as soon as you stopped believing in God you got sick.” And it was like . . . all those clouds, everything that I was trying to convince myself was there, all that went away. I could not question the truth when it came from him.
I got up from my bed, I gave him a hug, and I told him, “I love you, son, and I’m going to get better.” I walked down the hall and I asked my husband, “Is it time for me to take my fentanyl patches off?” He said, “Yeah, baby, it’s time.” And so I took off my fentanyl patches and detoxed like you can’t even imagine. It was that moment of my little boy saying that to me: “You weren’t sick when you believed in God.” I mean that moment couldn’t have been any more clear. I couldn’t question it.
I was going to have to go to the recovery group that I had been going to for all these years and raise my hand as a newcomer and be willing to give up everything that I thought I was or that I wasn’t. I did it because I wanted my relationship with God. I knew happiness, I knew freedom, I knew that when I did pray for a miracle and swept that parking lot, my life was comforted. I just wanted that simplicity again. I wanted to go back to the hope and the freedom of knowing that just being sober today was good enough. Just being happy and smiling and laughing with my friends on the back porch was enough. Being a mother to my child, where we could hold hands through Disneyland and I could be present, was enough. I just wanted that again.
And here I am again. What I know is that I turned my back on God. God never turned his back on me. I did it myself. I turned my back on love, I turned my back on faith, I turned my back on the simplest things. I let my ego get the best of me and suffocate that beauty and that peace that God gave me. For fun and for free, God gave me a life beyond my wildest dreams. I didn’t do much to get it. I just swept the parking lot and prayed for a miracle every day.
I think a lot of times we just adopt everything our parents thought, everything our family of origin thought. Violence was a big one for me. I was beat up a lot when I was a little girl. I was taught to be violent. That was the only thing I was ever good at. I was completely empowered by being able to go up to the craziest person there was in school and fight a fair fight, and be known as somebody that was good at that. That was a big thing that I had to learn, that I didn’t need to physically protect myself anymore.
And my mom, bless her heart, she was an addict, and so her life was nothing but violence. People beat u
p on her, so she did the same to me. Or my dad, who was married to another woman and had his own family—he just got my mom pregnant. So I come from a lot of shame. I had to get rid of a lot of ideas I had about me, and I did that through people lovingly teaching me different ways of coping.
And then—not knowing how to read and write, and being told that I could and believing that I could. One of my counselors at the club took me to the Department of Rehabilitation and I learned how to read and write with all the immigrants. To me, it looked like it was way too big, but each little step with them holding me . . . I was able to get past a lot of these root beliefs about myself. At the department, they did an aptitude test and they said I should be a factory worker. Basically, the world said I was hopeless, but the people in recovery said that was bullshit, just bullshit. I liked those people so much that I believed what they said about me.
The second time was more about committing to me. Like saying to myself, “I’m done rejecting you. Yeah, everybody rejected you and you kind of kept that going. But no more.” I kept abandoning me, looking for someone to save me. I wanted somebody to tell me that I’m enough, that I’ve made it and that I’m good enough. I just came to a place where it was like, “You know, God made you the way that you are. You are enough. You’re way more than enough.” I committed to not letting my head go on and on and on about what it is that I don’t have or what it is I’m not.
I’ve really worked on training my mind to believe in higher things and to live in a place that’s the highest good for everybody. If I could inspire one human being and love one human being a tenth as much as the way I’ve been loved and inspired—that is all I want to do. So I’m committed to loving God, loving my fellow man, but first loving me. If I make mistakes or I don’t achieve what I want to achieve . . . well, you know, tomorrow is another day. I’m learning to just be gentle with myself. I’m learning to really know that God is love and that if I love, that’s enough. That’s the commitment that I’ve made to myself.
Moments of Clarity Page 16