That was a comfort.
Around this time, I’d decided to clean up my act. I cut down on the drugging and drinking. A few months later, I was actually sober and not missing the partying at all. My girlfriend of two years and I had decided that a big change was needed—in large part to help me stick to my sobriety. We had decided together that we had a major problem with using and drinking—that was an understatement!—and we finally needed to take control of our lives.
We managed to quit cold turkey (I have never been to rehab); we did this together successfully and started to think of ways to get out of LA. I was offered an amazing job in Atlanta, to be the group fitness director for a gym chain. We discussed having kids. We ended the lease on our LA apartment and bought a small house in Atlanta. I put every single piece of my life on a moving truck. Then, the night before we were going to leave, my girlfriend did something so unexpected and so devastating to me (I can’t share the details) that we split up. I’m sure in hindsight we were both equally responsible for the behavior that led up to this moment, but needless to say, we ended a potentially great future at the time.
Shattered, I asked a very close friend of mine, whom I will call Michael, if I could temporarily move into one of his spare bedrooms. He said sure. (Remember, I have no problem being bounced around, moving, or being in a new environment.)
Michael was one of my students in the front row in my Spinning classes at the Workout Warehouse. If I played any song recorded before 1980, he would get up and leave. I’d be like, “Hey, Michael, I’m playing Hall and Oates now, bye!” and everyone else would say, “Bye, Michael!” as he got off his bike in a huff and stomped out. He just hated vintage music—it reminded him of each of the three wives he had married and then divorced. He’d always known he was gay, but he hadn’t wanted to admit it. He didn’t want his ex-wives to know. He didn’t want hardly anyone to know, in fact, and he trusted me to keep his secret private.
Michael and I became incredibly close. We nurtured each other, and we adored each other. There was only one problem: He was much further entrenched in the world of drugs than I had ever been, and he introduced me to meth. He’d made enough money in his career to finance his habit, and he was totally into it. A lot of gay men in Hollywood in the 1990s were into it. I remember being scared to death of it at first, because Michael smoked it, and I knew that inhaling the drug was so, so bad and a guarantee of a much quicker, full-blown addiction. I also knew enough about addicts to understand how smoking drugs versus smoking cigarettes was not in the same stratosphere . . . let’s just be clear! I stopped being scared once I started putting it up my nose. I’d snort it, he’d smoke it, and finally it got to the point where, as a joke, he would blow it in my face, and then in my mouth. I was just fooling myself.
I knew if I touched that pipe, my meth addiction would become a huge problem. But because the drug was so addictive, I was soon smoking meth even after swearing I never would. Lying to yourself is something addicts do. I’d become living proof of that cliché “slippery slope” everyone talks about—but at that point, it wasn’t just talk, it was my life. I remember it being like your first taste of sugar as a kid . . . just as bad, and all you think about is wanting more.
Ironically, one of the reasons I’d been using drugs all along was as self-medication. They helped me avoid my problems and frustrations, and took me out of my challenging life situations. But meth was something completely different. My meth high paradoxically made me feel normal. Focused. I am not hedging when I say that I got so much done when I was on meth. (I learned years later that meth and Adderall both affect the same neurotransmitters in your brain, and as I have ADHD, meth functioned in much the same way as the prescription med. Which is scary!)
As I had earlier in my LA years, I thought of myself as a fully functioning addict who was fully in control. Crazy, yes, but that’s how addicts defend their addiction. I tried not to miss a class I was teaching. I worked incredibly hard. I became totally obsessed with my cleanliness. I had enough beauty products in my bathroom to rival Sephora. I took vitamins. I ate well. I trained every day. I was sleeping more. What’s so insane is that this became my new normal.
Michael was a functioning addict, too. All this time, he was able to work as hard as I did and was successful at his business. No one outside of our circle would ever have had a clue that meth was a part of our lives. I was so focused during this time that I went to sound engineering school and was able to research music for hours in between the Spin classes I taught. I was also able to keep up with my personal training clients as well as my own workouts. Soon, I even had a second career as a DJ.
