If you are or were a Service Member and would like to tell us all how you got Sober or just some cool things you have learned along the way i would like to post it Contact me at jjs42day@yahoo.com and we can get that started. Keep fighting the good fight

Saturday, January 22, 2011

Don’t Medicate the Moment

I figure I’m in the business of keeping people alive or keeping them from living.  At least I feel that way about the job I have in the military. My view and my opinion of things like my life and being in the military are always evolving so I may read this in the coming years and think “well that was a jacked up way of looking at things, they aren’t that way at all“. For now though it seems everything I do both while deployed and while training , has to do with keeping my buddy alive and eliminating the enemy. It has been a hard intense way to live and at one point I used drugs and alcohol to cover up feelings of stress, loss, disappointment and on and on. For a while I thought I may have depression so I figured I was “self medicating” because that’s what everyone does?  I think drugs and alcohol are one of the strangest things in life because if I were to weigh out my options and write out on paper the good and bad things of  using ,  the right answer would be very clear.  For instance Alcohol :
1. Tastes bad
2. Hard on your insides(liver, Kidneys, pancreas, heart etc)
3. Expensive
4. Kills brain cells
Just to list a few. But I have been so drawn to the stuff for 20 years now. Drugs and alcohol have made my already hard and intense military life so much harder.  Just like every other story out there one fine day everything came to a head and as clear as anything has ever been, I could see that my addiction was destroying my life. Loosing my friend (drugs and alcohol) was so painful for me but it was a friend that had to go. I am so grateful for the pain that brought me to realize what was killing me.  When I was using I didn’t feel all the bad feelings in my life but what I didn’t realize that while I was medicating the bad moments in my life I wasn’t feeling the good moments in my life either. 
It took about a year for my brain and body to detox and today I deal with the bad feelings in life through the help of a sponsor, meetings and true friendship. I now feel love, kindness and happiness on a regular basis because I don’t  use. It has been such a freeing experience to put everything  that goes on in my head in its proper place.  Life has gotten so much better and it still continues to this day. It is so much easier to deal with the crazy military life  and now I can help others to deal with it too.  The best advice that I have to give now is “Don’t medicate the moments and learn what you can from it”.