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Source: Unidentified Historical Recording – Fellowship Review Recording 910 – Date Unknown.mp3 File: fergus-a-nasac-national-convention-johannesburg-2006.mp3 Duration: 00:10:35
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Right. I don't know who she is. She's not an addict. My name is Fergus. I'm an addict. And this is my first convention, and I see that they're actually selling condoms in the curio shop with Keep Coming Back written on them, so no wonder these conventions are so popular. If I'd known there were such crowd pullers, I would never have agreed to share here, but here we go. It seems like this topic was made for me. It's kind of the history of my process in NA. I've been coming to the rooms for, that's coming up to close to four years, and I went to a treatment facility in Cape Town, and I thought that the desire, well the desire to use had been lifted, and obviously in my rock bottom I thought, God, I don't know if I'm ever going to be able to not use drugs.
To face life on life's terms. And I don't know if it's like that with all treatment centres, and then coming into the rooms, it's almost impossible to bridge that gap between a kind of lock-up facility and then life on life's terms, and I had a big fear of dealing with life on life's terms, and I came straight back to Jo'burg and got into work and started coming to meetings, and I did nine, ten, ninety.
I've never had a sponsor, and I started to do step work, but I obviously realised that NA was the way to maintain my recovery, and for eighteen months I kind of stuck to the rooms like glue, and thought I was doing really well, and then one day I heard the fire engines, and obviously somebody's house was on fire, but I was the last to know it was my own house. And I relapsed in a major way, and woke up the next day with the security company and an ambulance in my front yard, taking me off to hospital, and I guess the reason why the topic's so apt for me is the next night I went to a meeting, I went to my home group actually, and they were as shocked as I was that I'd relapsed.
And it was probably my stuff, but I felt rejected, I felt like I'd failed, and then I actually thought to myself, you know, I've got to make a new start. Well, first I carried on relapsing for about six months, and I was like the proverbial when we, when I clean up, you know, and I would go to a meeting every night of the week, and the one night I'd miss a meeting, I'd just, I'd use, and then sometimes I would use go to a meeting and use afterwards.
And actually my rock bottom in that relapse was worse than my previous rock bottom, because I knew that there were gifts to recovery, and I knew that I was an addict. And at that point I really didn't know which side of my life was going to win, whether I was going to be an addict, a using addict for the rest of my life, or whether I was actually going to, whether I wanted life and recovery enough to recover.
And it was probably the scariest moment of my life, because, I mean, before I first cleaned up, there was no alternative, so I thought this is my life, I'll just live it. And eventually my drug counsellor said to me, what are we going to do, must you go back to treatment, how are you going to stop using, you've got to just stop this. And I couldn't go back to treatment, it wasn't going to work for me.
And so I made N.A. my treatment facility, I made a strict rule packed with myself that I would attend five meetings a week, and I've done that for the last 17 months. And I do it religiously, and I do a lot of service, and they say in the rooms that you should make your recovery your own, and I'm a strong believer in that. Maybe because I don't have a sponsor, and I don't think I'm ever going to get one.
It's not that nobody will have me, it's just I've got codependent issues.
[00:05:05]
But I really believe for my process, it's taken me a long time to get it, coming to these rooms for four years. My first attempt at recovery, I thought, I knew the desire to use drugs and alcohol had been lifted, but I never really got the fact that I was an addict as a person. That that was my identity, and that that wasn't a depressing fact, it was just the fact that that's who I am. And in all areas of my life I have addictive patterns of behaviour, in my work, in my personal life, and that drugs and alcohol are just a symptom.
And that was the difference in my second recovery, is that I actually, I used the rooms to see how other people deal with life on life's terms, to feel normal, to feel accepted. I get my serenity from the rooms, and I really believe that the therapeutic value of one addict helping another, I mean I know that's N.A. jargon, but it really does work for me. And I know that no matter what goes on during any given day, if my ego is playing up, or I'm particularly stressed, the minute I get to a meeting, and I share my stuff, and I'm quite religious about sharing my stuff, it all makes sense to me, and I can actually stop trying to be perfect, I can stop obsessing, and I think the nature of N.A. is one program can't suit everybody, we're all different people, so I think the idea of keep coming back, it's also about not being perfect, that's why I came back to a meeting the next day after I'd relapsed, I thought, I'm not perfect, if I could have given up once to begin with, I would never have become an addict to begin with.
This is not easy stuff, and I think the fellowship is fantastic. In my first recovery, I got jaded, and I started to see N.A. as a group of politicized people that were out to get everybody else, and point fingers at those who weren't doing recovery properly, or whatever the case may be, and eventually I kind of sidelined my meetings to one a week, and eventually I relapsed, and now I really do see N.A. as a kind of cotton wool swab, that that's where I go to recover, and that's where I go where I fit in, where I'm going to be a normal member of the community in that environment, and that's okay for me.
There's a lot of talk about anonymity as a strong feature, and I don't gossip about people, but I share very honestly in the rooms, because I feel that once I'm comfortable enough to share something about myself in an open forum like that, then I've broken the spell of guilt and shame on that particular subject, and I find it extremely liberating. And so I have kind of become an N.A. junkie in a way, and against all odds, I mean, I have a family who's very supportive, but then I'll say, oh, you know, should you really be going to so many meetings?
You know, you've got such lovely other friends, you know, really, you should really mix with them, and you know what I heard somebody share in a meeting the other night, that they still, and they've got about, I think, six years clean time, that they're still not comfortable spending a lot of time with people who aren't recovering addicts, and if somebody had said that to me two years ago, I would have said, oh, please get a life.
And actually now, it is my life. My primary identity is that I'm a recovering addict. When I first went to treatment, I got such a shock, because I went to treatment in Cape Town, nobody knew me, and I didn't know how to be me. I got the fright of my life, because I couldn't hide behind my career, I couldn't hide behind anything, and for a long time in recovery, I've kind of been struggling to find an identity that wasn't wrapped up in an addiction, like an obsessive work addiction, or sex addiction, or whatever the case may be, and now I'm happy that my identity is a recovering addict,
[00:10:02]
because I've accepted that that's what I'm going to be for the rest of my life, and I'm okay with that. And yeah, I think that's really all I've got to say, I'll keep coming back, and I'm very happy to be at this convention, I'm loving it, and thanks for listening to me.