So, What’s it Gonna Take?

I started this journal with a purpose. Then again, we start everything with a purpose.
However, I decided to write this with the intention of asking myself the question, “What’s it gonna take?”
I ask myself this because I have seen different things. I have lived different lives, so-to-speak, and I have been up and I’ve been down.
I ask this because there are things that I want to do. There are places I want to go and things I want to see.
I ask myself this because have a list of goals that I want to achieve and losses that I want to overturn. But also, I want to recharge my personal value. I want to restart my life, which is not to say that I am born again or that I am born again from a religious perspective. No, this is not to return to the womb or to start over. Not at all.
I want to wipe the slate clean. I want to start fresh or at least, I want to start fresh, even if the life around me isn’t fresh at all.

I still have life around me. And I still have more to say, more to do, give and more life that I want to live.
And so do you.
The question also stems from the need to improve.
So I ask myself, “What’s it gonna take?”
I see this as a great question to cure the social, mental and emotional challenges that we face with daily life.

I wanted to lose weight.
So, what’s it gonna take?
I wanted to be happy.
What’s it gonna take?
I wanted a better life.
What’s it gonna take?
In fairness to all the questions above, the answers themselves are all simple.
It’s not the answers that were hard to face; it was the work and the effort and the fears of removing my guards and dropping the mask that made these changes hard.
This meant I had to let go of my crutches or my crutch-related behaviors, which I had raised myself with and used throughout the years to cover my scars and hide my burdens.

So, what’s it gonna take?
The question is easy.
The answers are the frightening part.

In fact, I remember my experiences when I was a specialist for a recovery program. This goes back to when I was someone who had been deployed to emergency rooms after a person overdosed on heroin.
I saw a lot . . .
But more, I learned a lot, and so now is a good time for me to get back to basics.

I remember being unsure of what I would see or who I would meet in places like this. I am not a fan of hospitals or emergency rooms. But then again, who is?
I had no idea how much impact this time would have on me. I had no idea that I would learn more from the patients than I assumed they would learn from me.
Maybe we both learned something in that situation. Maybe both the clients and I needed that interaction and maybe the universe does have a way of teaching us that life is precious, time is infinite and life is finite.
You tend to learn this when death is all around us.

I suppose no one thinks about this until life is threatened or something life-ending occurs. Things like this remind us that mortality is real.
Death is real.

But I digress . . .

There was a woman who came home to find her husband unconscious. She knew the reason, and she knew that he was battling heroin addiction. However, he was clean for a while, but he fell from his program and went back to find himself at death’s door.

My involvement with this was brief but impactful.
I worked the late-night shifts, which were overnights. I would be deployed during the graveyard hours and the calls ranged from mild to wild.
I arrived at the hospital, which was dimly lit, and all was quiet. I remember the sounds of beeping machines which came from different rooms.
The nurses were doing nursing things, and the doctors on call were mainly quiet and sitting in front of a computer with the bluish light shining on their faces and reflecting on their eyeglasses.

I was advised of the client’s location, name, sex, and age, which is typical.
I walked over to see this man laying in his bed. He was tied to a machine and there were oxygen tubes in his nose.
He died and they brought him back to life.

He was not awake when I came in. His wife was sitting in a chair at his bedside. She was sleeping, lying forward with her arms crossed and her head nestled in them above the man’s stomach.

She was covering him, as if to protect him, which she did because she was the one who found her husband and she was the one who administered the medication and saved her husband’s life.
We talked for a while. She told me what happened and how she found him.
She was weeping.
She almost lost the love of her life.

The man woke up and, of course, he denied the fact that he had overdosed. He denied that he used heroin.
His wife stopped him and told him, “I had to give you Narcan!”
But the man stuck to his story.

I always had the same response to this. I used this response often because I heard the same thing almost every time.
“I didn’t overdose!”
“I don’t use heroin!”
And I would say, “yeah, well. . . I know you didn’t come here for the food and friends either” and then we started to talk from there.

I always began my interviews with the same explanation.
“I’m not a cop.”
I said this to disarm them and to remind them that my interview was to save their life – not to be a cop or arrest them.
I was part of an opiate overdose recovery program. And, too, I was someone who was clean and sober and like them, I’ve had my own experience with drug use and law enforcement.

What I remember most about this deployment was the wife.
She was pleading with him not to die or kill himself.
I had asked what has to happen for this not to happen again.
I asked, “is this enough?”
The man looked at me and said, “I’m gonna do what I’m gonna do.”

