this is a guest post by my blogging and twitter friend alexander zoltai. it’s the story of how, down and out with alcohol and homelessness, he almost … well, read for yourself:
at first, i was trying to push ahead when i really needed healing time.
went from a homeless situation in ohio to florida for my daughter’s wedding. (dear audra! i wasn’t able to help raise her but she loves me anyway.)
was walking, literally, 100 blocks a day to get to my job and back to the salvation army shelter. had miraculously been included in her wedding party but i was not the dude who gave her away.
one month after the wedding, i was homeless again, and deeply depressed.
must have been some turning point in my history of striking out with vigor only to be beaten down, then striking out again. this time, the fire of renewal was gone.
beat down enough to walk the streets of sarasota, florida begging god to kill me.
one of the members of my faith attempted an intervention–not for my psyche but to loan me $3,000 to move into my own trailer.
there was a delay in approval for the place and i slid further down the slope of life.
went to the bank one day and cashed the check, took the $3,000 and went into an alcoholic tailspin. rented a motel room and drank about a case of guinness a day; also smoked pot…
finally had the suicide idea hatch–hell, i’d been sittin’ on the egg a long time!
bought pills that i could overdose on, and proceeded to watch them for a whole day–i had no motivation left at all–even to kill myself.
so, on to sandusky, ohio, my hometown and continued drinking.
my sister had hacked my email account and determined i was alive. oh! i’d written a good-bye e-mail and shipped it out to all my friends.
while in my hometown, i bought two knives and tried slicing my wrist–again, no motivation at all–even to kill myself.
my sister did intervene with love. i went back to florida and stayed with her, went to the VA hospital for psychological examination, got stuck with a chronic depression label, and found out i had hepatitis c!
this is when i was certain something “spiritual” was going on: god, the humorist, was letting me know who was in charge. he “said”: “so you thought you could end your life and i stopped you; but, just to give you a chance to truly repent, here’s a deadly disease.” i told family and friends but they couldn’t understand my delight.
next, six months on antidepressants, quitting smoking, and spiritual recharging–creating a 300-page compilation from a 500-page compilation of powerful spiritual writings.
the day for starting treatment for the hep C arrived and i skidded into eleven months of debilitation, crappy feelings, hair-loss, muscle-mass-loss, flu symptoms, bone aches, anemia–all “normal” for the treatment.
i’ve said before, the poet in me taking center stage, that truly spiritual events have an inherent contradiction embedded in them. for those eleven months, i experienced the contradictory pulls of massive physical degeneration and ecstatic spiritual upliftment–feeling my existence as worth more than i’d ever imagined, as long as i profoundly submitted to god.
here i am 17 days past the end of treatment and resigned to the further tasks of being proactive about depression mitigation and establishing myself in a home-based business.
like i told my VA psychiatrist last week: “before, i’d rise from a fall with conviction of conquering; now, i don’t know what will happen…
just moving ahead with resignation: “in the sense is of making an entry (signum) ‘opposite’ — on the credit side — balancing the former mark and thus cancelling the claim it represents. sense of ‘to give (oneself) up to some emotion or situation'”– we so often consider being resigned to a situation a depressing alternative. however, if the resignation is to cling to the way the universe actually works, it can be a calming and steadying position.
no idea, or could even pretend to guess, what my future holds. but, the captain of my soul shouts, “steady as she goes!”
alexander m zoltai is a writer with roaring flames in his heart, a blogger with a global agenda, and a nutrition entrepreneur. alexander has also written a beautiful poem that goes with this post.