Letter of resignation

To whom this may concern:

I am writing to tell you it’s over, I’m done, out.

I’m also writing to explain myself. Partly because you deserve to know and also because it will help me understand what happened. There will be no excuses in this letter because I don’t have any. But I do have reasons, and I’ve finally begun to understand the difference.

The only place I’ll point the finger is at the mirror. But there were plenty of other people involved, some on purpose and others because they had no choice.

I guess you could say it all began in the early ’80s. I mean, I dabbled in drugs during high school, but it didn’t get heavy until after that. At 20, I discovered cocaine.

So I’d been using cocaine, drinking, and smoking weed for a pretty long time. It wasn’t till probably 1988 or ’89 that I stopped using coke, and then only because the supply was getting crappy around here. That’s when I crossed over to crank — you know, speed, meth, crystal, tweak, go-fast, ice, glass, uppers, black beauties; methamphetamines were in abundance. I guess I used it till August 4, 2005.

The whole time I was looking for something that wasn’t really there. I was hurting inside, in a place drugs can’t reach, but I didn’t understand that.

I was neglecting family, neglecting my job; I was always late, getting written up left and right. I was using drugs before work, at work, after work, all of it to make me feel better about the things I wasn’t handling, to make me feel better about life and the things I simply couldn’t handle. I was looking to drugs for an answer that wasn’t there.

I thought I was a loser. I felt like a failure. Everything I did felt like it was my fault, even when it wasn’t. I really didn’t know I was hurting. I think maybe it was because I wasn’t like everybody else. My life didn’t turn out like the “fortunate folks.” I didn’t know they had their own problems. At least their heads seemed above water, while I was swimming around in my own problems and drowning in my addiction.

To make things worse, methamphetamine has a bad habit of making a person psychotic and crazy. I found myself screaming and hollering at people. I was abusive with my family. Family takes the main brunt of this. If others don’t like what you’re doing, they leave you. Family stays there and takes it.

My going to jail was the result of me doing drugs for four days straight. I lost it and took it out on my wife. I became an abusive, assaulting person. I see myself as a law-abiding man, but I did something wrong. They arrested me at work and took me to jail. The charge was assault with a deadly weapon with intent to do great bodily harm. There was a chance I was going away for three years.

I blacked out and didn’t remember half of what happened until it was told to me. The meth went in and my rage came out. This event and my going to jail only compounded the idea that I was a loser. As a result of my drugs and my attitude, I was creating my own trouble, but I didn’t understand that. I was on a path to self-destruction, and I was taking others along with me.

I thought I had lost it all. I thought I was never going home again. I found that, surprisingly, my wife didn’t leave. I remember all I wanted to do was stop the fight. I had the choice to go 10 feet out the front door or 10 feet toward her. I made the wrong decision.

It was my first offense. My work and my family bailed me out of jail. Here were all these people supporting me, bailing me out, and giving me the chance to pay them back, letting me know they thought the world of me, and I couldn’t hear it. The only thing I could think of was using again.

After the assault, I pretty much thought everybody hated me. But I didn’t feel most of my pain because I was padding myself with dope. Even after I got out of jail, the first thing I did was get high. I wasn’t allowed to go home yet because of the restraining order. The only person I had to turn to was my mother, who took me in; and even at her house I used. Once I was high, nothing else mattered, and I was OK. It didn’t change the world, but it changed the way I looked at it. I was still trying to find a way out, and this wasn’t it.

It was another year before I went into recovery. I was on probation, but I continued to use. I found a way to slip through the knotholes, unnoticed. But they kept getting better at their drug tests.

Even though I knew a test was coming on Monday, I used on Friday. One of my daughters, she was 11 then, had a seizure and ended up in the hospital. She’s a handicapped child — blind and dealing with developmental problems. It’s a lot of weight on my shoulders I just didn’t know how to handle. So I got high.

Still, I passed the drug test on Monday. But they had doubts about it, so they sent it to the lab. I had all of Tuesday to think about it. I was scared for my life. I knew I’d lose my job and my family, knew I’d have to finish off those three years in jail. I felt pretty lost, low, dumped. I had nowhere to reach out for help, no one to talk to. I didn’t know there were places that could help me. I thought I had to fix it all on my own.

The first person I thought of was my probation officer. I called her and said I needed help. She told me to come in on Wednesday. I pretty much thought I was going to be arrested on the spot. I wrote goodbye letters to everyone; I thought I was gone.

I did go in on Wednesday, and I did take another test. It was clean. But I had already been scared to death. I told my P.O. I couldn’t stop. I told her I needed help and didn’t know who to ask. She gave me a break and sent me to the Recovery Center at Community Hospital.

August 4 of last year was my last day using drugs. It’s been 16 months, and what scares me is that I am only one day away from using if I don’t follow this program.

Recovery goes on for the rest of my life. Alcohol itself has never been a problem for me, but it’s an instigator. Normal people can go around and drink and stop there. I’ll have one drink and look for something else. On that last day, when my probation officer made me call the Recovery Center from her office, I surrendered. I did not want to live a life in jail, and I did not want to die.

Using drugs felt good until it became a dependency. I was always looking for the next high, and it took a bit of clarity to set in before I could see that it’s not the way to live. It’s hard to explain, but in recovery I had to change everything I did. I called everybody — dealers, fellow users, family, and friends — and told them I was out of the game. I figured the only way to fight the situation and get through this was to tell everyone, “I’m going through the Recovery Center; I’m done.” I needed to let my story be known.

I told everyone except my boss because I didn’t want to say it to him until I was 30 days clean. On that day, I walked up to his desk with the coin they give you in recovery when you get to 30 days, and I threw it on his desk. And he said, “It’s a whole different world, isn’t it?”

I told him that I’ve seen a little bit of that world, but not all of it. I have seen today, where I no longer have to live the madness, to be worried or afraid. I live each day focused, sticking with the here-and now. I can’t fix the past, and I can’t alter the future. Everything is right in front of me; I have that clarity now.

I have been married almost 21 years now. I have a 20-year old daughter and a disabled younger daughter, 12. I couldn’t handle all that before, and I couldn’t handle it now without the program, without following the 12 steps of the path. I could not do this without the Recovery Center.

It’s hard for me to think I lived the life I did, that I lived a life of destruction. If something was screwed up, I hid the truth from myself and blamed it on everyone else. Without being honest with myself, I can’t be honest with life. My honesty, my truth — it is my saving grace.

Love,

J.R. Cruz

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