My Story of Grief, Addiction, and Finding God
A recounting of suicide, grief, and finding eternality.
“Learn your theories as well as you can, but put them aside when you touch the miracle of the living soul.”
Carl Jung
There’s no shortage of monkeys on people’s backs these days. Being that the last decade has seen a rise in the usage of some pretty terrifyingly potent and deadly drugs like krokodil and fentanyl, the conversation about the modern man’s proclivity towards the tantalizing sensations of narcotics needs to be had, and not in the already ad nauseated “finding myself” sense. What must be explored is the clearly transcendent power of God uplifting of people who only knew misery, loneliness, and addiction.
On the night of February 10th, 2016, my mom shot herself. She wouldn’t have done it if she wasn’t doped up on pills and alcohol, but particularly manic people who haven’t felt the brooding realities of sobriety in years don’t have a particularly firm grasp on reality. She was a ticking time bomb that nobody stepped up to and defused, and afterwards, nobody took responsibility for their actions in her death. To this day, I have a very lacking relationship with my father and my sister. They wouldn’t accept responsibility, and instead just blamed her for being “troubled.” This is symptomatic of the atheist mindset that sees everyone as “free moral agents.” My father feels absolutely no culpability in where he fucked up.
I took after my mom in many ways. Not just in how I look, but in my manic personality, and my highly emotional reaction to everything. However, I have noticed a palpable difference between my emotional state before I found God, and after. Before, I only experienced the immense hole that could not be filled, and afterward, even though I still have my own minor struggles and specks in my eye, I feel no deep sense of shame for being me - for fulfilling me. I feel delivered, and because of that, I experience joy to an immense degree, even when having the tribulations that go along with life. Hell, I love the tribulations; I invite them. My mom, however, being a woman, and having a difficult upbringing, got quickly addicted to the attention of men, and the soothing sensation of alcohol.
For the nearly seventeen years I knew my mom (she died exactly one week before my seventeenth birthday), she was always having to hide the monkey on her back. She had bouts of recovery, and those were the best times in our family, because no one was hiding anything. My dad had many faults, and although I forgive him, his biggest fault was not facing matters head-on. He always pussyfooted with my mom, and never wanted to put an end to our dysfunctional household because, well, he, nor did my mom, know that the house was dysfunctional. Mom would never go to rehab, nor would my dad find God, so the family was doomed from the start.
They both came from fucked up households. Both of them ran away as teenagers, joined the army, and battled with their own failed marriages before eloping and marrying each other. This is why I have a half-brother on my dad’s side (who I didn’t grow up with), and a half-sister on my mom’s side (who I did grow up with). Everything about their relationship was an escape from the rightfully critiquing attitudes of those around them. They weren’t especial to this lifestyle, and in fact, were quite a common result of the failed x-generation that seeked to piss their parents off while committing the same mistakes their boomer parents made, but on overdrive.
My dad was, and is, a very troubled, but extraordinarily intelligent man. His life is a success story, on the surface, but behind the scenes, he still deals with the same emotional and spiritual degradation his peers deal with. He was dirt poor and hustled odd jobs for his insane, Assemblies of God parents. I have made the educated estimation that he fell away from the Church because of the dysfunctionality and misery that his parents brought to him in the name of God. He went to college after graduating high school at 15 or 16, joined the army, excelled constantly in whatever job he was given, and persistently did well, but it was all for none, as the chip on his shoulder never fell off. The same man who taught me how to be humble, to honor and respect all places of power regardless of how I feel about them, to greet everyone, from the lowest crossing guard to the highest CEO, with genuine love and a smile, is the same man who failed at maintaining a household and a relationship with his wife to raise his children.
It wasn’t really his failure, nor was it my mom’s. They simply lacked a recognition of the divine, and therefore, everything they did was for a chasing of the wind. Look to any household of dysfunction, which are most American homes these days, and even if they are so-called Christians, they still suffer from a lack of recognition for all their doing to be done in the name of God, and renounce any selfishness or self-centeredness. This is where modern men fail, and this is why most of us likely come from deteriorating families who hardly keep together.
