Letters From Rehab #1

While I was in rehab I had planned to write back home to my friends as often as I could. Once I became aware of just how busy they kept us in rehab I kept putting it off. So instead I wrote a journal of sorts which I would compile into a big letter to send my friends. Since I have been expressing myself more openly lately about my sobriety I thought it might be fun to share some, if not all, of the letters. Instead of typing them all up at once I figured I'd share a few "entries" every few days or so. The damn thing is 11 pages long so I doubt anyone would sit through the whole thing at once.

These are unedited. Spelling errors, slang, and all. I can't even quote Simpsons properly which saddens me.

And with that, I give you Rehab Sean...

NOTE: If I repeat things it's cuz I've been writing over several days.


Dear Toolbags,


I hope this letter finds you well. I will never have to see hell because I have been to Kamp Krusty.


Just kidding. But in all honesty please forgive my handwriting because I'm still going through detox. My hands are still a bit shaky but it was MUCH worse the first day. I'm still getting Valuum which is rad. Day 1 I spent 18 hours in a room alone with no technology at all. And I mean NOTHING. The only reading material I had was the bible. It was a fantastic 18 hours...


Day 2 still in detox but I was able to finally go outside granted I was in a wheelchair and under supervision at all times. Gee fun fun. Good news is I was feeling better. Later once I had enough energy I was able to wander on my own. I was in no mood to talk to anyone and just sat by a lake a stared. (Side note, just now this dude came to my door to check to see if I was in my room because it's "Lock Down." Mind you, it's 10 fucking 30! Lights go out at 11) You also can't bring in outside electronics so no Nintendo DS, ipod, NOT EVEN my books and magazines! You can imagine the insanity it's been for me.


11/12/11 Day 3 (today) Woke up feeling much better. I was able to go off on my own. And since I didn't feel like shit I went off in search for some friends. And I found a bunch. It was also the first day of my class. That's right, 6am-10pm is all work with few breaks for food and down time. I even have homework. Gyuuuuuhhhh....


They have plenty of activities, none of which I care about (basketball, vollyball, horseshoes). So me and my new friends sit and watch the "jocks" act gay and laugh at them. Also, no one told me I would be staying at a place with recovering convicts! I swear! lol But it's cool, they have their own little area to chill (the floor under mine). But to be serious, as of today things have gotten so much better. Also, I don't have my cell phone so I the only number I have is my aunts. I can't make a call til tomorrow so all have her forward the message to you so I can get ur address and actually mail this thing to you guys.


Fuck, time for lights out (11:00). Talk to you guys soon!


                                                                                                           The Hat


P.S. They set alarms on the doors at 11:00 so I can't escape! ha ha ha

It's bizarre going back and reading these. My friends were happy to read that I was able to keep my sense of humor through all this. Reading it now there's stuff I want to edit and change but that would take away from this. This isn't just for me. This is for anyone reading who feels they have a problem too.

So that's all for now. Probably post another one tomorrow. Hope you enjoyed...

Fanatic

This is why I love the internet. Last week a friend of mine was retweeting an obsessed Justin Beiber fan on Twitter. This girl is an absolute riot. Everyone is entitled to their own opinion and this is not a jab at her liking Justin Beiber, I'm just posting this because it's hilarious and at times, even a bit scary.


If I had to choose between killing my family or Justin Bieber, I would probably kill my family... #bieber4ever

Justin Bieber is much bigger than Kurt Cobain, so shut up. Did Kurt Cobain ever have the biggest fanbase on Twitter? NO.

My World, My World 2.0, Believe and Miley Cyrus' I Can't Be Tamed are the only iconic albums released in the last 10 years. RIP music.

Believe is a masterpiece and if you think any album by Michael Jackson is better than Believe, you're delusional.




WHO THE FUCK EVEN IS KURT COBAIN? Stop spamming me, idiots. As if you even knew who Kurt Cobain was before Bieber mentioned him... -__-

LOL at people saying Freddie Mercury was a great role model and Bieber is not. You know Freddie was gay and had AIDS right?

Kurt Cobain (some rock singer) died in 1994, the same year Justin Bieber was born. RT if you think Bieber is Kurt reincarnated!

