517 Clothman In Detox
Normal detox symptoms include hallucinations, shakes, headaches, etc. Mine have been completely different; then again I’m coming off a different drug.
A friend recently told me that controversy is my alcohol. Ya right, like that could ever happen! I’d like to challenge that lame call ref. I don’t need controversy; you hear me! I DON’T!!
Actually, I think pride has been my drug of preference and it is at the root of my detoxification symptoms. I’ve been through a very challenging year and a half of massive change in my life. It has involved an involuntary downsizing of my savings account, my public exposure and my ego. As I’ve been going through this I’ve been experiencing painful withdrawal symptoms – detox.
In the process of becoming less visible in my home town (though crazy as it sounds, it seems my national exposure is unexpectedly growing), I discovered that an unhealthy amount of my personal self-worth was directly related to my being known and liked in Missoula and the surrounding region. I first started noticing this ugly spot in my life after I came out about hell (I no longer believe in a literal, eternal hell).
Because of my view of hell I was quickly and publicly banished from not only my leadership role in one of the local ministerial associations, but also membership. That was followed by a massive cancellation of scheduled speaking engagements and the non-scheduling of future ones. I not only lost several long term friends, I was cut off from a large portion of my drug supply; i.e. positive strokes.
The next hit was in the pocketbook. Through no wrong doing on my part (I was in the wrong place at the wrong time), I got caught in the middle of a massive legal battle between a disgruntled couple in our community and the city government. This battle went all the way to our State’s Supreme Court and lasted nearly three years. The result, a personal loss of over $100,000 that I didn’t, and don’t have. Suddenly, just being able to pay the bills every month became a great thrill.
The last big blow was being cut from weekly to monthly in The Missoulian for reasons I honestly don’t know because the managing editor has never said a word to me. My final local supplier of drugs was cut off.
The combined affect of these three has been a great humbling and a lot of self-evaluation and a painful period of detoxification. I was used to being liked and I discovered that I liked, perhaps needed, to be liked. Those numerous daily recognitions I received from folks in public or via snail mail and emails was intoxicating. When all that began to diminish I noticed myself beginning to shake; my self-worth and identity shrinking proportionately along with it.
I discovered that I wasn’t content with just being who I am. I was nourished by what I was, what I did and what I earned. As those things faded I found myself hurting.
Initially I had to daily restrain myself from lashing out and blaming others for how I was feeling, for the pain. It was easy to do this because in all of the hits I took I could see how others were at fault. But finally I had to accept the truth that I was trying to pluck the specks out of the eyes of others instead of focusing on removing the log in mine. This was when the detox really began to hit me; when I honestly started looking in the mirror.
My emotions were rattled …my ego deflated …my self-worth anemic. I was in a steep nose-dive with very little strength or desire to pull on the joy stick to level out the trajectory of my life. For the first time in over 30 years I found myself tempted with becoming a hermit and just saying to hell with it.
However, that’s also when I started seeing this light at the end of the tunnel that I haven’t noticed for a long time. A warm peace began to emulate from deep within that I had forgotten about. It seemed I was finding something that just might be of more value that that which I was loosing.
…to be continued…
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