駄菩薩

The first step of any recovery program is to make a Tumblr blog about the experience. This is what I currently look like:

My name is Michael. I'm 32 years old, my parents met in a mental hospital, childhood and adolescence was often pretty bizarre, laying a pretty textbook foundation for a very mixed-up person with a lot of issues. I was always a bit bizarre just on my own, besides. Then, by 14 I discovered both Buddhism and drugs.

For years, I continued to read about Buddhism (and, eventually, all sorts of mystical and contemplative traditions) voraciously and, with more passion and zeal than consistency and discipline, attempted off and on to practice and meditate. There were even some of my teenage years during which I barely consumed any drugs besides the very occasional single hit of cannabis, actually meditating quite seriously, for several hours a day, and keeping strict precepts and a tight daily routine.

Mostly, however, I didn't let my interest in a path which prohibits drug use stop me from exploring and experimenting with all sorts of drugs through the years, never actually staying sober for any significant length of time.

I was always open to any random offer and never used a single drug exclusively every day, but I developed more or less serious addictions to particular drugs for a few years at a time. In my teenage years I stole and drank a ton of Robitussin, but it began to produce a sort of "allergic reaction" that forced me to stop. I began to drink a lot in my early twenties, but that also eventually faded away more or less on its own. I got very addicted to poppy-seed tea for about four years mid-twenties, but I quit that with the help of Refuge Recovery. I tried kratom and only took it very occasionally for several years before ever starting to take it regularly sometime after I'd quit poppy seed tea, at which point I finally developed a real addiction to it. Finally, at a particularly low point of more or less total despair, sleeping in a car alone and unemployed in Fort Worth, TX, I accepted someone's offer of a little methamphetamine and thereby began a roughly 2/2-1/2 year nightmare of meth addiction from which I have only just begun to awake in the last six months or so.

Now I am still addicted to kratom, as I am finding it, oddly enough, much harder to quit than meth precisely because it is so much less destructive. This is the next concrete item on my list, as it were. This is the main reason I wanted to make a blog--I think it could be helpful in getting over this next hurdle of quitting kratom (and hopefully many further hurdles to come). I will explore exactly how I think it could help sometime later.

For now, I'll just finish with this statement of intention: I want to get fully clean, and I want to finally be able to say I am an actual Buddhist, following the five precepts and leading a life which is at least not grossly misaligned from my own core values. This is what this blog is about.