Back to Alameda

After my trip to Mexico and the negative results, I decided to come back to Alameda. Got a room intending to detox from my latest destructive run. My friend was not into this change and became bored. Then she met another guy staying at the motel and she was gone. I was happy about this development, realizing this was not going to work out. Overall, it was doomed from the start. I started going to AA meetings, attempting to deal with the pain without anything to help with it. I did OK for sometime, renting an apartment, getting settled in and not drinking. A friend I met in AA helped me retrieve my stuff from Oregon. We drove up there and while we were there, I looked up my friends from my last stay in Roseville. One of them who my friend was attracted to was my future wife, Anita. After returning to California, I started drinking again, as pain and loneliness overcame me again. I have never done well living alone, but being insecure about how others might regard my injuries and a shyness condition I’ve never been able to overcome led me to bad habits again. Reflecting on all the times I have used drugs or booze to medicate my feelings and pain, I am surprised I am still alive and healthy. My life had evolved into going to one recovery program after another. My thoughts were continuously depressed and hopeless. I was not breaking out from the depression. I tried a chronic pain clinic in Marin to try again to get help. The doctors agreed that narcotics would be the only thing that could help me, but their program was not about prescribing pain medications. So I was out and about, again. There was one nice (I thought at the time) development while I was in the pain clinic. I began corresponding with my future wife and was hopeful this would turn out to be a good thing. I was so wrong, but it took a while to find out. I need to say, despite all these negative occurrences with attempting to control pain, I finally succeeded many years ago getting it all under control. I don't drink like I used to and my medications have worked well for me for seven years now.