(Above: A photo of my broken shoulder and swollen arm and hand before I went in for surgery in Santa Fe, New Mexico.)
I have been debating about writing this column. But one thing about being in a debate with one’s self is that not only does one make counterarguments but also experiences the counterbalance of being both the winner and the loser when a decision is made. I am still not sure if writing this column - and posting these visually honest photos of what my body looked like pre- and post-surgery - is my having won the debate or lost it. But in some way what I am writing about is achieving balance and giving others a kind of graphic hope that they too can heal so perhaps I am finding an equipoise in coming clean for it is not about being a winner or a loser but just finding the nonjudgmental level where a leveling with oneself (and others) comes to rest. After the last five months, I just want to do that too: rest.
I have been through a crucible having broken my shoulder in four places my last night in Paris after two months there and having had surgery in Santa Fe two and half weeks later where I was heading next on this spiritual and cultural pilgrimage that I refused to stop even though I had dangerously manifested my deeper brokenness with the physical sort. The surgery resulted in my having ten titanium pins and a plate inserted into my shoulder and arm and attached to whatever the surgeon needed to attach them to in order for me to be repaired. I then focused on the months of physical therapy I have been having. There was a lot of pain as well - especially at night when I’d try to sleep. But I also put that situational pain post-surgery into the context of my not having cancer and that other people suffer worse chronic pain. I trusted that my pain would end at some point. And I put into practice what I had begun to learn a dozen years ago in recovery when I was attempting to cease the physical and spiritual destruction of being an active drug addict. Post-surgery, I woke up each day and I surrendered. I got to the end of that one day. During that one day, I did what I was told. I did the work. The next day I woke up and did it all over again. This week, I got back here to London five months later mostly healed - 75% is my new 100% - by facing this crucible one day at a time. The construct of recovery took on a new construct of a different kind of recovery. Or was it?
(Above: My body 10 days post-surgery in Santa Fe.)
Before I broke my shoulder I was already living under a new construct in my life. When I was walking down the street in London last fall, where I was living for four months before my two in Paris, I realized I had not gone to a meeting in a couple of months regarding my sobriety. It was not that I had thought about it and chosen not to go to one. I just had not thought about it. It never dawned on me to go to one. I was too busy living my life within contentment, a place where happiness and sadness comfortably exist side by side and can even at times caringly hold hands. I had earlier been accused - is that the right word? yes, that’s the right word - of “pulling a geographic” which is the parlance in 12-Step speak for running away from a problem only to find yourself, the root of the problem, still there. But one man’s “geographic” is another man’s pilgrimage. I even said that to a few people who lobbed the accusation at me, and said it sincerely with serenity instead of resentment. Walking down that London street that day, it dawned on me in an epiphanic way that I was living my life no longer under the construct of being an addict. I was no longer waking up in the morning facing the decision not to use (meth was my drug of choice) because I just never thought about it. And yet I still was living a life aligned with the precepts and tenets of recovery. I still said my litany of prayers and did my meditations and acknowledgements the same and prayed to do the next right thing and take the next right action and to live a surrendered life and focused on controlling my reactions to things that were beyond my control. I said the Serenity Prayer; I say it. I think everyone’s life would be bettered if they lived a life of service and kindness and took a daily inventory of their behavior. But you don’t have to be an addict to do so.
As I continued to walk that day around London in the calm thrall of this epiphany I began to compare it to my having ceased to be a Christian while walking the Camino which led me, in turn, to living a deeply more spiritual life because I no longer had to live within the cultural religious strictures inculcated into me. I no longer thought in terms of shame and guilt or good vs. bad or immoral vs. moral or sin vs. innocence just as I have now stopped thinking in terms of using and not using. I became spiritually nonbinary. My discernment for living became this: one is either kind or one is not. Full stop. Having ceased to live my life under the construct of defining myself as an addict has deepened my sobriety from one of strictures and structure to one of acceptance not of powerlessness and a Higher Power - power no long exists in this new construct - but of a kind of ascetic aesthetic of simplicity. I have had the renewed sense of rewriting my own narrative and not giving in - different from surrendering - to placing myself within the confines of one written for me. I have begun truly to live within the construct of my deepest self: a seeker. I once sought whatever I was seeking through drugs and the behavior enabled by them. But once I accepted the seeking, the drugs have drifted away from me, not I from them. I am no longer their home. I am my own, the only one I now have as I set forth in the world each day still one day at a time. The first platitudinous anodyne saying I saw printed on a sign that lay at my feet on the floor of the first room I ever walked into to start on the road to sobriety - which is now more deeply a road of recovery - told me to KEEP IT SIMPLE. It has taken my living within a different construct to circle back to that first day and understand that bit of signage. I have finally taken it to heart but I had to travel on the patch of road where I saw it to get to this newest stretch where I now am. Same road. Different part of the map.
