Imagine it from Ground Zero: Addiction and How I Broke Free
The Critic is ME
This is part 2 of a two-part series on the chronology that led to my eventual sobriety. If you missed part 1, you can find it here. This is my life, Thank you for reading.
It is not the critic who counts.
Not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better.
The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena,
Whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly; who errs, who comes short again and again, because there is no effort without error and shortcoming; but who does actually strive to do the deeds.
Who knows great enthusiasms, the great devotions, who spends himself in a worthy cause.
Who at the best knows in the end the triumph of high achievement,
And who at the worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who neither know victory nor defeat. —Theodore Roosevelt
I used to think about being hypnotized. I believed it would take something completely changing the way my mind operates for me to stop anything. A friend of mine that I was in jail with told me a story about being hypnotized. He was a very country guy that you wouldn’t assume knew anything about something like that. He didn’t want to do it but, his wife hated his smoking, and she wanted him to try it, so he did it for her. Afterwards, they’re on their way home, almost there, it’s about a half-hour drive and she says, “We’re almost home and you haven’t had one cigarette. By now you’ve normally smoked five.” He knew that she was right, but he didn’t want to admit it, so he lit one real fast, but after that one he didn’t even finish that pack. He was done. It changed something up there. In my mind the change wasn’t so sudden but regardless, it happened.
I can’t be discharged from this program, I just can’t. The class is Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday, 9am-12:30pm and I can’t miss a single class or have a single dirty urine. I have a first shift job that I’ve been at for years. Monday-Friday, 7am-3:30pm. I have rent to pay, but I can’t get kicked out of this program. It’s the only thing providing structure and medicine to keep me from going back to heroin. I have to give it a try. They’re not giving me any other option. So, I do. At first, I’m still missing here and there. They can see that I’m actually trying, so they say nothing. One of the days in class, they play the following TED Talk, I didn’t know what a TED Talk was.
And this one.
This changed my life. Now, these two talks are masterful, brilliant, and she did the work to come up with these ideas. They are brave and truthful to a fault. When she boycotted Joe Rogan during COVID for having “Anti-Vax” doctors on I couldn’t help going to her video to comment, “Dude, don’t you see!? He’s in the arena and you're being the critic!!!” Anyways, I went home and watched and watched and watched. There is a quote in the second one Listening to shame that she talks about and the quote with her explanation of it, changed my life, here it is:
“It is not the critic who counts. It is not the man who sits and points out how the doer of deeds could have done things better and how he falls and stumbles. The credit goes to the man in the arena whose face is marred with dust and blood and sweat. But when he's in the arena, at best, he wins, and at worst, he loses, but when he fails, when he loses, he does so daring greatly.”
This is a very famous quote by Theodore Roosevelt, the Man in the Arena quote, and it really says so much. She continues with:
Life is about daring greatly, about being in the arena.
When you walk up to that arena and you put your hand on the door, and you think, “I’m going in and I’m going to try this,” shame is the gremlin who says, “Uh, uh. You're not good enough. You never finished that MBA. Your wife left you. I know your dad really wasn't in Luxembourg, he was in Sing-Sing.
I know those things that happened to you growing up.
I know you don't think that you're pretty, smart, talented or powerful enough.
I know your dad never paid attention, even when you made CFO.”
Shame is that thing.
And if we can quiet it down and walk in and say, “I’m going to do this,” we look up and the critic that we see pointing and laughing, 99 percent of the time is, who?
Us.
Shame drives two big tapes, “never good enough”, and if you can talk it out of that one, “who do you think you are?”
The thing to understand about shame is, it's not guilt. Shame is a focus on self, guilt is a focus on behavior.
Shame is “I am bad.”
Guilt is “I did something bad.”
Listening back on this, her delivery is kind of, dare I say, cringy but the subject matter is brilliant, and beautiful and true. Even as I’m sitting here typing there’s a distant voice in my ear saying, “who do you think you are? No one would want to read anything you have to say. You’re wasting your time.”
Silencing that voices some days is the hardest thing I’ll do.
I made a conscious plan, that I must make one-of-two decisions. Either give up this program and revert back to way things were or take this seriously and get as much out of this program as possible, I opted for the latter. It was literally the first thing I’d ever taken seriously, my whole life. I didn’t do serious. I’m still a goof ball that laughs way too much, but I can straighten up when it counts.
I went into work on Friday and told them, “I was attending a drug treatment and would only be able to work Monday and Friday.” If I can’t do that then I understand. I’ll find work elsewhere, and to my surprise they said, “Okay, we’ll see.” I’m sure they didn’t believe me because I had said things like this before, that I was in treatment, or getting clean, or going on vacation, when I was really going to pull a scam in Tennessee, they had a right to be skeptical. I thought, “I have to prove myself.”
