Keep Going

It’s nice to be back writing blogs again. Thanks for reading this rather personal entry, it’s a bit of a journey. I look forward to sharing more heartfelt lessons soon. 

“Be resilient. Be determined. Persevere.”

Right. Ok then.

“Hang in there. You’ll get through it.”

Uh-huh. 

“It’s darkest before the dawn. We fall so we can get up stronger.”

………….

—

I’d seen those phrases before. I’d uttered them to many people, in fact. And most of the time, it was reasonably easy to see the value in them. But now? At this point in my life?

A few months ago, it felt like rubbish, all of it. Words, hollow words absent the understanding of a situation. A meaningless vomiting of pop-psychology catch-all catch phrases that failed to catch my interest. 

The anonymous sage offering this advice didn’t know me. Maybe this shit *wouldn’t* get better. Maybe we were just halfway in our descent to depravity, a pit stop in the race to hell, except there was no “and back” to return to, just the cold, lifeless void. 

“Keep Going.”

—

When I left my wildlife rehabilitation center for the last time after six years of living and breathing the rehabber life, I pulled to the side of the road and cried. If I think deeply about it now, ten years later, tears still well up in my eyes, though for only some of the shared reasons with that initial memory. I tear up because I miss that life, the hands-on nature of doing good in the world and helping animals directly. I miss the relationships I had, my “second mother” Kathy Stelford, the wildlife director to whom I’m grateful to for so many reasons, not the least of which is her continuing friendship to this day. I miss walking around that property, 17 or so acres of beautiful natural forest and plants and thriving wildlife. I miss using a chainsaw. I miss the frogs croaking at night, the coyotes howling in the wind, the birds swarming the feeders, the squirrels trying to nestle away their share.  

I miss Kathy’s husband, Mark, never content with either doing something halfway or without thoughtful engineering. I miss working with him on outdoor projects, listening to his patient instruction. I miss his self-described “redneck hot tub,” basically a modified horse water trough. I miss Mark stepping foot outside the house to yell “Buddy!!!” at the top of his lungs, to bring back his trusty troublemaker companion dog. I miss the dirt holes that Buddy dug to stay cool in the summer. I miss the other farm dogs, Misty, Tanzi, and Caicos.

But I think most of all I miss that presence that Kathy brought with her into a room. A strong, firm conviction in whatever she did. For after all, we become like those we hang around, and working with Kathy brought me some of that confidence, that toughness, that spirit, that otherwise had been beaten and stomped out of me throughout the course of my life. I knew she wasn’t always in the right but it didn’t matter, no one ever is. She put herself out there, every minute of every day. She survived countless hardships to make her wildlife rehab dreams a reality. She was spirit, she was alive.

As a parting gift, Kathy and Mark left me two treasures. One was built by Mark, a commemoration of our work building a cabin together, the cabin that was to be my residence for about 18 months during my time at the rehab center. We used old 30-foot building support beams from his father’s lumber yard, full of nails and other shrapnel that needed to be cleaned off. During one of my many flashing moments of brilliance where I’ve decided that I’m hot shit and the rules don’t apply to me, I refused to give in to a giant knot that was preventing me from drilling a hole for one of the bolts that we were using. As I pushed that drill bit into the wall, beads of sweat dripping down my brow despite freezing temperatures that left my toes in constant pain, throwing everything I had into that moment in time, a flash of light almost blew me off the ladder. In the blink of an eye, my steaming bent-to-shit drill bit went flying around the room, having exploded out of my drill in sharp protest to the task at hand. The knot won the fight, and we were both fortunate that no injury came to either of us. Mark’s tribute was a piece of the wood we used for the cabin along with the drill bit and a generous description of my actions that day. He surely could have used a less flattering word.

As for Kathy, she gave me a tiny little metal figure. Unremarkable in almost every way, save for the simple words inscribed on its back: Keep Going. 

—

I don’t know why that phrase resonated so strongly with me. Short and sweet, I suppose. Easy to remember. Easy to bring to memory when times are tough. And times…they have been tough.

