Musician Jon Gerler had been so focused on his expectations that he forgot to look at his reality.
I’m a 41 year old Gen-X man in long term recovery from substance abuse. For the last two years I’ve been chronicling the journey on my blog, mylaststand.org.
In the 12-step literature I follow, there’s a promise made to those like me:
“We will not regret the past, nor wish to shut the door on it.”
For most of my life I wanted to be everything to everyone. As a child my dad wanted me to be a baseball player, whereas I just wanted to be a “good boy” (though I’ve never felt I lived up to anyone’s standards of goodness, especially not my dad’s). As a teenager, I wanted to be James Hetfield from Metallica or Kurt Cobain from Nirvana. In college I wanted to be a famous graphic designer with a world-class portfolio, and then a wealthy producer of music and globetrotting DJ.
In short, my dreams of grandiosity led me to think that I needed to be whatever I was not. Or, that I should be whatever anyone else wanted to be. In our society of entitlement, entrepreneurship, invention and “prosperity”, men have extraordinary pressure placed upon them from the outset, to be everything our country, our jobs, schools, families or even gods expect us us to be (I realize that women also have tremendous expectations placed upon them – many the same, though many very different).
Those expectations I had for myself which went unmet gave way to new expectations, which then allowed me to ignore everything that came before and create a new “continuum” for myself. I could write off my old mistakes and failures by pretending they all happened in some sort of alternate universe, effectively “shutting the door” on them. By age 35, I was an overweight alcoholic and drug addict with high blood pressure, two DUI arrests under his belt, a four day stint in a local hospital after an overdose, no job, no money, no home and no hope. I had never in my life wanted to die until that moment.
Rock-bottom is the last great reality check. You experience both paralyzing fear and a profound sense of freedom all at once. It was in that moment that I realized life itself is the continuum, that there’s no “dialing back” or undo button for life. It either is, or isn’t.
I had been so focused on expectations that I forgot to look at my reality. All the things I had wanted to achieve – success in graphic design, as a musician and producer of music – I had achieved! They were there waiting to be acknowledged, but because my focus was on the expectation of perfection rather than on the progress I’d made, even successes became failures. Unfortunately before I could find hope, I found escape in the alternate universe of an addict.
Two years of blogging about the ups and downs of my lifelong path to HERE has taught me that everything we experience in life leads us to right now. Somewhere along the way I achieved (and continue to achieve) all the dreams I’d ever wanted for myself – and in many cases, in spite of myself.
Be well.
Previously published at mylaststand.org. Photo courtesy of author; modified by jvincent.