My mom never really renounced God or the divine, but that wasn’t her job - it is the job of the husband to spiritually guide the wife. With my dad being a dyed-in-the-wool x-gen Daria, the coordination and guidance was lacking. So, with the addictions of my mom never recovering, and my dad pretending and believing her lies so that he could avoid arguments, life devolved into tension and chaos pretty much every day until the months leading up to her death, when we were just utterly distant. By then, I had already been using drugs, mainly just weed, but it was quickly expanding. When she died, I used her death as a means to become self-destructive and careless. I was an ungrown boy, who should have been taking on the responsibilities of the man I knew I could be, and instead infant reverting.
That is essentially what addicts of all sorts are - adults who never went through the transition from child to adult. They still want the delicious sugary cookies, and need a smack from the larger hand of their mother or father with a hasty “No!”
Most people understand this, if they deal with addicts at all in their personal life. They see a child, or very young adult, who never grew up. For my mom, she was 14 or 15, emotionally and mentally. Not that she didn’t have aspects of growth or self-effacement, but they were brief. For me, I was pretty much an addict from an early age. From 12 or 13 to when I was 20, I struggled and coped with a tense, dysfunctional household. I think the fact that my school was mostly black and hispanic, and that I never had a friend who was a well-adjusted white boy was very contributory to my addiction. I had nothing but friends who were either on the same boat, or had no ability to intervene in my decay.
The internet didn’t help either. When you have easy access to Erowid, it’s really quite easy to mix concoctions of cough syrup and alcohol or anti-histamines. Then, when I got more social, and went to parties and concerts, all I would be after was access to drugs. After my mom died, my entire life was hijacked by the monkey on my back. I resented the feeling of sobriety. I couldn’t sit still. I couldn’t guide myself to where I needed to go. I made up excuses for never going back to school, going to trade school, hardly working, and my dad just absolved himself of responsibility, like a good boomer/thirteener does, by just saying, “Well I’m just a failure I guess!” I’m not shitting you. Rather than engaging me, he just took the heat of my vitriol and scorn, and never did anything to guide and father me. It made me feel worthless, and although deep down I know there is an ounce of him that cares, he feels entirely unworthy to be guiding anyone because he is the outcome of a Godless society that makes economic accomplishment its Source, and its many tantalizing desires its gods and angels. He had no guide himself, and so he never understood the structure and responsibility bestowed to him. He never felt responsible, nor worthy, and so it was up to me to figure out how to father myself.
But that’s the thing. You don’t. You don’t guide yourself, nor father yourself. You accept that you are powerless, and I don’t mean in some gay 13 step program Alcoholics Anonymous way. I mean by falling to your fucking knees and screaming out into the abyss for a purpose. You don’t get better by detoxing. You get better by recognizing the fleeting happiness (and major comedown) that drugs bring do not top the eternal joy that God will hand to you on a silver platter if you recognize He loves you and wants you to do good works in His Name.
"The prayer of one who does not consider himself a sinner is not accepted by the Lord."
Isaac of Nineveh
It was maybe a month after my mom died, and I was already looking for something to get me feeling anything other than numbness and emptiness. I don’t think I will ever be able to tell the story of the lead-up to my mom’s death. I don’t mean what I just laid out about her life, but the specific events leading up to her killing herself, and the days after.
When people kill themselves in such a blaze of drama, their closest relatives get to experience a life’s worth of misery and aimlessness in just a few days. For everyone who pretended like they cared, they were sadder than I was. I was just empty. I didn’t have a point because my mom was kind of my entire life. She was one of my closest friends, and being that I was so similar to her, she and I got along so well. I remember the several hour-long conversations we would have on the porch. She loved asking me questions about life. She also had the funniest sense of humor I’ve ever found in a woman. The levels of leadership and power that woman had in her mere presence is a mortal rarity. She was a once in a life time woman, and I was blessed to have her as my mama. Nonetheless, for reasons I can’t even put into words, that go deeper than just surface-level grief (of which I don’t think I’ve thoroughly experienced the stages of, or if I have, they haven’t been in the way some pencil-neck egghead psychologist would explain it), I’ll never be able to recount the entire story. It’s just too much for me. It was a lifetime of emotions experienced in the course of a day that ended in the death of my mom.
Therefore, there is now no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus, because through Christ Jesus the law of the Spirit who gives life has set you free from the law of sin and death. For what the law was powerless to do because it was weakened by the flesh, God did by sending his own Son in the likeness of sinful flesh to be a sin offering. And so he condemned sin in the flesh, in order that the righteous requirement of the law might be fully met in us, who do not live according to the flesh but according to the Spirit.
