I,
Voyager
by
Kevin O'Neill
ref:
March 98 Heroinsight
I am a voyager, passing through the intimate lives
of a thousand families, touching on the tribulations
of ordinary folk. I hear the lies, see the anger,
feel the grief, taste the saltiness of the tears and
smell the death.
For a lifetime I have worked with persons using substances.
But the people with whom I have worked are those who
come to me with lives chaotic and out of control.
I see few of those many people who can maintain stability
in their lives along with their use of substances.
I see the brothers or sisters, sons or daughters,
and spouses of people desperate to understand the
cause, and desperate to find the cure. I see parents
determined to hold together a fragmenting family,
desperately binding the wounds of the family while
its life-force bleeds away.
It strikes me as ironic that in all of the chaos the
caring and the anguish associated with the public
face of drug use, it is often near impossible to obtain
the access to, and diversity of, treatments which
may reduce the chaos and bring the drug use under
control. The irony is that, in my experience, the
most frequent opponents to treatment centres are often
parents themselves, parents concerned about the influence
that such centres might have on their lives and those
of their children.
I am a fixer of people's broken lives. I am asked
to put together the fragments of a person or of a
family. In that regard, my capacity and ability to
rebuild is counterfeit, for I can only provide the
means and the opportunity for the real architects
to rebuild if this is what they truly want. I have
no cure, no certainty of success, for these come from
within the person with the addictions. Nor should
any parent believe that they must fix this broken
vessel, or find the cure, or take the blame for another's
actions. They are fixers like me, using means and
opportunity to permit those affected by drugs to bring
order to a chaotic life.
I am a sounding board for those seeking answers, for
both the users of the substances and those around
them. Those who use and those who are concerned are
insatiable in their questioning, often for opposing
reasons. Solutions sought are to deal with the immediate
the problems that brought the drug use to notice,
when the ideal should be to expose the problems of
the past.
I am a surrogate parent, struggling with my own inadequacies
and inexperience while trying to nurture and protect,
without suppressing self-development and self-exploration.
I am the well-meaning amateur of parenting seeking
to get the right mix for success, standing self-condemned
if I fail.
I am a storyteller, protecting, giving hope, rebuilding
and sustaining self-image. I am the user of allegories
trying to explain and make sense of the unbelievable,
of the absurd. Imust tell a parent, a brother or sister
that their frustration, desperation and deep despair
will not suffice to redeem the life of another. I
will recount how the addict in their lives will blame
fate, bad luck and chance before they consider blaming
themselves, or take responsibility for their actions.
I can tell of the limit testing, the deliberate risk-taking,
the flaunting with death which is so much a feature
of the exposed addict. I tell of the violence, the
violation, the defiance, the uncertainty, and the
self-harm associated with uncontrolled addiction.
On the other hand, I can tell of the empathy, the
sympathy, the unshakeable love and affection of one
person to another. And there is a story to tell of
forgiveness and patience and of an abiding belief
in the capability of a person to overcome an addiction.
Equally, I tell of the rehabilitation of those who
develop new ways of dealing with old problems, of
those who are prepared to make dramatic changes and
who see a world about which they have a renewed optimism.
I am a realist, understanding my own limitations and
the limitations of those with an addiction. My expectations
match my realism, requiring only a step by step progress
towards a productive outcome. I do not condone nor
do I condemn. Neither success nor failure of another
person's efforts do I attribute to myself. I stand
ready to support any improvement but not to control
it. Without intruding I am there, waiting for the
success which will surely come if it is self-motivated.
Like me, like you, they will once against become voyagers.
Bon
Voyage!
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