Setting aside the seemingly regular chaos unfolding in external society, the past year was my own personal implosion. One challenge after another found me; the feeling of being kicked while you’re down came to mind. As a person who has old ingrained tendencies to deflect self-concern in favor of others who need it more, this was the first time in my life I can remember looking back at things and thinking: “Shit. Damn dude. This legit sucks.”

—

There are some things that I won’t bring up out of concerns for other people’s privacy, but I’ll note most of the main ones. Starting off my descent, a death in the family. A month later my beloved souldog Balto collapsed, stricken with cancer that had spread just about everywhere. She was 14 so I guess I couldn’t be too surprised, but the fact that she collapsed and a week later was gone didn’t give me much time to digest it all. This was especially true after the other recent death. 

Because I tend to overthink and plan obsessively, I had prepared for the moment. Almost every single day when I took her on our walk over the last few years, I’d make a deliberate effort to just watch her trotting along, with awe and love. I knew she was older, and that the time would come eventually, and when it did I didn’t want to be left with regret for not having appreciated her. I appreciated her. I’m unsure of how much it mattered. Her death was painful and even a year later it is challenging to sustain the thought of her for more than 20 seconds without being moved to emotion or tears. My ex thought there was something wrong with me, but I didn’t; in fact I felt lucky that I got to live with Balto for 7 years, that I was in a position of caring so much that it would hurt so bad. I’ve started a blog about Balto that I’ll finish and publish, when I’m ready.

A month later I was approached by my former employer, a nonprofit that I helped build as its inceptive Executive Director for 6 years. They were in a bind due to difficulties with the current/previous leadership and asked if I’d return while they hired a new Executive Director. I did not want to do it. But, when I looked at what I was currently doing—I had co-founded a new charity startup and was building that—it was clear to me that the greatest good I could do would be to help see the old nonprofit through the storm. So, I came into an extremely strained environment with deathly morale comparable to a challenging mushroom trip and 6 of 19 staff positions vacant (all having quit over a three-month period) at the busiest time of year when their biggest deliverables were due, doing work I didn’t want to do anymore, and putting off the work I did want to do. While dealing with a shit ton of personal stuff. I’m proud to say that I righted that damn ship, with the help of those who stayed, of course. Less proud to report that it almost killed me.

That’s because I also developed a drug problem during this time. There was a lot going on. Another dog died a few months after Balto; poor Bido’s time finally came after two years of declining health and hospice care. He only retained about 10-20% of his fur by the end; he had Cushing’s Disease, which starts out benign enough but sure takes its toll over time. My ten-year marriage was in its final days (more on that in a minute). My mom contracted skin cancer (and has been treated successfully so far, thankfully). The stresses of the full-time old charity job combined with me trying to continue moving the new startup forward weighed heavily on me. A wrist injury in January 2022 made typing for work difficult and painful, and prevented me from many forms of exercising, the absence of which only added to my tension. I caught a bad case of covid in April that lasted six full weeks. There are other things that I won’t mention for privacy reasons. So amidst the chaos, I turned to the things that kept me going through challenging times over the past 25 years—drugs. Only I turned it up a notch. 

—

Yes, I’ve been doing drugs regularly for 25 years. I tire of the reluctance to admit this sort of thing; we’d all have so much more empathy if we were just honest with each other (and ourselves, for that matter). If you want to judge me and put me in a box as an “addict” then that’s your choice; sadly you’ll miss out on knowing a pretty thoughtful person. Most of you dear readers have been using drugs as well during your adult life, at the very least in the form of caffeine or alcohol or marijuana. For me it had mostly *just* been alcohol (problematic) and weed (benign, but problematic because it is benign), but this year was different. This time, I had access to lots of drugs. I was in the most depressed state of my life, and the only way I could continue moving forward—the only way to get the job done—was to self-medicate. And self-medicate I did.