I love Michael Jackson, but saying Michael was bigger than Justin Bieber is now just makes you look dumb.


This is why I HATE Kurt Cobain and his flop band. So fucking unprofessional, I'm happy you died! 

And that's only a handful of her posts. But that was last week. Turns out word has spread and now shit is intense.

Somebody leaked my number. I'm getting tons of texts. Great, gotta change my number and my dad will probably kill me. http://yfrog.com/kjlx5pp


I'm trending in Singapore, they hate me. They suck! :)


I have to deal with e-mails like this EVERY DAY. Thank God my swag can handle it! I get more fan-mail anyway :)     http://yfrog.com/hsi8fzcp

And then my personal favorites. I'm not religious by any means but wow...

Jesus ain't real. If he was, cancer wouldn't exist. Bieber is real and he donates money to cancer funds all the time. Such a hero <3


I hope Illuminati are real so they can kill all the brainwashed Christians and muslims in the world. They just spread hate anyway


Christians really annoy me. The Bible is some science fiction shit about a fag with superpowers. HOW can people even believe it's real?


Great, now religious people are mad. GOD IS NOT REAL. Idiots. If he was, then explain why cancer and poverty exists?


God doesn't care about starving kids in Africa, or people with cancer. Justin visits hospitals and donates money to help them. Who's better?

All in all, in a few years, this poor girl is going to be a complete mess. I'm embarrassed of some of the shit I liked when I was 13, but I didn't broadcast it online for the whole world to see. And while I don't give two shits about Beiber, I'm interested to know what he thinks about deranged fans such as this.

The Mewes/Smith Effect

I owe my sobriety to my friends and family. Plain and simple. If it wasn't for their intervention I wouldn't be the man I am today. As stated in my last blog I would thank them every day if I could, but I'm sure they'd get tired of hearing it. I think my progress speaks volumes and that I often hear "I'm honestly not too worried about you relapsing" means I must be doing something right.

This blog however is a sort of thank you to those who are less aware of the influence they've had on my recovery. Mr. Jason Mewes and Kevin Smith, Jay and Silent Bob themselves. You might be asking yourself, "Those two stoner guys from the movies?" Yes, those guys. For those unfamiliar, Mewes battled his own demons and has now been in recovery for over 2 years. That, my friends, is the guy I look up to. If Mewes can do it, than I can too.

I'm going to back track for a second to explain the impact these two had on my life. Kevin Smith is the reason I went to film school. Everything I wrote and filmed in high school was so obviously influenced by him (or as others might have said "ripped off") because as myself and a slew of other young aspiring film makers who saw Clerks thought, "Hey, I can do that!" So long story short, Kevin Smith shaped me into the man I am today. At the age of 16 I no longer felt embarrassed for my love of comics and Star Wars. I embraced it.
Here I am pushing 30 and people still associate me with my love of all things geek.

I unfortunately never got to finish film school, having to move back home to take care of my terminally ill mother, but had always hoped to go back someday. Unfortunately after she passed away, I started drinking again and as the years progressed it just got worse and worse.

While listening to some "Jay and Silent Bob Get Old" podcasts recently, I was suddenly hit with not only inspiration from their words, but also memories of my dark times. I remembered the times where my drinking had reached it's boiling point. I knew I needed help, but fuck it if I was going to ask for it. If I asked, then my beloved poison would be taken away from me. The sick irony of it all is that I would be curled up on my couch in the fetal position some nights, shivering uncontrollably and often crying, with my ipod listening to "Jay and Bob Get Old" and hearing Mewes talk about not only his horror stories but also the benefits of sobriety. I felt inspired by his words and yet while he was talking about how great sober life was treating him, and how much I desperately wanted that for myself, I continued to pound shots of vodka through tear soaked eyes and trembling hands.

I couldn't stop. I WOULDN'T stop.