This crazy lifestyle went on for three years.
Then, I fell in love again, and that made me want to stop doing meth. This girlfriend did not like the idea of the drugs at all, so I had to make a choice. It had really gotten to the point where drugs had taken control of my life . . . so I managed to kick my addiction cold turkey again and moved out of Michael’s (but I kept my room there just in case). Michael wasn’t so lucky—he continued on that same dark path, all by himself. At least when we were living together, I seemed to have had a moderating effect on him. I was guilt-ridden leaving him alone in that apartment, but I knew I had to try to change my life.
It also didn’t help that his boyfriend, whom he was passionately in love with, broke up with him and moved away. Plus, Michael had a painful genetic neuropathic condition that made it hard for him to get out of bed in the morning, and his drug abuse only made it worse. He often talked almost sarcastically about committing suicide—it was very hard to tell with him, given his sharp and dark sense of humor—and he had made a few halfhearted attempts that his friends and I thought were more a cry for help than any real determination to do it. This had happened enough that we never took him as seriously as we should have.
I knew Michael was in a bad way, but I was shocked when one day he told me that he had gotten a euthanasia kit from some sketchy online site. I panicked and called all of our friends and told them that Michael was serious this time. I said they needed to get right over to his house, but they didn’t believe me and thought he was just trying to get attention, even as I begged and pleaded and told them there was a real euthanasia kit in his room. Only one of my friends came over, and he talked to Michael for a long time, and on the way out told me there was no way he was serious.
I went into his room, and Michael was lying on his bed. I sat down next to him and told him I was calling the police. It wasn’t the first time I’d made that threat.
“Why would you do that?” he said. “If you do, I’ll ruin your career. I’ll call the gym where you love your job and tell them you’re a drug addict. I’ll ruin you. For real. You cannot get in my way. If you love me, let me go. I just want to go. Remember when you used to go with me to the convalescent home to see my father? Do you remember how awful that was for me, how my father suffered? I don’t want to end up like that. I don’t want you or anyone else to have to do that for me. I just want to go now. Let me go, okay?”
It wasn’t okay, of course. I pleaded with him. I begged. I sobbed. I threatened to call the police again, my job be damned. “What can I do to make you stay here?” I asked. “Do you want me to move back? Do you want to go to rehab?”
“Well,” he said, “you can have sex with me.”
That actually made me laugh. “Shut up!” I said.
“No, I’m serious. I’ll stay alive if you have sex with me.”
I looked at him. “I’m not doing that, Michael,” I told him. “I don’t sleep with people just to get what I want. You know that. It’s not the type of person I am. Don’t do this to me.”
Michael smiled. He knew how much I loved him as a friend, and he also knew I could not have sex with him. He would have taken care of me forever, would have given me anything I wanted; but he knew I wouldn’t do it. And I knew he was proud of me, in that moment, for staying true to myself.
So then I tried to tu
rn the tables on him. “Let me see if it works,” I said, grabbing the euthanasia kit. “Let’s try it on me first.”
No way would I have done it, but I wanted to scare some sense into Michael.
“Don’t touch that thing,” he said. “What, are you crazy?”
“No, but how do you think I feel, listening to you talk like this?”
Michael leaned back and sighed. “Look, Stacey, you have a whole life to live, an entire career, and so much to look forward to. But please promise me a few things. I promise you from the other side”—that’s what we called it—“I promise that when I get to the other side, I will watch over you, I will guide you. I will take care of everything. However I can guide you, I will.”
Tears were sliding down my cheeks.
“But you’ve got to stop,” he went on. “I mean it. You’ve got to stop doing drugs, you have to stop smoking, and you have to stop drinking.”
“Oh, gee, that sounds fun,” I said, trying to be flip.
Michael ignored me. “When you do that, all those things, I promise I’ll totally take care of you,” he said again.
