Recovery and flashbacks. Playing Hide and Seek with Jesus.

Only last week I was in despair struggling with my mind to stay in the present. An assault backed up by evil institutional abuse of power and toxic waste, had waylaid me in an other wise okay life.

I always ask God what is the message.  I was the fool in the tarot deck, relaxing, trusting and the message was again, ‘beware’.  This world is ruled by corrupt military and business regimes, those who frequent Epstein services, those who are driven by pride, pretentious and low brow.  

Jesus said do not be afraid and I can face charging bear and hurricanes at sea but stupid men in groups with power haunt me.  False allegations and lies haunt me.  Faced with this again I buckled. 

It’s flashbacks starting with being strapped in school by the principle and caned in school by the teacher. It’s the abuse at university when I corrected the professors for being wrong.  Their ‘face’ more important than truth.  

It was like a deluge and I was back decades ago with a judge who was wrong and costs a life and the criminal who supported him and the damsel in distress.  The obscenity of that whole time and the lies and money and me simply doing the next right thing only to be attacked by the ignorant and spiteful then to be vindicated a year later.  Vindication should be my middle name. I have won in time and yet don’t want to be in the battle.  I don’t want to fight any more. But here again I was false accused by the entitled and demanding who mount wars.

A weekend lost to nightmares, panic attack and agoraphobia and plans to quit and leave and fleeting thoughts of those ancient thoughts of suicide, no plans, just asking God is it worth it, can we just stop, start over, or go to bliss. I was in a divorce at the time and the ‘authorities’ were using her sickness to get back at us for stepping out of line.

I managed a week.  It got better each day, rest, talking to friends, consulting mentors and authorities, resisting the panic, talking back to the terror, meditating and praying and getting over the emotional hangover that followed the orgy of self pity.  A mere day or two lost like a bout of diarrhea when the bowels couldn’t digest the shit from above.  I was mostly removed in a few days then a weekend travelling away off the grid and being with forest and nature.  It was so healing. I feel for the incarcerated, without the space to touch God who is so close in nature. I’ve spent so much time in churches in prayers and didn’t do that this time but instead camped by a river and thought of Buddha and Jesus and prayed for the protection of St. Patrick and the guidances of all saints.

I realized it was June, the anniversary of my abstinence from alcohol and marijuana and tobacco.  I’m coming up to 26 years and the decision to be abstinent was a tough decision in a tough time.  I experienced what AA describes as my life being unmanageable. I had married a kindred spirit with addiction who didn’t want the party to stop and I could related  because I was attracted to women with active addictions.  Brilliant beautiful party girls who were individually amazing, so much fun drunk, but so depressed when sober.  Now I took the escape, rather than leave medicine, my past, and all those wheels within wheels I left alcohol and tobacco.  I”d tried to quit smoking tobacco and smoked marijuana only to smoke tobacco again when I was drinking.  So quit them all.  I’d gone back to the church and prayer because I couldn’t protect her from herself and from hurting me. Like many an abused person living with the mentally ill I was hit when she was hitting herself . I was the punching bag.   I really thought I could love enough but I learned I didn’t love myself and loving others required that.  I set out on the road of recovery alone, a journey that so often is alone with God.  I had no idea how much abstienece would change my life.  Always one seeking God and spirituality, a Christian, and an intellectual, I’d read the spiritual texts, been with monks and gurus and returned to the party with booze. Now I was letting go of the booze.  I had only asked that she would too but she didn’t and chose what I called her lies,so afraid, so wounded and abused before me. I was selfish then. I had to get out alive and that meant leaving. 

So many were so kind and the truth was there in the groups of spiritual men and women who said that it would get better and it did. It’s that time of the year. An anniversary of the 

Death of the old man, the snake shedding it’s skin, the old ceremonies. It was a hard year and now it’s a good life.  Jails, institutions and death were the alternative at that time.  Even the psychiatrists I’d seen were lying and serving the authorities till I left the institution and went with those with God.  I ‘d not realized that I was really among materialists who masqueeraded as not until I was blessed to be among Christians like my parents and had that sense of coming home.  So many people from my home town surrounded me with their love. People said, we’d love you till you can love yourself.

I am loved.  I followed suggestions and I continued forward with kindness.  All the promises came true remarkably quickly.  Now I’m continuing on and that blip was the reminded, the flash back to being scapegoated, to be lied to and lied about when all I was trying to do what simple and good.  

I am now blessed beyond my wildest dreams, loved and love, with a modicum of peace and an immense tool box to get me through just such a terrifying time, A nodal point.  All the past challenges and times and people now here in this time.  So many deaths, all my sponsors, and most so many of my most trusted mentors.my mother and father and my brother. The death of my brother hit me so hard.  He was the good one and I was the black sheep. He was serious, the man of money  and I was the poet, the chemist, the psychological and theological.  He invested and I just lost everything trusting the feminine repeatedly.  Alone I’d be ordered then again and again I’d dance with the devil and chaos and somehow get washed up on the shore till 26 years ago and I stopped booze and no more hang overs in all the various disguises.  

I’m so thankful for this life, for the companions, for the friends for the colleagues. I’m so thankful for Jesus and for the godly. I’m so thankful for the inner world and meditation and prayer and church and AA and nature and calm and quiet and the sense of belonging and being with God , feeling god, experiencing the interconnected, the glue.  

Thank you God.  I was lost but now I’m found.  Playing hide and seek with Jesus.