Inner Peace…

I feel at peace tonight – not the always inward conflict I feel on a normal basis. I am very thankful for all the many good things in my life right now. I’ve come a very long way from that drunkard homeless man back in 2003. I will never forget the night my mother turned on the heat in my deceased grandmother’s house – wonderful, glorious heat. I had called her and told her I was homeless. I had a warm bed to sleep in that night and was so very, very thankful. I had been sleeping in a tent by a pond on some land we owned. The month was December as it is now.

“I don’t care what your daddy says you’re not sleeping in a tent tonight,” my mother told me over the phone. “It is freezing cold outside!”

That was the spark that lit the fire that got me moving towards recovery, stability, and sobriety. I finally had stable housing living in an apartment under my grandmother’s house. It took a few years, but I finally got sobered up as well and started to take my medications. The medications were useless while I was drinking. The medications are the key to my recovery. My father always likes to say that I am a different person on my medications than I was before. He said the same of my mother as well. My mother was a mean, stern, chaotic, and obstinate woman growing up and she turned into this gentle and kind creature when she started to take Zyprexa for her schizophrenia.  I actually got to be friends with my mother in the last few years before her death. We were no longer at odds with each other.