Before continuing, I simply have to share a piece of wisdom from my therapist, Julie. After bouncing to a few therapists, I found a kindred spirit in Julie, as she has a good understanding of mindfulness and how to use that knowledge to bear fruits of change. In reflecting on my decisions to use drugs, a reflection that would often include harsh judgments of myself for choosing poorly, she laid things out for me in a way that even my stubborn mind couldn’t refute. She pointed out that I was dealing with a tremendous load of grief and anger. I felt unable to “fix” the problems in my life. I was deeply unhappy and didn’t have good support. And through the course of those challenges, I made some decisions, and those decisions were the way that I coped at that moment in time. It doesn’t mean they were “good” decisions, but they were what made sense for me at the time. Drugs have been a coping mechanism for me for a long time, so of course I’d turn to them when things got rough. I’m continuing to grow away from this crutch and every year I live more and more drug free—doing very well today, btw—but I can’t expect to just snap my fingers and adopt a completely new way of life. It can be difficult to break a habit that you’ve observed for a few weeks; imagine what is involved with changing our behavior after decades of reinforcement. 

I found these arguments persuasive, and they helped me form a more skillful perspective. So if you are in the midst of beating yourself up over returning to a “bad” habit, cut yourself some slack. Often, some amount of regression is inevitable as we move forward. You’ve noticed the habit. You’ve noticed that you don’t feel good about it. You are making progress. Keep going.

I should note that I will write a much longer blog specifically about this drug experience in the future, as I strongly believe in talking openly about sensitive topics in order to destigmatize having the conversation. So many suffer in silence out of fear; the only way to change that is for the rest of us to speak up when we can, to help give them the courage to speak openly and find the help they need.

—

You know, it’s funny how things go sometimes. Before the challenges described in this post, I was in the best physical and mental shape of my life during the summer of 2021. My mindfulness practice was deep and regular with four and half years of daily meditation under my belt. I had just completed a teacher training course (note that I will offer my next introductory mindfulness course during the second half of 2023—if you’re not turned off by this blog post you can sign up here). I was completely 100% drug-free (including no caffeine) for two months. I was exercising six days/week. And then things started to fall apart at the end of that summer and proceeded to snowball for a little over a year. What’s interesting is that I think that my decline over the past year was so painful because of how far I had to fall. That’s the bad news; the good news is that I now know the top of the mountain exists. 

—

As my life spiraled out of control, I started using drugs more heavily to control my mood and output. It started out innocently enough; drinking more/stronger caffeine to stay motivated for work, using more/stronger marijuana to relax at the end of the day. I had previously quit alcohol for about 18 months, but as a last ditch effort to try to connect with my mostly estranged wife at the time—who enjoyed having some drinks and associated them with having a good time—I started dabbling in having drinks again. Of course it starts with “only once/month,” but that then evolves into an exception here and there, and finally before you know it you’re back in the thick of it with alcohol being a regular presence in the house. And as I’m intimately familiar with, I don’t make good decisions when I’m drinking.

So when some “hard” drugs became available to me when I was drunk, of course I decided to purchase them. I ignored my own arrogance—a character trait that is usually my pet peeve—and thought that I could use these things occasionally and not get hooked. After all, I’ve been hooked on caffeine, on marijuana, on nicotine, on alcohol, and managed to quit those…eventually. It didn’t help that I injured my wrist in a fall in January, so I wasn’t able to engage in lots of the types of physical activity that might have helped occupy some of my available drug-using time. As things were, my stresses kept building, and my coping methods resulted in several significant and scarring addictions. Broadly speaking, uppers to get going, downers to get off the bullet train, whatever to induce sleep. 

Having been so in-tune with my mind and body as recently as the previous summer, this was a dramatic shift. Instead of having the agency over how I experienced my feelings that I had cultivated through my mindfulness and meditation practice—not to *change* them, but to watch them rise and fall with kind curiosity, with acceptance, so that one can move on—I became dependent on chemicals to stabilize my mood. I eventually lost the thread on, well, everything. This is going to sound extreme, but by the end of my drug run, it’s like I forgot how to feel happy or relaxed without external substances. 

Those who are familiar with the experience of withdrawal, either personally or via a close friend or family member, may be familiar with post-acute withdrawal syndrome. My dependency on “harder” drugs only lasted six months, and my daily habit was fairly meager compared to some, so I certainly can’t profess to know how deep PAWS symptoms can go. But even in my case it was awful. Most people at least know the basics of acute withdrawal—the aches, fevers, chills, lethargy, depression etc that occur in the body once its new chemical dependence needs are not being met. However this only lasts 5-10 days; the aftermath lasts much longer. I’ll save more details for the aforementioned future blog post about this experience, but I went through a period of listlessness that I wouldn’t wish on anyone. To give but a taste of it, a few weeks after I was clean, it was a big moment for me when I felt the sun on my skin as pleasant again, rather than just annoying (which was the filter for just about everything, for a while). The sun on my skin feeling pleasant gave me hope that I didn’t irrevocably mess up my ability to experience pleasure without chemicals, which today I’m pleased to confirm is indeed the case. I’m not back to where I was in the summer of 2021, but I’m on track and making good progress.