Typing those words is just as hard as remembering the events themselves. The reason I feel more comfortable talking about it today is because I am not that person anymore and I never want to be that person anymore. These days I'm listening to "Jay and Bob Get Old" and actually enjoying the fact that I'm sharing this experience with Mewes as well. Ya see, it wasn't until I read Kevin's book Tough Shit, that he mentions that "Jay and Bob Get Old" is actually a means of helping Mewes sobriety. I never put this together when I was a drunk but now I completely understand. This is a way for Mewes to talk about his past and share with the world the horrors of addiction while being entertaining at the same time.

This is his therapy. And he's sharing it with all of us.

That's when I really sat back and thought about myself. I have always been vocal on the internet. I never shut up (again, Smith influenced), so once I entered recovery I didn't want that to change. If I was vocal about my sobriety then people could see how much I have changed and how much better I'm doing. And most important of all, hearing all the support.

One of the first things I did after getting out or rehab, besides calling friends and family, was private messaging Mewes on Twitter and letting him know I was clean. Over the course of my first year I would message him several times and thank him for being an inspiration, and each and every time he would congratulate me and then thank me.

Thank me? Why would he thank me? I didn't do anything.

While I didn't understand at the time, I completely get it now. We, the recovering addict, love hearing that we're going well. So when I would thank him for being an inspiration, he would always say "no, thank YOU. keeps me strong." And he's absolutely right. It keeps us strong hearing those words.

While Mewes is my sober inspiration, Kevin is my vocal inspiration. To share my story. It's my time to give back to the sober community and share my stories for those who need the help. I would normally be nervous getting up in front of a crowd of people but during my one year celebration, I took the podium and just started talking. It didn't take long to feel incredibly comfortable, and to be honest, powerful. I thought of Kevin up on stage telling all his amazing stories at Q&A's and wanted to do that myself.

So thats why I'm writing this today. This is for them. Because if I've learned anything in sobriety it's how much you can really effect someone's day just by saying something nice.

I told a friend I was going to write this, an open thank you letter to Mewes and Smith, and his first reaction was to ask, "Why, they will probably never read it?"

To which I responded, "Why not?" and basically quoted back to him everything Kevin said in his book about how the world is filled with too much "WHY". Reading those words hit me really hard and actually hearing them even more while watching "Burn in Hell." My fun loving mentor had turned from joke master to Jedi Master, spouting Yoda like inspirational words about "why not" and recounting the death of his father. This was a lot for me to take in, recalling my own mothers death, but in a positive way. It got me to start writing again.

And when I say writing, I mean a lot.

So I'll wrap with that. This letter is for Mewes and Smith, who will maybe someday read this and know how much of an impact they have had on my life.

11 months sober and counting...

One Year Sober

I haven't fully given up on the blog. Not yet at least. And it's not really because I don't have anything to say. It's more I don't have enough time to do so. That is one of my biggest "problems" in sobriety.

I don't have enough time in the day to do the things that I want.

Pretty rough, right? That's what I honestly tell people and it's true. Sure, not drinking is an incredibly difficult task that I have to face every single day but the way I deal with it is by constantly keeping my mind occupied. Video games are obviously the biggest distraction. All I wanted to do when I was drinking was take shots and play Playstation. But where is the fun in that when you are too incoherent to actually enjoy it?

Easy answer. It's not.

Same goes for movies. A lot of the films I watched back then I am rewatching pretty much for the "first" time. It is incredibly painful to think of those times. So my motto is to always focus on the positive. Few people have survived as long as I have in recovery, which is completely disconcerting, but the more you dwell on that the less likely you are to succeed. The odds are stacked against us from the very beginning. The one thing that has been a constant in you life for how ever long, in my case over a decade, is stripped from you. Done. Gone. No more. That's is SO hard to accept when you really think about it. The fact that alcohol will never again, not once, enter my body of my own free will was a lot to take in when I first started this journey.

But again. Positivity.

And one of the biggest keys to my success is a strong support system. If you don't have that, shit is gonna be rough. If I had my way I would call each and every one of my friends and family every single morning, the moment I awoke, and thank them for getting me the help I needed. Because if it wasn't for them I wouldn't be where I am right now. I knew I needed help, but in my addicted state of mind if I got the help I needed I would lose the very thing that was destroying me. And that's how we, as addicts, think. We are petrified of the fact that what is literally killing us from the inside will be stripped from our lives forever. It's a sick mentality to have, but guess what, we're sick people.

