Cardigan knitting for chimps

Reading Michaela’s blog on how we are perceived by others in recovery really got me going. Of course, these days the signs of getting going are less fever pitched palpitation and animation and more twitch of the eyelid and a whispering sigh, but I digress…

In my active addiction my life got smaller and smaller. I got more isolated. I was amazingly good at covering up the evidence, but the strands of my existence were beginning to come loose.

I was becoming unreliable, dishonest, angry, blaming. I was full of complex rationalisations and denial. I was a hopeless and selfish partner and communication had broken down to the point that it seemed we were from different worlds.

Other bits of my life cardigan began to unravel, and I tried to repair them. I was like a chimp with knitting needles: a lot of clacking but not much plain and purl.

Where the frayed edges showed, many friends and family either didn’t notice, didn’t choose to notice or had reasons for not saying much. There was almost a corporate denial around me that mirrored the denial within.

We say that addiction is a family illness and my partner was just about as sick as me though was not drinking or drugging.

When I started to get honest, and told friends what was going on, one friend said to my partner “I didn’t think Androcles (not his real name folks) was stupid enough to have used drugs” It didn’t help. Not at all.

I went into residential treatment in crisis (lost job, no money, few values, depressed, isolated, relationships in ruins, pursued by the police, and a variety of other hilarious things).

I was there for months and months. Came home, got arrested, worked my way through the criminal justice issues, tried to pick up the pieces of my relationship and wondered how I would survive wih no money, no job and limited emotional reserves.

Here I was sitting in the aftermath of the addiction earthquake, a frayed life cardigan, now with added elbow patches for strength, hanging rather loosely on my shoulders, and friends said: “Androcles, it seems to us like you’ve over-reacted. Your drinking was never that bad.”

They wanted me to be the same as before, not some teetotal bore (their perception). I had to leave such friendships behind which was incredibly hard and I still grieve for them.

Early on, the advice I was given by several people in long term recovery was to encourage my partner and those close to me to make their own recoveries from the hurt.

My partner chose to do that in the Alanon fellowship. Now we talk the same language – most of the time.

Did I say I’m actually from a distant galaxy sent here in a rocket ship when my home planet blew up and that explains why I don’t really fit in? But that’s a different story. Perhaps another time…

Nowadays we have have a shared understanding of the nuts and bolts of recovery and my internal chimp (I call him Charlie) has got much better at knitting life cardigans.