One seemingly helpful aspect of everything seeming bland and uninteresting during this time was that it blunted some of the challenging parts of separating from my partner. I say “seemingly” because of course, these feelings need to be dealt with at some point. Drugs or withdrawal symptoms are a temporary fix, merely issuing yourself an “IOU x emotions” for later. 

—

I somewhat joke about the drugs making the separation easier, but of course the experience of ending a 12-year relationship didn’t exactly help my drug use. In the early days, the best way I can describe it is that it felt like the most nauseous I’ve ever been in my life times ten. As my partner and I struggled through the final months of our marriage, we were faced with the reality that we knew but didn’t want to realize: that somewhere along the way, we started growing in different directions, and we no longer shared enough of a common thread. We separated last July, at a time where I was really, truly, just barely hanging by a thread.

While having a support system is crucial to getting through difficult times like the past year, our separation was ultimately beneficial to me, as the tension of living with someone else while both parties are unhappy only further contributed to my decline. There is a stigma to the idea of getting divorced, that it’s a terrible thing to break your vows. It is indeed a terrible thing to break your vows, but far more terrible is sticking things out and going through the motions simply to adhere to a few words that were uttered a decade ago. Those words were true at the time they were said, but that doesn’t mean they can’t change. People change, circumstances change; it’s the only thing we can always count on happening. Vows should not be taken lightly but neither should they be a shackle binding you to someone when both parties have tried to work things out and remain unhappy. If you’re like me and are motivated by a framing that speaks to helping the world, then know that you can’t show up to save the world if you haven’t taken the time to care for and nurture yourself. Or, you’ll show up for the workday, but do a pretty mediocre job. And go home early. 

So, while there is tremendous grief and sadness, ultimately our divorce will serve both of us—as well as everyone in and around our lives—much better than if we were to stick it out because of vows that made sense in the moment but no longer carry weight today. We can take the lessons we’ve learned from this experience and make more skillful choices in the future.

—

And so as I collected myself in July of 2022 and took stock of where I was at, I realized I had come to a fork in the road. I could continue my descent and possibly end up dead, or I could pull together everything I had and start again. What was that advice that I gave people when they found their mind wandering during meditation? That it’s ok; simply begin again. I needed to begin again. It was around this time that I started packing up a few things, certain that I’d soon be moving, and I came across a little metal figure that I hadn’t noticed in years. 

“Keep Going.”

A sly smile formed on the corner of my lips. You’re goddamn right. 

—

There are a few more areas of struggle that bear mentioning. 

Covid: After some months of living what felt like a shadow of a life, I also caught a bad case of covid in April of 2022. I’m sure my drug use didn’t help me get better any faster, but my body felt destroyed for six straight weeks. My only moments of refuge from having both noses clogged was when I used that brutal nasal spray that clears up your nose almost instantly, which I had to periodically dose throughout each work day. I felt couch-locking fatigue and didn’t want to do anything. It finally started to break just in time for a trip to check out a few cities in Texas; for the last few years my ex and I had been scoping some different parts of the country for a move. Unfortunately we had already decided to separate the following month at that point, so the weeklong trip was about as awkward and sad as can be. 

Job: Most recently, I’m in the process of leaving the new startup that I co-founded last year for a variety of reasons. This is going to present financial problems, as I’m losing my salary at a time where I’m also losing the benefits of living together as a married couple. I’m doing my best to ride the wave and make things work, but it’s certainly a challenge worth mentioning in this post. As this seems like the time for crossroads in my life, I am considering using some of my savings to forego regular paid nonprofit work for a year or so in order to dedicate some time to the study of the dharma. This seems like a unique period in my life where I could embark on such an endeavor, and since I’ll have some financial wiggle room from the impending sale of our house, it’s the rare practical opportunity for me to take on unpaid work. For a time, at least.