(Above: The photo I posted on social media last night at the opening of Donizetti’s L’elisir d’amour at the Royal Opera House last night almost five months after I fell down a flight of metro stairs in Paris and broke my shoulder in four places. The Royal Opera House in London is my happy place and yet I had a hard time envisioning my ever returning unbroken there. Last night I made it back one day at a time.)
And yet. When I was in Provincetown recently I went to a meeting my first night there in the fellowship hall of the church on the harbor where I first got sober and made coffee and was of service. That room and the people in it saved my life. I told some of the people in there that night just that. But it was like going to other churches now and remembering what it felt like when I identified as a Christian even though I no longer do. I feel a comfort inside a church sitting on a pew in the same way I felt that night in Provincetown sitting in that fellowship hall on that folding chair. I fold too my having been a Christian into my spiritual life now. I fold my having identified as an addict into my continuing recovery on other levels.
A few days before my frightening fall in Paris and the shattering of my shoulder, I did, as a bit of insurance, pray however not to use meth once I got back to America and its old temptations and habits. I have come to understand that fall and my shattered shoulder now as an answered prayer. It was not the answer I was expecting but it was an answer nonetheless. There was no way I could use in the condition I was then in - although a true addict would have found a way to do so. I would have, in fact, at one point in my life. I even came close when visiting Hudson for a couple of doctor appointments when I was feeling better and a source of mine for drugs offered to make them available again when it was known I was going to be back in town. I left it open-ended since the universe seemed to be offering me the chance to do them and what was a one-off bit of usage for someone no longer living under the addict construct. Right? Yeah, sure. I toyed with the idea and had even fantasized about the wild sex I could have. But a friend of mine also named Kevin - I call him The Other Kevin - invited me to lunch which made it impossible to rendezvous with the source. I could have told The Other Kevin no but I knew by saying yes I was also living in my new construct. I even confessed to him during our meal that his asking me to lunch was a way of my not buying drugs. He was a conduit for me to test out this new construct in my life. He congratulated me for saying no to the drugs but I corrected him and told him I had instead said yes to him. It was not a negative act but a positive one.
About six weeks into this crucible as July approached this past summer, I was saying my litany of prayers and acknowledgments and meditations when I heard myself softly utter, “Thank you for my broken shoulder.” I gasped. Or the gods and goddesses did through me as they were realized anew by me in that sudden realization of gratitude. That was a turning point for me. I was actually shocked at first by hearing myself say it. But from that moment on, I began to heal more deeply. The shoulder was just the excuse to do so. I am truly grateful that I broke my shoulder and all that it has brought into my life these last few months - the kindnesses from others that I can pay forward, the knowledge of how tough I actually am, how vulnerable, the fear I have had to confront, the power of the body to repair itself, the reparative power of one’s soul when one knows that it is integral to what is needed to heal, the power too of people to repair relationships, the importance and complexity of family, the love I feel for mine. I am just now dealing with some of the trauma of the experience of the actual incident which has opened me up to experiencing even earlier traumas in my life that I need to confront. I am still discerning the lessons of it all. This column itself is a discernment in real time as I type it. The construct of living my life as an addict for 12 years was my earlier fall into brokenness which in its way has led me to this pilgrimage I am finally on having heeded its call toward a new construct for my life. I don’t think I ever said a prayer of thanks for my addiction as I did for this broken shoulder. I say it now. This column is that prayer.
I seek now new prayers.
The Other Kevin. I think a lot about that endearment for my friend and how it fits into my narrative I continue to write, rewrite, live. The Other Kevin? I am neither. I am both. I am the same one. I am them all.
Onward.
And amen.
Good on you.
This was excellent; one of your best actually. From one broken-winged bird to my healing-his-broken-wing friend, thank you. I might pull this out for a re-read next month.