Those who live according to the flesh have their minds set on what the flesh desires; but those who live in accordance with the Spirit have their minds set on what the Spirit desires. The mind governed by the flesh is death, but the mind governed by the Spirit is life and peace. The mind governed by the flesh is hostile to God; it does not submit to God’s law, nor can it do so. Those who are in the realm of the flesh cannot please God.
You, however, are not in the realm of the flesh but are in the realm of the Spirit, if indeed the Spirit of God lives in you. And if anyone does not have the Spirit of Christ, they do not belong to Christ.
Romans 8:1-9
When I got to taste what stimulants were like, I couldn’t stop. I remember I was hanging with one of my more drug-addled friends, and a few of our own mutual friends, and they all knew this gal who sold molly. We went by this gal’s place, which was in the ghetto of an already shitty town hanging off the edge of the expansive sprawling squalor of Houston, and she sold me a few of these pills for super cheap. I mean these things were like five bucks a pop, and good golly miss molly, did they give the best high. I’m talking I’d be sitting around doing absolutely nothing with some really calm synthwave on, and feel like the king of the world. Nothing has ever made me experience the same level of happiness that that drug made me feel. For nearly two months straight I was buying this shit until this gal had to cut me off because I was going through grams of it on the weekly (sometimes daily). I don’t know if she realized how bad this was, or if she was sick of me coming around, but either way, wherever she is, God bless her for cutting my addiction short before I overdosed.
From then on I was just doing anything to get high. Weed, acid, shrooms, cough syrup, antihistamines, xanax, and if there’s one thing that could explain my lack of vocabulary, it’s all the air duster that I snorted. The monkey on my back knew no bounds, and actively looked for new avenues of insobriety.
Obviously, I was getting close to the age of 18, and surfing couches, and barely making an effort to find work. By the time I turned 18, I ran out of bridges to burn, and my dad, feeling real remorse and empathy, but not knowing what to do, offered me a ticket to whatever city I wanted to go to in contiguous USA, and I chose Minneapolis.
“How blessed and amazing are God's gifts, dear friends! Life with immortality, splendor with righteous, truth with confidence, faith with assurance, self-control with holiness! And all these things are within our comprehension.”
Pope Clement I
I have explained my experience on the Rez, and the few months I spent in the Dakotas and Montana in an article here. However, my gay pilgrimage to go get a dose of reality and a slice of life from the most ghetto, spiritually lost people in the world - Plains Indians - was not what delivered me from my own brokenness. Nor was it when I was at the youth shelter afterwards, but the slow journey going from homeless-schizo-addict kid to someone employed, nominally sober, with my own apartment. I can’t tell you how good it felt to have my own place, even though it was in a Houston ghetto.
There is a certain mindset that God delivers to those who are most broken, and it isn’t some ontological argument, but the clear productivity baked into the presence He has in our lives. When I started reading the bible front to back while homeless, then at the shelter, I realized how God spoke through every page, how present He is in my own life, how the all-encompassing and eternally applicable the stories of the prophets and Old Testament were, and how it is He I listen to when I need guidance, and not anyone else. He kept me from the alleyways, He prevented me from feeling worried when I had all the reason to, He kept me from feeling justified in my anger and resentment, He healed me of my addictions, because I know it is HIS GLORY that I seek, and nothing else.
There is no logic to God, nor is there reason. Worship of reason (Scientism) is really just idolatry of alchemy. The shifting sands of “logic and reason” are as unreliable and bearing of no fruit as the long-dead paganisms and ancestral worship of times gone. If your life is fleeting and meaningless, or some vague energy, then you have no purpose. However, when you know that the Creator of the Universe not only made you in His Image, loves you unconditionally, wants the best for you, and sacrificed Himself for you, then there your meaning lies. It is in the concreteness of His Presence, and without it, you know all you do is meaningless. You do not create your own meaning because the functionality of things is already self-evident, and the beings and machines of our own world function for a purpose. Do we not have similar purpose?
The eschaton of atheists, and spiritually infantile and stunted people, is limited to vague personal virtuousness and fleeting joys of the material world. The same material world that deceives them endlessly, captures them in the traps of anxiety and emptiness whenever they chase after desire, the same world ruled by men of questionable morality who rule with half-truths and lies.
