It Could Be Worse

A woman that started coming to our morning meeting last week asked several members for help this morning.  Her words were coherent but her thoughts and plans lacked temporal continuity.  She was going to get a ride to an agency, Hero House, specializing in mental health issues going so far as to get in another member’s car and then she got out saying she did not want to go there.  She said she was hungry.  I offered to buy her some food.  She said she did not want to eat at the Alano Club asking for Taco Bell.  I offered her a ride to Taco Bell and then the agency.  We started off down the road.  She wanted to go to the transit center to go to Seattle.  She wanted to take a shower at our place.  I gave her a few dollars and we left her at the transit center.

That short interaction was powerful.  The woman was predatory, manipulative, deceptive and incapable of successfully advocating for herself in a way that will get her a sober safe place to live.  My first words after she got out the car were to be grateful that Lea and I are not so messed-up that would could not get real functional help from others.  The woman did get money and ride from us, money from another guy at the club and the other lady would have given her a ride.  At the end of the day, she was still homeless and seriously mentally ill.

I don’t know if it was some sort of drug (meth?) psychosis, pure mental illness or a bad combination of the two that fueled her behavior.  Whatever it was, I would not want to be like that and have great compassion for her.  I have rarely seen such a visceral close-up of that level of crazy since I have been in recovery.   By the grace of god, that was not me today.

I know my addiction is a form of insanity.  It is not (YET = your eligible too) as bad as what other people have.  Yesterday in Bellevue, a man my age bludgeoned his aunt to death then drove around in her car getting and smoking crack.  He had been sober 6 months and relapsed.  He will presumably spend the rest of his life in prison.

I am grateful for our daily reprieve from active insanity contingent on the maintenance of our "spiritual condition".  Working with others reminds me of where I don’t want to go helping me to stay sober one more day.