Hard Wired

I started smoking weed and drinking somewhere around 8th and 9th grade. My home-life sucked, my mom and stepfather drank a lot, and my mother started dealing with her terrible childhood about the time I started to hit puberty.  Unwittingly I began to seek escape. I say unwittingly because I don’t remember saying to myself “man life sucks right now I really wish I could escape!” I “just wanted to have a good time” is what I would tell myself, and a “good time” back then, meant drinking and using drugs.

So, the first time someone offered me a beer (church camping trip 13 years old) or put a joint in my face (waiting for the bus, 9th grade) I didn’t hesitate. I didn’t because that’s just what I thought you did. I spent the next 32 years drinking and drugging and it occurred to me the other day that I was hard wiring my brain, from 14-46, to rely on alcohol and drugs to solve my problems.

This is the way I imagine it happened; I pictured the inside of my brain being hollowed out and a version of me is standing inside. It’s lit, but where the light is coming from I couldn’t tell you. I am standing in the center of this hollowed out portion of my head with a never-ending supply of wires hanging from my hand.

Now, for the next 32 years I begin connecting the wires in my brain. The problem is that I am wiring it from the perspective of a person using drugs and drinking to cope, so I’m fucking terrible at it, and I am literally changing the trajectory of my life as I am doing this. I’m wiring myself to seek the easy way out.

 “Life’s hard: Drink”.

That seemed to work! Wire yourself to remember that drinking fixes a hard life.

“Home-life sucks: Do some coke!”

Bingo, that worked! So hard wire yourself to fix a bad home-life with some good “ole cocaine.

“Schools in the shitter: Smoke a joint.”

Another victory! Keep the wires coming and plug in the one that says smoking weed helps you deal with school!

Any psychiatrist looks at this and with the ease of pulling his or her glasses off and looking down their nose at me would diagnose my actions as escapism. Not me though. I was busy plugging wires in that told me I was just having fun. And it worked! Really well! Drunk, stoned or high, meant home life, school life or just life itself was somewhere else. I didn’t have to think about it.

What I was doing was easing the situation of my life in the easiest way I could by getting loaded.  I was too young to understand the consequences of what I was doing and how bad I was hamstringing the rest of my existence with each bad connection. At the time I just didn’t want to feel like I felt anymore and drinking (plus 1980’s-grade-ecstasy) made it SUPER EASY for me to forget my problems.  

I continue making these connections in my brain over time, always with the goal of grabbing the easiest solution to every situation; to find the thing that required the least amount of effort, which usually meant getting high on something, and sweeping it under the rug never to be looked at again.

I got really good at it! Which was really bad! But by this time muscle memory had me plugging in the bad wires the second the shit hit the fan, so I kept on pluggin’!

Things like selfishness, and self-centeredness became important connections to make. The addict in me didn’t want this beautiful solution I had found to be in danger so like Sméagol trying to protect his “Precious” I made sure to wire myself to guard against any efforts to change the way I was doing things.

But then things changed…abruptly. At 46, as I am contemplating the prospect of losing my job (again), my wife leaving me and taking the kids with her because I am addicted to crack, the guy in my brain has an epiphany. The guy in my head, the version of me that has been working so diligently over three decades to create this system realizes in abject HORROR that the system he (I) created is literally killing him (me).

He now stands at the base of what has become an unwieldly birds nest of wires, like an open-face fishing reel that has just spun its line into a mass of knots that cannot be undone.  The whole job is wrong, suddenly none of the work that has been done makes a lick of sense!

It’s an “EPIC FAIL”…akin to the inevitable “furniture-from-a-box-fatal-error” where ¾ of the way through completing the construction, I come to the realization that for my new IKEA Dresser, I made the one and only mistake that wasn’t big enough to notice in the moment, but will now force me to take everything apart and start the process all over again.

My guy’s realization of his insane construction of this massive birds-nest of wiring is met with the shocking clarity that every wire placed was done so in error!

What the fuck do I do now????

I do the only thing I could do. I had to get to work. It’s as simple as that. I didn’t know what the work was going to be, I just knew I had to do something.

What does that mean though? Get to work? Those wires and connections I had made took a long time to create. I didn’t know how I was going to do it, but I started the process of rewiring all the bad connections I had been making since I was 14. And this is why the metaphor makes sense to me. It’s what helps to me to realize that process is going to take a while, and that is ok.

For 32 years I made these poor connections. Now I feel like, every day I am sober, I get to unplug a wire and put it where it belongs…I started to make new connections.

“Life’s Hard: Pray.”

Hey, that worked. Make the connection that praying can help you get through a tough time.

“Work’s tough: Talk to a group of people about it. “

Whoa….wait a minute! Did I just make a connection that says if I talk about stuff it gets better?? Plug that wire in.

“Family Life is ROUGH: Meditate or call a friend you trust and work out a plan. “

ARE YOU KIDDING ME!?! This is WORKING MAN! MAKE THAT CONNECTION!!!

Slowly but surely I started the business of rewiring myself. It’s tedious, it takes time but it’s working. Working in ways I would have never imagined. I gotta admit, It’s not easy! I get frustrated some days. Some days I look at the bird’s nest of bad connections that remain and I want to walk away.

It’s in those moments that I ask God for help.

Usually that help comes in the form of the realization that I took a very long time to make the mess that is my brain and the poor connections that led to my addiction. Which means it’s going to take a while to undo the mess and become the man I was supposed to.

The cool part is I think God, that is my understanding of God, guided my hands to the important wires first. Willingness to change being one of them, followed by the Dad wire, the Husband wire, to help me start to realize how important those roles are.  And while none of these initial rewires fixed the whole of who I am, they gave me enough of a head start to get me ahead of my addiction and on the path to a better life.

So, every day I get up and I go to work. It’s been three years since I’ve started to rewire things and life is better than it’s ever been… which is fantastic!! I know I have a lot of work left to do yet, but that’s the crazy part…because if life is this good now and I am still staring at the rest of this bird’s nest I have to fix…what’s it going to be like later?

If it follows its current trajectory it means I’ll be in an even better place…and that doesn’t even seem possible. If that’s the case, then LETS GO!!! I look forward to knowing that the slow continued effort of rewiring means I’m on the path to being a better man.

This is a project I know I will never finish, but I sure am enjoying the work!