The same earthly cravings that led to the downfall of my family, and many other victims of the modern world, are what rule a world when humanity decides to shun God and His purpose for them. I can’t tell you the eternality of my joy, and how never-ending it is. Even in my failures, even in my embarrassments, even in my hypocrisies, even when I have many reasons to regret, I am so glad, so dumbfounded at the presence of God in meaning and life. Without Him, meaning is fleeting. Without Him, life is short, brutish, and pointless.
“The most common form of despair is not being who you are.”
Søren Kierkegaard
For those of you seeking God’s Glory, or for His Presence, I will assure you, it is not in reason that you will find Him. It is not a biological function. It is not logical. It makes no sense. God is within you. He shows Himself everywhere, and you’d have to be absolutely blinded by your own ego, your own doubts, your own self-loathing, or your own childishness to not see the impact He has in your life. Everything happens for a purpose, for a reason, and yet, those obsessed with picking up every fucking crumb off of the ground, who look for a labcoat or a suit to explain to them how something functions are the same people who will not be awestruck at His Presence. They seek constant explanations, but can’t ever accept that the reason they want meaning and purpose is because they want a Source, and they can’t see that source because they are too busy messing about in the mental masturbatory frivolities of reasoning, logic, and science. It stuns man’s ability to be great, to be joyous, to recognize his eternal soul, and that what he does isn’t in vain, but for an Ultimate.
How can God make a lowly wretch like me into something decent? I was fat, drug-addled, self-loathing, and desire-seeking. Now, God has delivered me from it all, plus more. Even if I am thrown to the side by all of humanity for even doing a percent of His Bidding, the world will fall, and yet God will still be there for me in the end.
This is why I make metaphysics and God’s love for us so prominent in all of my work. Without Him, my work is meaningless. Without Him, high-trust societies do not coalesce. Without Him, miracles are not done, brushes with death and mistakes are not final.
"Wide are men’s inquiries into uncertainties; wider still are their disputes about conjectures."
Tertullian
In realizing I was always seeking happiness, I found joy in the simplicities; in the black and white of God. In looking for a reason for life, I found no reason, but meaning. In searching for logical explanations, I found chaos, contradictory nonsense, and flat-out lies. In searching for a guide, I didn’t realize my own self as great, but the God on High that is Great, who will love me, who will love you, and father us until the end of time. It is not disavowing your shadow, nor “becoming” great for the sake of it that makes life meaningful, because the emptiness will be there, and one will seek for constant distraction from knowing his own closeness to death and darkness.
Rather, one must abandon sense and saneness, and seek the Spirit of Jesus Christ, that overcomes evil through forgiveness, scorn through love, and eternal damnation through salvation. Only those who feel unworthy of themselves, who overintellectualize reality will always find a reason to not believe in God, to not accept His Eternal Love, and the garden of vitality planted within their souls by the rains of Faith and Love.
Jesus Christ is my bedrock, my foundation, and nonbelievers, who place all their faith in the shifting sands of science and men's opinion will never be at peace and never feel they have a point. Furthermore, He has the Power to deliver us from our lack of growth. He will guide us where we need, through His Word, through His Voice, through visions and dreams. Without recognizing the ethereal, all you have is the ephemerality of the material world. However, it is not a negative belief to accept God; due to needing a purpose that goes beyond the stimulation of dopamine receptors. How is it that we find meaning in impoverishment? How is it that we find meaning in fasting and humility? All things truly virtuous are actually done in secret, only for God to see. Without knowing what you do has meaning, then all you do is evanescent. The world will pass away, and so will the Heavens and the Earth, but God is the last to go. Place your end in Him, and not in desire, not in men, but Him.
“As far as we can discern, the sole purpose of human existence is to kindle a light of meaning in the darkness of mere being.”
Carl Jung
Thank you to Charlie for inspiring me to write this. From one addict to another, God bless, and I hope others were as stricken with glory from your story as much as I was. Mad love and respect.
My Story of Grief, Addiction, and Finding God
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Nice piece Ouro. You really put yourself out there. How did you manage to get so many parts of my personality and experience in the members of your family?:) Happy Easter! Den