Monthly Archives: October 2018

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Mountainside Lakes Ch 2.

Day 3 of 28

This is day three here and I still don’t know what to make of this place. I feel like I’m walking through motions that someone else is making me take. Nothing here is done by me. Instead, everything is done all because someone else told me to.
They told me I would get my job today. They said everyone here gets one job until they retire a few days before discharge. Most get a few days off. Some work until their last day here but the job isn’t really a job. At least it’s not a job as far as real jobs go. Each patient (or inmate, depending on who you ask) has to do one shift in the kitchen to clean the dishes.
The kitchen is a real kitchen in the back of a large dining room with round tables and chairs. They serve coffee all day but the coffee is terrible and tea has never done much for me. Continue reading →

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A Short Series: Mountainside Lakes Ch. 1

This is day 2 of 28
I came in yesterday after a long drive that I can barely remember. I was drunk when I came in. I walked through the front glass double doors into the main room of a place that I can only describe as a place that looks like an old rundown motel and hasn’t changed since its prime in the 70’s.
They call this place Mountainside Lakes. Of course, they do. Mountainside is a place in some faraway town that no one has ever heard of before and here I am, trapped between a mountain and nowhere. Here I am now on the bed in a room where I’ll sleep for the next 27 days until they let me go home.
I’m here with a paper and pen because this notebook (namely you) is my only connection to a world outside from here. Continue reading →

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About Our Behavior And The Ability To Improve

More and more, I have become interested about how the brain works. This is especially so when it comes to my own and my own life. So in an effort to learn more about me as well as my mistakes and behaviors and in order to understand more about the self-made roadblocks we often find in our way, I took a deeper look into the definition of what sobriety means.
According to dictionary.com, there are nine different definitions. However, a few of these stood out to me above all. According to the dictionary, to be sober is to be free from excess, extravagance, and exaggeration. To be sober is to be sane or rational, and to show self-control. Although I am some of these things, I am certainly not all.

I thought Continue reading →

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Written for The Misplaced

It has been told to me that the hardest things to find in life are often the things which are right in front of our face. I see myself as a seeker of things and often times, I find myself in places where I feel lost or incomplete. Of all things to feel and find, the hardest things to feel is out of place, lost, or Continue reading →

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From Bedtime Stories For The Insomniac: A morning I will never forget

It wasn’t long before the realization set in. I felt foolish. I was stupid. I could feel the weight of the handcuffs and of course, I could feel the discomfort of steel tightened and cinched to a tight setting around my wrist.
It wasn’t long before the nerves shook and the fear took hold. I could not show this however, else, it would be obvious that I was afraid and seen as either weak or timid.
Of all places, this was no place for me to appear either of the two. As it was, I had been picked up for a simple foolish mistake.
I was not heading in for any hard crime. No, I was in my pajamas, however, and picked up on a bench warrant after being pulled over with expired registration tags on my car. Continue reading →

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prose for the child that was

I know you feel afraid sometimes. We all do.
I know that there is this thing inside you that want to protect because you don’t ever want it to hurt again or suffer or feel so vulnerable that something could come along to hurt you and in one swoop, this would punish you beyond repair.

Little kids are afraid of the dark. I have heard of children that shut the lightswitch in their bedroom and then they run to bed and try to get underneath the covers before the lights go out. I used to do this too. Continue reading →

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And Love

And love . . .

Love is always changing, transforming, and emerging in new ways like an early sun before it takes over the sky, and I’m like, “Ah, here it comes.”
My love is always changing, always seeking and always yearning. It is always looking for the next level of awareness. And I say awareness because I see it like this:  I see love as something with its own view. I say love has its own way of seeing things —so I don’t agree when I here people say love is blind. I just say my love sees things differently and what you might call Continue reading →

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Life Volume 1: The Ability To Recover

There are no guarantees in life.I know this the same as I know that tomorrow will come and so will the next day after that. I know these things are on the way, but yet, I have no idea what they will bring with them.
I have no idea who I will meet or say goodbye to. I have no idea what successes are in store for me. And just the same, I am not sure what failures I will have to overcome. All I know is I have a path to travel. I won’t know where the wind will come from or which way it will go. I just know the wind will blow in whichever way it chooses.
And if I play my cards right . . . Continue reading →

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To Be An Advocate

I suppose a lot of things are intimidating in the beginning. I remember my first class I needed to take to start gaining my certifications to help in the recovery world. They went around the room and each student had to introduce themselves to the class. Each person had a title. They all had credentials. Some in attendance had been in the clinical world for a long time, some of them held master degrees, and me, well, —I was just me, intimidated Continue reading →