I wasn’t sure if my plan was to stay clean, or just not get kicked out. As a matter of fact, I know. I never intended to get clean or be clean but once I made that decision to take this serious not getting high became easier than getting high. Sometimes were tough and looking back I’m really not sure how I made do. For one thing, I was only able to work Monday and Friday, I made $8.25/hour which meant that I cleared $116 a week. My rent was $100 a week it cost $4 at the ATM and I am a smoker. Like I said, I don’t know how I made it. There was a soup kitchen around the corner that would give out lunch and a food box every day. I would go there every day after I got out of class and get something to eat. On the way there I would stop at my job while they were in there working and raid their ashtrays.
The class, some days they would have us watch a talk like the Brene Brown talk and we would discuss, but most days someone would present a problem they were going through and all 12 of us would talk through it. It was like an open discussion. I resented it at first, would hardly take part in the discussion, but once I decided to take it seriously, I would long for it. I would get out of there on Thursday afternoon and couldn’t wait to go back on Tuesday. When it was completed, I’m not gonna lie. I was upset. In fact, I don’t believe I’ve longed to get back to anything like I did that class. The people around me at home, the ones who cared started to notice, I talked different, I moved different, I reacted different to stress. No doubt my life had changed, I had changed. There was just one problem.
Will, my best friend, and housemate, was without a doubt, in support of me staying clean, but the rest of our housemates were not, after completing IOP there was times that one of our housemate’s downstairs would message me at 1 in the morning, “Hey, come down and get this hit of crack”. It would always be near payday, that was their plan, to get me smoking right before I got paid so I would fuck up my paycheck with them. It would work at first, I’d take that hit and immediately start planning to blow my whole paycheck on it tomorrow. Crack was such a miserable drug though, it made me want to do it less and less every time it wore off, so this kept insuring I wouldn’t be back.
The guy I rented from was one of my housemates, Jesse, he was a kind soul, raised by hyenas, his mother, got rest her soul, and sister were the devil’s downstairs, and he could see what was happening, so he made a suggestion. “Look, I know how my mom and sister are. You’re doing really good.” He didn’t know what was going on, but he knew something was. “Why don’t you and Will get a place together, out of here. After this week, I won’t charge you any more rent, you save up your money for a month and get your own place?” And we took him up on that.
I got on Craigs List looking for apartments or rooms for rent. I called many of the listings, but they were all a huge process to get into. Then, I called the listing that read, Cold Rooms 4 Rent Available Pay Now Move in Today, I thought it’s either fake, or fake, but I was out of options, so I called, a man answered, kind of aggressively, half yelling, “Sup, what you need?” I put on my best stern business tone and said, “I’m calling about the Craigs List ad for ‘Rooms for Rent’?” He said, “Cold rooms, yea.”
I said, “do you have any available?”
He said, “Yea, when do you wanna move in?”
I said, “This Friday.” He very quickly, read off the address and said, “call me when you get there.” Just that fast and I’m like waaaait! I had more to say, “I want to move in this Friday but only have half the money today and will have the rest on Friday so I’m just calling to make sure you’ll have a room on Friday.” And he said, which blew my mind but in hindsight wasn’t as crazy as I thought at the time and made me real skeptical of this whole thing, “just come and get the room today, and if you don’t pay me Friday, you’ll leave Friday.”
To understand the next part I must explain that my best friend and I were moving into a boarding house. If you don’t know a boarding house is just a house, where they put all the rooms up for rent like it’s an apartment, everyone shares the kitchen and shares the bathroom. So, we’re renting a room there. I’m used to sleeping anywhere and he’s used to having a bed so he would take the bed, and I had a blow-up mattress to put in the corner. It was going to be tight quarters but that wasn’t new to me. Nobody knew us here, I told everyone we were brothers so they wouldn’t think we were gay.
I go down to the address listed in the ad. I call the landlord. He has one of the other housemates there show me the room. I walk in the room, and let me just say, it wasn’t exactly spacious. The bed was centered in the room, and I would have to move it to one side to fit my twin blowup mattress, but that’s okay. It will do, I’m actually pretty happy with it, I’m finally not renting from someone with whom I also live. I’d been doing that for years and lost a lot of friends because of it. Take it from someone who has tried every combination of this. You do not want to rent from a friend or someone who lives in the house with you, it might work out in the short but, eventually things turn sour.
Moving day comes, we’ve got our stuff packed up and a ride down there. When we get there, I call the landlord, he sends out his maintenance guy to take us to our room. In the house the maintenance guy, instead of taking us to the room I was shown, he says, “That’s already been rented, your rooms back here.” We walk through the kitchen to the back of the house, our room is the back room. He hands us the key and says, “that’s your room, I gotta go, will see y’all around.”
