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Source: Unidentified Historical Recording – Fellowship Review Recording 930 – Date Unknown.mp3 File: wallace-living-clean-nasac-durban-2007.mp3 Duration: 00:13:40
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Good morning, my name is Wallace, I'm an addict. I haven't been this freaked out since the last time I came down, so bear with me. About three weeks ago, my sponsor in Wimbledon, Warren, said to me, listen man, I'll put you down for a share at the convention. And I said, yeah, okay. And then he said to me, they'll let you know what the topic is at some point in the next couple of weeks, so you'll have time to prepare. And then I didn't hear anything, I heard nothing. I didn't investigate, I didn't want to go looking for trouble. And on Friday, I personally looked at the schedule, and I didn't see my name. I didn't want to believe it could be there. One of my friends, one of the guys, came with me, actually pointed it out to me, and I went into a flat spin, I'll be honest with you, I'm in one right now. But the topic is living clean, a new way of life, and there's one thing that I can say, and that's that the old addict would not have been able to do this. I would have run. So I guess in a certain sense, that is a good sign. I'd like to start just by saying thanks to everyone who organised this convention, and for the guys who came with me, and for NA as a whole. I really love NA. And while I only have ten months clean time, I've been in recovery for ten years, off and on, and it is NA, ultimately, that has done it for me.
Since I rocked up at the convention, this is my second convention, I was at the last year's as well, three pretty weird things have happened to me. I'm not going to go into all the details, but I've met two people again that I haven't seen in nine years. The one guy was the guy I used to buy drugs from in Joburg, up to about 1998, and seeing him here is kind of an inspiration. To see him embarking on a new way of life and being clean is like a revelation to me. If somebody had asked me ten years ago, do you think so-and-so is ever going to get clean, I would have said I'm pretty sceptical about it. What also happened is last night, we spoke for a few minutes, and he reminded me of something that I had repressed. This image came up as soon as he mentioned it, about the last time we saw each other, and it was pretty horrific. It was funny, it was a bit of a euphoric recall, but it was also very, very painful for me, because myself, as an addict, I've become complacent, I forget where I've come from, and he reminded me of a scene when I was out of my mind, utterly wasted. And he described me, well, not in derogatory terms, but in very suspect terms, my behaviour that day, and the whole thing came rushing back to me. I hadn't thought about that patch of two or three days for years, and it brought me back down to earth with a bang. It made me think of what Rose related yesterday, about iconic moments, and how you go there and you can smell and feel and be in that instance, and those moments helped to keep me clean. And somebody else I hadn't seen for about nine or ten years as well, we also spoke after morning meditation yesterday, and he reminded me that when he last saw me, I'd just come out of prison, and he said subsequently he went into prison after that. I neglected to tell him that I went back to prison twice after that. So the point of my relating the story about these two guys is that it's incredible what individuals and the group as a whole can do for other individuals like myself, because these two guys reminded me of where I came from and of the hope that lies ahead, and I feel if they can have it, then so can I. I haven't got that much clean time. I haven't been in proper recovery for very long, so there's not much I can really, really say about living clean and a new way of life. I know I can speak quite a bit about what I don't have to do anymore, and one of those things is I don't have to live my life without a higher power anymore.
I was always into the whole intellectualising thing. Having a higher power meant that I was accountable to someone or something, and I hated that, because the guilt which was always with me
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was just ten times worse. I wanted a universal experience, a life experience without any moral reference point, because the way I lived was completely amoral. Today I have a higher power, and it's by His grace that I'm standing here today and I'm relatively sane. The other thing I don't have to do anymore is stuff up relationships. Last year, towards the end of March, I'd been in prison awaiting trial for 55 days. The day of my last court appearance, I found out on the way out from one of the wardens that my mother had died, and that was a real mindfuck. It's the only way to describe it.
It flashed upon me that the last few years of her life she'd been sick and I'd been in active addiction, and my being in active addiction probably accelerated her passing, and the weight of the guilt of that was truly profound. My father also died years before that, also while I was in active addiction. I'd never really, really grieved my parents, and being able to do that in recovery, sober and rational, is a gift. It really, really is. I only really started grieving my parents in December last year when I came clean.
