I came back to reality by journaling what was happening around me and so I will trust that this is where I began to make sense out of where I was emotionally, where I was headed. Having been partially successful with the recovery process before, I had decided to finally stop the madness when I dialed the phone and asked for help. From that point on I was going to face my fears as I always had but with no artificial courage. Fear, anger, and anxiety is the fuel that fed my madness before recovery.
The fear of failure and rejection needs to be dealt with every single day whether fresh or from the subconscious. I have yet to find success from failure or strength from rejection as opportunity in a career but I have been successful lately within the span of a day just knowing I can change the course of it with my varied responses to wins and losses. It is an ongoing process to endure psychic competition but over time I can turn the losses into an advantage because of my experience with having such lows in life. But also great things have happened along the way that shows me overcoming fear and adversity. Or in the least I’ve stepped up to accept my shortcomings and also I haven’t exploited my gifts, as a footnote rather than rubric.
The fear of loneliness and insanity – that my racing thoughts are going to strip my cranial gears. The perfect cogs of those gears were broken, no longer representing a brilliant puzzle, each person in my life representing a piece. But one piece of the puzzle, one tooth of the gear was missing. No matter how hard I tried to fit in I would be alone in knowing as loved ones paired nicely with their higher power and I became just a tickle in their throats. I was denied access to them by my spirit as I knew what I was losing. It was not within my abilities to fit any piece of the puzzle and I couldn’t force piece of mind. So to stop the insanity and to be less alone I was going to leave those who love me and infiltrate those who also sought help.
I began journaling after a delusional experience that was born out of rage and left me in love. It occurred during the second week of my recent hospitalization, where I was seeking help again for being in abundance and with stubborn characteristics, to put it mildly. The experience began by me being outraged at my neighbors for flipping furniture. I stormed out of my room yelling at the first person I saw that I hated them. I went searching for security (the guys who had been through this program before) and found myself in a wing of the hospital where everyone was asleep. I crept through the halls lightly as I remembered there were cameras throughout the place. With no ill intentions I began scraping my nails along the walls as I walked slowly imagining my fingers were elongated, at first looking like light saber beams but turning into blades that etched the concrete as I began to swell up and shiver with goosebumps before turning a corner, realizing that the ferocious noises of furniture being tossed was indeed security all along wanting me to wake up and play with them, to roughhouse, grapple and frolic through empty halls as outsiders in recovery. These were misfits and giants that didn’t slow down enough to get burned and were too fast to get wet. I wanted to play too so I accepted this invitation to recover by crying out “I love you.” Anger had left me as I walked back to my room to find an empty five gallon water jug placed outside the door next to mine. It must now have been true that security recruited me to play with them in sobriety and so I sat and played it out in my mind, waiting for my new friends to have me join them. I could hear a group wrestling around while making there way towards me and I was prepared to play in recovery with them forever. They turned the corner and it was not security but a band of ragtag patients just like me and so I told them how security had drank all the water before I could return to them and that they chose me to wrestle and play and could you patients please leave me while I wait here so I can love again and be free from anger. I was ready to accept the beautiful invitation to recover even if I was tricked into doing so by love over anger. And so it goes I waited there into the next day by myself as I did every night since I got there and for the next week or so without sleep. But now I was part of a greater plan that involved waking up the sleeping giant within me.
Francis Erich McElroy 