His wife was weak and crying, literally begging him.
She told her husband, “I can’t watch you kill yourself,” to which her husband replied, “Well, if ya gotta go, then ya gotta go,” with zero remorse and said, “you know where the door is.”

I watched her breath leave her lungs in disbelief.
I saw the contempt in his eyes.
“No one is gonna tell me what to do!”

I get that. I’ve said that before myself.

I heard different stories about this man. I heard he cleaned up. I heard he died. I heard he was in prison.
I had no way of knowing which story was true. But all stories could be equally possible.

What has to happen?

My oldest client was a kind, gray-haired man. He was homeless. He was mainly toothless as well, but his smile was meaningful to me.
We spoke like humans speak to each other. He told me about his love for Harley Davidsons. He told me about his life when he was younger and crazy and rode with a motorcycle club.
We must have talked for hours in his hospital room.

I asked him, “Do you think this will be your last time in the hospital like this?” He told me, “no.”
He told me how he had overdosed a few times the year before and this was his third or fourth time in the year which was current.

Do you have to overdose again?
“No,” said the kind old man. “But I’m not gonna lie to you. I probably will anyway.”
He even joked, “You never know what you’re gonna get these days”
Do you have to die next time?
He said, “Maybe,” and surrendered to the fact that this is the life he chose – and, so be it.
We went back to talking like two people who met for a reason and shared some stories with one another.

“You are the first person who talked to me like I was a person,” he told me.
He thanked me. He asked why I was being nice.
“No reason not to be nice,” I told him.

I explained how the last person who walked on water died a long time ago and the stories about that man is that people didn’t treat him so well either.

The old man died not too long after our meeting.
And yes, he died from an overdose.

I suppose the toughest calls were the younger calls. These were hard for me.
These were the late night deployments to see the younger kids who would swear that they knew the law or that they knew the system.
I hated these calls. I hated the attitudes and the fact that they thought they could con me.
The hardest part about working in the mental health field with kids is they think they know everything.
Yes, this is true.
Kids think they know everything.
But the same goes for adults too.

However, seeing kids after an overdose hit home for me. I say this because I was like them once — young and angry, defiant and scared of literally everyone and everything. I lost friends to deaths like this – preventable deaths – or so they are called. I saw the faces of every person I knew who lost their life to addictions like this.

I was that kid.
I was defiant.
I tried to act like I knew what I was doing.

I also swore—not me.
I’ll never go to jail.
I’ll never get caught up.
I’ll never have a habit.
I swore that the things that happened to other people with addiction would never happen to me.
“Not me,” I said.
“That’ll never happen to me,” I told everyone.
I was wrong.
I was told, “Yeah, that’s what everybody says.”
And still I responded, “Oh yeah? Well, not me!”

The worst I saw as a specialist was my first fatal arrival.
Usually no one else is with the patient. Maybe one person is there. Maybe two or three at the most.
Usually, the client is alone and laying in a bed with an amazed or surprised look on their face, as if they could not believe what just happened.
But this time was different.
The boy just turned 18. He was getting ready to go to a big college. He had a bright future ahead of him. His family was wealthy.
His mother did not speak English.
The only word she could ask me was “Why?”
Why?
Why is my son in the hospital?
Why did my son die from an overdose?
Why did this happen?
The question “Why?” is infinite in cases like this.
I’m sure.

I got the story from his older brother. He wept when he told me because “Older brothers are supposed to protect their younger brothers.”
But some things are out of our control.

What has to happen for us to wake up and realize that the final curtain can fall at any moment?
What has to take place for us to realize that this is not a dress rehearsal and that there is no sequel?
We are all live and onstage!

I know my shortcomings.
I know my faults and my flaws.
I know that I am far from perfect and even further from sinless or sin-free.
I know this well.

I am a person with flaws and mistakes and yes, I have committed horrible acts against good people.
I’ve done this. And I am not alone
I am no guru of any kind. I am not tough or strong or even cool.
Well, maybe I’m cool, at least to some people.

I think about where I’ve been for the last decade or so.
I think about the life I had and the differences between that and the life I want for myself.
The questions become:
Do I have to get sick?
Do I have to lose more?
Do I have to die in the process?

I have work to do.

The fact is I’m just another person, down here on Project Earth.
I’m trying to make it.
I’m trying to find what happiness means to me.
I’m trying to unlearn what I was taught and to distance myself from the things that hold me back.
And that’s it . . .

I am moving close to ending this journal.
I know I need to branch out and explore new versions of life, as in REAL LIFE.”

So, what’s it gonna take?
The question is simple.
The answers are simple as well.
The rest is just a decision away.