We stayed up late talking. In the morning, I left because his sister and brother-in-law came over to see how he was doing and keep him company. As I was walking out the door, I said good-bye to him. For the last time.
His last words to me were: “See you on the other side. . . .”
I’m not sure what words were exchanged between Michael and his family. They obviously weren’t strong enough to make the impact he needed to change his mind. At this point in his life I don’t think anyone could have changed his mind. He was on a mission to leave. . . .
After he was gone, I went off the deep end. No matter how much I told myself that Michael had truly wanted to die, I was tortured by guilt and self-recriminations, and my only way of dealing with that was to do drugs even more often. I felt that I was lost without him. We had spent an enormous amount of time together. He had been like a surrogate dad, a brother, a boyfriend (without the sex). He was like my main squeeze.
Our plan was to be in each other’s lives forever. But so many other things were happening for Michael. He was beginning to feel his age, and in West Hollywood, where there are so many hot young men running around and you’re the old guy who feels like a dinosaur, it got to his ego. Michael was also having a lot of financial problems. His life wasn’t going the way he expected, and I think he just couldn’t cope anymore. I honestly think he died of a broken heart. He just gave up.
I felt like part of me nearly did, too.
The next year was pure hell. I missed Michael desperately. I felt him near me, every day (and still do). I talked to him a lot. I had his initials inked on my right calf. Having these conversations was like a soul-soothing meditation, but it wasn’t enough. Michael had committed suicide in one desperate moment, but I was doing it slowly, by degrees, every time I took another hit. On the outside, I was the glowing California girl, brimming with health and vitality, a superstar Spin instructor with famous friends and a fabulous lifestyle. On the inside, I was going down.
I knew I had to find a way to quit, and it wasn’t going to be easy. It took quite some time of me dealing with some hard truths about myself, of spending the time I needed to try to understand myself better, and many weeks of couch-surfing and staying in friends’ guesthouses (there were two; very LA!) when I knew I had to pull it together, some way, somehow. I’m not an Alcoholics Anonymous type, and I’m not the rehab-going kind of gal, so I just kept reading spiritual books, praying to Michael to help me from wherever he was, praying to my grandparents, praying to all the friends I had lost over the years . . . to help me.
“I am living proof that you can recover and detoxify and cleanse and clear.”
How did I do it, finally? I fell in love with an incredible woman, a normal family person with children, and I knew that you cannot be on drugs or have drugs in your life if you want to be a good partner.
She was the most amazing mother, and it was clear early on that if I wanted to be with her, I had to clean up my act. My therapist says that at first you quit for someone else, and then eventually your training wheels fall off, and you’re riding the sober bike all for yourself. And that’s exactly what happened.
I do have to admit that for the first six years of our relationship, I lied about how bad my addiction had really been. I just didn’t want her to know what I’d done. I was full of shame and guilt, and was really embarrassed to tell her how bad it was. And I kept drinking for the first two years we were together. I got really drunk at a fortieth birthday party, and we got in a fight, and she told me that if I ever had one more drink, she would not be with me anymore. Period. My behavior that night was reprehensible.
So I stopped. And with her help, I conquered my drug addiction and my alcoholism. This wasn’t easy, because as I said earlier, almost everyone in my family is an alcoholic. Even Grandma Stella, who’s ninety-seven years old, still loves her martinis. Who am I to tell her that alcohol is bad for your health? It wasn’t bad for hers. She’s beautiful, and healthy, and looks amazing!
At first, I missed the friends I’d had and the clubbing lifestyle that went with my addictions. But I don’t miss it now. I love my sober life. I love who I am as a person more than I loved that person who partied. Sobriety has become such a big part of who I am that I identify more as a sober person than I did as a functioning addict.
I went from calling it partying, which sounds like so much fun, to admitting I was an addict, which is really no fun at all and negatively affects those around you, not to mention yourself. Now I can say out loud that I lied to myself about being an addict and that I had been lying to myself for a long time. But I had to own it. When I finally did that, it was my first real step into my recovery.