The only family that I really have left are my sister and nieces whom I've put through hell, and I don't have to do that anymore. They don't have to distrust me. They don't have to fear what I'm going to do next. They still have a certain amount of trepidation about my future, but I know that I don't ever have to hurt them or cause them as much pain as I have again. When I think back to relationships, in general romantic relationships, I don't believe that our higher power necessarily has only one potential soul mate. I believe that I've met two or three in my life span, and because of my addiction I've blown those relationships out of the water. I have deep regrets, but I've also learned something from that. I also don't have to be so self-reliant anymore. I can defer to the judgment of people with more wisdom and more experience than I have, something I never liked doing. The ego and the self will get in the way big time. And then of course there's the NA literature, which is also a revelation. It gives you a reference point. It's a guide. It saved me on many, many occasions. Being an active addiction, I used to picture myself, and when I think about it in retrospect now, I was like a black hole, an emotional black hole. I used to suck people in. I used to suck money in. I used to suck things in. I was a dead loss. I was a liability to society at large, and I don't have to be that anymore. I'm not a slave to my ego, not to such a great extent anyway. Pride can take a back seat, and it's okay for me to stand here and say today that I'm afraid to be here, that my past is full of shame and guilt and heartache. It's okay for me to be vulnerable, to open up and to expose myself to people. I always used to believe that to be vulnerable or to be open, even to be honest, was a sign of weakness. I don't have to do that anymore.
I don't have to do insane things like sell my shoes for substances on the streets of Howrah. I don't have to sell a kind old lady's car who befriended me and was willing to lend me the car. I don't have to steal my car, the one that I pawned to the Nigerians back from them. I don't have to wake up in a police cell, wallowing in self-pity, hatred with absolutely no self-worth and withdrawing from two hectic substances.
I don't have to go to prison in fear of being raped, have to deal with the intimidation, have to phone my sister up and manipulate her to come and help me. I don't have to do those things anymore. And as for the new life, living clean, I have the opportunity to think out of the box. A couple of friends of mine said yesterday that they've got a plan, they're going to get their arms tattooed with their clean date, and then every year thereafter they're going to add something to it, sort of symbolic, make it more difficult to relapse, etc. And in the past I would have said, no way, that's a crazy idea, I'm not big on tattoos. But I realise now in my
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new life I can think out of the box and something like that becomes possible for me. I'm able to identify my own emotions, and not only that, I'm able to feel them as well. I had a break-up. I went against the N.A. suggestions, or the suggestions the fellowship offers us, and got involved in a relationship. It wasn't too heavy. I tried to practice spiritual principles. It didn't go too far. What did happen though was that I experienced betrayal, rejection, and there was a chain of events where I felt I was betrayed by more than one person. And what hit me immediately was that I'd been trying to practice spiritual principles and this is what I get for it. What is this about? I remember lying in bed a couple of days later and the pain, this dark black place full of the feeling of rejection, resentment, anger, shame, bitterness. In the past I wouldn't have been able to feel those feelings. It was just this fuzzy black mess of excruciating pain.
That night I was actually able to lie there and let it wash over me and feel the experience, whereas in the past I would have used a substance and I would have suppressed those feelings. They would have come up again the next day, but I still would not have been able to experience them, feel them, and move on. To me, that is a small, small sign of growth. As my clean time grows longer and my brain chemistry approaches normal and I keep working the steps, I'm discovering that I'm a person that I don't have to hate as much as I used to, that I'm not all bad, that there are some good things about me. That is a gift, because for the better part of 17 years of active addiction, I really, really detested myself, I despised myself. I'm getting to a place now where I can go a day in my own company and not be disgusted, and that's also a real gift.
Being able to make right choices and be assertive instead of aggressive, to be active instead of passive, to make things happen instead of letting them happen to me. When I was in active addiction, people, situations, circumstances, I was a fatalist. Things used to happen to me. I didn't make things happen. I'm now able to take responsibility and ownership, to some extent, of my past, of my future, and I'm able to live in the present, which is something I was never able to do. I never understood the concept of living in the present. A couple of people have alluded to it, but it's a new experience for me, living in the present. I have to say that my worst day in recovery is better than my best day in active addiction. That's just the simple truth of it. I can leave the baggage of the past behind, and NA has given me the tools to do this.
Thanks for listening. That's me.