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Another day at Back 2 Basics Sober Living and my experience has been far from perfect. Truth is that I’m finding out that I’m not perfect. In fact, I dare say, it has been a living nightmare for me.
I grew up in a family that leaves dirty dishes on the counter for a week, unpacked boxes scattered around, and blankets spread on couches awaiting the next binge of T.V. watching. These things never mattered to me. As a young adult, the imperfections of our daily living comforted me. In a world where order and class are rules to be a respectable citizen in society, it was nice to come home to one big mess.
At Back 2 Basics Sober Living I am learning how to clean up my messes internally and externally. Holding myself accountable for the seemingly arbitrary materialistic values in society, has been a slow and painful process for me. It feels like letting go of the simultaneous disorder and giving into the conformity of fear. Well all this may feel degrading to me most of the time, it also conveys a little bit of selflessness.
Making my bed, cleaning and putting away my clothes, saying my prayers in the morning, and trying to be a little less stubborn, are what I do for the environment around me. In all honesty I could care less but if there is one thing that I have learned at Back 2 Basics it is that there needs to be a balance between the orderly and the disorderly.
The artificial things in life that I tried to deny for so many years can be beneficial as well. There are many days I still want to fight it, kick out the windows, rip my clothes off and scream at the top of my lungs. There are many days when I still want to criticize the daily monotonous structure of society and say a big F you to the clocks ticking in the background, but I chose not to today. Sometimes I think the only reason that I don’t is out of love for all the chaos and ridiculousness that this world brings.
Fighting has led me to my own subculture of alcohol and drugs. It was liberating for a while to worship the unpredictable, the disorganized and the unloved misfits of the universe. It was pure anarchy in my mind but my utopia slowly turned into an internal prison. I became the stuck in the disorderly just as I have become stuck in the orderly.
The truth is it doesn’t matter if I am a Buddhist monk, or a conservative Catholic, if I am living in a desert or in Beverly Hills, it’s all the same in my internal prison as a result of drug and alcohol abuse.
A man I have come to respect and admire at Back 2 Basics said something to me that has helped me make sense of it all. He said, it does not matter if my room is clean or my clothes are washed, it does not matter if my hair is messy or my eyebrows unplucked, but what does matter is people communicating and helping each other. Everything else is nuisance but it can be fun. I have realized that I do not need to conform to all the ideals of society but some of the ideals are not going to hurt me.
A new world has been opened to me where I can appreciate the material and the natural world. I can find a home anywhere as long as I am internally free.
Journal from Back 2 Basics Sober Living Client