All my years of addiction, and all my experiences in life, are a huge part of why I am as successful as I am as a teacher. I didn’t just magically end up where I am today. The climb and the struggle were fucking brutal. It was more than twenty years of climbing and never giving up. Having experienced that myself is why I can help people go from the bottom to the top. I know what it’s like because I’ve really been there and I’ve really done that.
I am living proof that you can recover and detoxify and cleanse and clear and become a totally different person. I am not proud of a lot of the choices I made. Many of them were horrendous. But I am here to say that you can rise from the depths of it. One second at a time.
And find your purpose, as I found mine.
“Figuring out your purposes is a process.”
TWO
THE POWER OF PURPOSE
When you are working within your purpose, it is much easier to live in your Ultimate Center. Purpose is what allows you to stay strong emotionally and physically in the face of adversity, and provides intrinsic motivation to all that you do.
Figuring out your life purpose is one of the most important discoveries you’ll ever have. Some people know what it is when they’re children; they declare that they’re going to be a doctor or a teacher or an astronaut or a carpenter or an artist, and don’t waver in their path. Others are not so sure, and graduate from high school or college and still don’t know. It takes years of doing different jobs to find out what they’re best at. Others realize that their life purpose is being a good parent or a good friend, or giving back to their community.
I overcame enormous obstacles on my journey toward figuring myself out and fine-tuning my purpose. Michael’s death was the tipping point. I knew he was right. I knew I had to shape up or die. I had to turn that knob way, way away from zero to get control over myself and move on to better things.
How can you do the same?
Figuring out your purpose is a process. Many people find it incredibly difficult to actually sit down with themselves and say what it is they really, truly want to be, especially if they have made life choices they didn’t want to make to please other people (such as going into a particular fie
ld to please their parents or to make a lot of money).
DON’T BE AFRAID TO ASK FOR HELP
Asking for help can be easy. You have the flu, so you ask your doctor to help you get better. You don’t understand how to do math equations, so you ask your teacher for help. You don’t know why your computer keeps glitching, so you ask someone smart at the computer store. Those problems aren’t easy ones, but they don’t involve emotions, so we aren’t embarrassed to ask for help with them.
But dealing with emotional problems involves digging deep enough into what’s truly going on, and many people have trouble doing that. It’s too painful, or it’s too daunting. To me, people who live like that are just existing, just getting by in life, without scratching beneath the surface. I find that terribly sad, because they’re losing out on life without really trying.
I can say that because I felt like that, too. I wasn’t able to admit to myself that I was stuck and flailing. I knew I needed help—something to give me that jolt to haul me out of my rut. It wasn’t until I went to a Tony Robbins seminar that I was able to clarify just how much help I needed. He didn’t pussyfoot around when he said, “If you do what you always do, you’ll get what you’ve always gotten.” That one particular statement got to me, in my gut, and I was so inspired that it made me ready to turn that knob two turns from zero before I’d even left the auditorium.
Part of Tony’s rare gift, I realized later—one Oprah has as well—was his ability to connect to more than three thousand people that weekend. We all left feeling as if he’d personally sat us down, one on one, in a tiny room, and asked us how he could help us. Everyone was able to filter his coaching into their own personal needs at the time. That is the mark of a true healer.
Tony also made me realize that I needed much more specific help with the issues that had made me an addict. I started therapy over a decade ago, and my therapist and my partner are still who I go to now for help. I firmly believe that every human being needs therapy; it’s a sign of strength to say “I need help” and have a trained and competent third party give you guidance. When you need help getting your body in shape, you go to a trainer. When you need help with your emotions, you go to a therapist. If you need help getting motivated, you buy this book. One of the reasons people love coming to my class is because I speak using the language I’ve learned over the years in therapy.
Two Turns from Zero Page 4