We walk in the room and it’s fucking horrific. This room has a twin mattress and frame, and the room is the length of the mattress, the width about a foot and a half wider than the twin mattress, my blow-up mattress wouldn’t fit on the floor because the room was smaller than 2 twin mattresses. I had cells in prison that were way bigger than this room. I could make a pallet on the floor, which is what I’ll have to do, but the space is so small I’ll have to lay on my side to fit. It was rough. This plan started to seem grim. The landlord knew it was 2 people, I don’t know how he thinks this’ll work! This must be why he was so quick to move us in, no questions asked. We spent the rest of the evening attempting to settle in and planning our next payday disappearing act. It never came. About 10 o’ clock that night I get a call from the landlord:
Landlord (LL): Hey man, I can’t wait all night. Are you coming or not?
Me: I’m already here.
LL: Were you gonna call me? WTF is going on?!
Me: I talked to you at like 6 when I got here.
LL: Got where?!
Me: To the house. I’m in the room now.
LL: You’re already in the house? Who let you in?
Me: The maintenance guy—
LL: Wait. What room are you in?
Me: The little one in the back—
LL: That ain’t the room you seen.
Me: No, it’s not. It’s the one the maintenance guy took us to.
LL:……..silence……
Me: I called you at 6, when I told you I’d be here, and this is the room they put me in—
LL: I’ll call you right back.
He didn’t call back, instead the maintenance guy was knocking on the door about 30 seconds later. He said, “I’m really sorry, lemme get you into the right room.” The landlord had 2 different people moving in that day, he got us mixed up, but after looking at the boxed-up entrance way and trying to figure out how to make it work, the normal sized room looked like a mansion!
The house was rough, even after we settled in, had roaches, was in the hood—I still live in the hood, but in our own house without roaches—but I learned to love that house. That house was the final resting place of my addiction. It was my sanctuary of change, there were people who used drugs in that house, definitely, and everybody smoked weed, but as long as I minded my business and didn’t go seeking shit out, no one was trying to talk me into it and I didn’t, I binge watched Netflix and Hulu, then starting getting into shows on YouTube, and then podcasts, I became fully immersed in the internet.
Will was a Trump supporter, and it never made sense to me, I was like, this billionaire dude. Why? I had been in jail when he got elected, we all watched it on the Dorm TV in absolute disbelief. I was always into political punk bands, and I loved Obama in 2008, then I became so far caught up in the drug world I didn’t care anymore. Even a room full of criminals being held against their will for breaking the rules could not believe Donald Trump got elected. Then I heard about the Russia stuff, and I said to Will, “Bro, if this election was hacked and stolen by Russia, doesn’t mean he’s not actually our president?” He said, “Shouldn’t be.” I thought about this a minute, knowing how easily I’d been thrown in jail for the most trivial shit—I got locked up for riding my bike on the sidewalk one time, Will was sent to prison for buying an Xbox that turned out to be stolen—I said, “well if that was the case, there’s no chance that they wouldn’t have kicked him out of office, right? They don’t just let people stay in office that hack elections, right?” He said, “you wouldn’t think so, would you?”
“No. I wouldn’t think so. It seems like that would’ve been the biggest story in history.”
This was how I came to care about and be curious about politics as I am today. I wanted to prove to Will that he shouldn’t support this guy and, in the process, learned that he was framed for fucking treason by the intelligence community. The Steele Dossier was faked, and created by someone who the DNC, at the order of Hillary Clinton, paid to create. Which was then used as evidence to the FISA court to get illegal wiretaps on Donald Trump’s campaign before he even got elected. Which was reported on from the left by Aaron Maté who recieved an award for this, and Matt Taibbi Michael Tracey Glenn Greenwald Jeff Gerth and many journalists on the right spectrum. Thanks to Public and Racket News we now know that the Kremlin actually disproved of Donald Trump and was hoping Hillary would make it into office. By the way, I don’t believe Trump is a good guy because of this, he uses the term “Palestinian” as a slur the fucking asshole, I just know that the Intelligence Community, the shapeshifting (red-blue-red-blue private-public-private-public) neocons, are way worse. The more I understand American politics and geopolitics the more they read like a true crime novel.
I never thought I was going to stay off of drugs if I’m being totally honest. I just wanted to get through that class and save face, but life kept getting easier and easier. Getting high and washing it all away was always the easier route for me, then not getting high turned out to be so much simpler. I never had to wake up sick again like I had at least once a week for so many years. Once you get into habit of doing what’s right, what’s right becomes the easier choice.
My mind is clearing up, all those years of fog, things are brightening up. I isolated quite a bit to simply going from home to work every day but after so long of isolation the friends you had in the darker world start to move on, I think isolation may be the only way to go. Also, if I hadn’t isolated and spent literally years online, watching videos, reading, looking for documents, trying to figure out different stories and by the way, being inspired by great people, I wouldn’t be writing this right now. So, I thank isolation for that.
Thank you for reading.
Jordan Lee Canter, Editor-in-Chief, Declaration of warLiberty
It really takes courage to tell your story hoping it will inspire someone else. ❤️ You inspire me.
Thank you so much.