Home: I’m getting ready to move across the country to Raleigh in February, where I know exactly one other person. As part of that, I’m in the midst of packing while preparing the current residence for transition. These challenges may not be particularly uncommon, but cleaning/fixing a house, finding a new job, finding new friends and community in a new city, moving my possessions across the country; these are all larger tasks that add more stress onto an already overflowing plate. So it felt appropriate to mention them here. 

—

In reading through this post again before publishing it, it strikes me that what I’ve written doesn’t even seem that bad. Part of that is because I wasn’t able to share everything, but part of it is probably because seeing some of these deeply cut wounds expressed in a few simple words fails to capture the gravity of the experience. There were many nights where I couldn’t get to sleep, and many mornings where I lay awake at 2am paralyzed in dread. There were days where I ran my body ragged without a shred of care for the damage I left in my wake. I had many dark thoughts. Those well-meaning phrases at the start of this post were simply not enough.

Whatever depth of struggle that I’m able to successfully portray in this post, I see all of it as part of my path. It is essential even, and it couldn’t have happened any other way. I needed to glimpse the top of the mountain last summer so that I know it exists when times are dark; the promise of what I knew life could be was the thing that made me “Keep Going.” I gained newfound empathy and understanding for people who struggle with drug addiction, when I thought I already had that from my previous struggles with alcohol and other drugs (I didn’t). The severity of my pain—along with a few therapeutic MDMA sessions—helped me finally, for the first time in my life, start having some innate compassion for myself. That it had to get “so bad” for me to care about myself doesn’t matter, it’s what needed to happen. 

I cannot express how grateful I am for my mindfulness practice, for the Buddha’s wisdom, and for all the yogis and gurus who continue to share lessons on how to live a life of happiness rather than (or despite) intense suffering. The lessons taught in Buddhism are not the hypotheticals of thousands of years ago; they are instructions for how to live life today. The Buddha always said not to believe him, not to take his word for it, but to try it, to practice it. After doing so, without a doubt I *know* that these instructions bring happiness and relief from suffering. I’ve started being able to direct love—genuine, authentic, moving love—to more and more people, including my supposed enemies. I’ve started being able to laugh when someone is mean or aggressive towards me; instead of getting worked up and ruminating about it, I chuckle as I know that it must be a bummer for them to live their lives that way, and wish them good fortune in finding relief from the suffering that causes such unskillful behavior. And every step of the way I feel myself becoming more alive, in a way that I had not otherwise experienced in my life, that I hadn’t known even existed, at least not outside of the trance of a psychedelic trip.

I’m truly pleased to report that I’ve come out of my lowest valley and restarted my trek to the top of the mountain. I’m not out of the woods; I still have tons of work to do, lots of changes to make, boatloads of stress to manage. I’ve kicked all the “hard” drugs over an arduous few month period and am on the verge of taking a nice long break from my last “soft” holdout, marijuana. I’m forcing myself to engage more with people even if I don’t feel like it, because I know that connections are helpful for getting back on track. I’m talking with friends to vent as well as solicit guidance concerning various challenges or situations (to you I am so grateful; you know who you are). I’m still seeing my therapist once/month and she continues to be a calming and grounding presence in my life (if you are struggling but not seeing a therapist, please consider seeking one out. You might think it’s too expensive but if you have a low income then you can go to family services and find someone for very little money. Do it, now. And if the first therapist isn’t a good fit, try again.). I can see the rise and fall of the desire to get drugged up; the fog is clearing and I see a sunny future ahead of me. I no longer only see sadness and despair from my divorce; I see opportunity and happiness and potential. Above all else, I have the most important thing: A firm conviction to get back on track. Not to be exactly the person I was last summer, when things were going well. That person is gone, forever changed, and there’s no getting them back. But I am determined to grow from these experiences, to take their lessons to heart, both for myself and for how I relate to others who might be dealing with similar struggles. And in this way, I can rest in contentment, knowing that I’ll get to where I need to be, in time. And whatever your struggles may be, wherever you’ve been, you can rest in that contentment that you, too, will get where you need to be. So long as we keep going.