I celebrated one year sober on May 10th of this year, just under a month ago. Every day was leading up to that moment and the closer I got the more I heard others had hadn't. As of a few months ago, I am the only one out of my group of rehab friends to not relapse. That was rough to hear. But you know what isn't rough? Hearing all the support from friends and family via phone calls, texts, Facebook, and Twitter.

Which brings me to why I started writing this post. I got a private message from a "friend" on Facebook. This person took it upon themselves to complain that I talk about my sobriety too much, that it's obnoxious, that I'm rubbing it in people's faces, etc. So first of all, let me state that this person is someone I don't even really know, I had no idea how we were even connected until I checked our "mutual friends" and found it's just some dick I shared an online connection with. We were never really friends to begin with and obviously their opinion means nothing to me. He was also promptly "de-friended" which in these times is the social equivalent of two 10 years old saying "I don't wanna play with you anymore." Who cares. Move along.

If this was coming from a close friend I would have been hurt. But it wasn't. And not only that, I don't think anyone ever would because I don't think what this dude said was true. I am in no way shoving sobriety down anyones throat. I'm merely expressing what it has done for me. That's it. And when I do post it's usually just to announce that I've completed another month or whatever. I do know of people in recovery who believe that now that they are sober they are better than those who aren't. I am not one of those people. I don't preach on Facebook that since I don't drink than you shouldn't either. That's not how this works.

I don't do it because it's simply not true.

I am the one with the problem. Not you.

Me, myself, and I. (Well, and the plethora of other alcoholics and addicts out there but you get what I mean)

So when somebody says something like this dude said, it frustrates me a bit. If that's how it came across to him than I apologize because honestly that wasn't my intention.

I won't, however, apologize for being happy. Because that's all my posts really are. I'm happy with my life. I haven't been happy in God knows how long. At least 5 years since my mother passed away, that's for certain. But things are different now. My outlook on life has completely changed.

But that one jerkoff aside, I do feel I should mention the other private messages I receive online. Shortly into my stint in recovery I would get messages from people who were actually coming to me for help and asking for advice. "When did you know you had a problem cause I might have one too" and things like that. At that point in my life, I didn't feel I was at the right stage of my recovery to be giving out advice so I simply recommended they check out some AA/NA Meetings. But I am glad they came to me.

Flash forward to a year later and I still have people asking except now I feel I can actually help. And those who ask know I will pretty much drop anything I am doing at that moment and listen. Because they are doing what I was always too afraid to do. To just ask for help. And thats a bigger step than most think.

So with that, I want to thank everyone in my life that has helped me get to where I am today. Maybe next post I will talk about my actual celebration or maybe we'll flash back to the rehab days and give you all a glimpse into that world.

Thank you

Where does the time go...?

Has it really been 6 months? Apparently so.

When i was in rehab back in May I remember when my counselor first brought up the idea of me going into a Halfway House. My immedaite response was "I don't think so". To me, a Halfway House was a place for crazy people. When I was in college my dorm was right across the street from a Halfway House and it was filled with some real crazy people. One lady literally stood in the center of her kitchen and spun in circles for hours upon end. I have video footage to prove it.

So you'll have to understand that when I hear that I am going to be going to a Halfway House I was a little worried. Especially when I'm being told I'll be living there for 6 months. But after sleeping on it one night and talking to my family I agreed the very next day to go through with it.

And what a journey it's been. Obviously I'm very glad I went through with it. The first 2 months were amazing. I met a lot of great new people, some of which I feel could be friends for life. But after those first 2 months things changed. A LOT. But I'm not really going to get into that right now. I've promised myself I won't bad mouth this house until after I leave. What I will say is that when a new company took over back in July things went downhill really fast.

So next week is a new beginning for me. I'm moving back into my condo except I won't be living alone anymore. Which is for the better. I not only have one room mate lined up to move in next week but another roomie moving in shortly after.

I plan to continue going to meetings, obviously. 4-5 a week at least. While living here I had to attend a meeting every day. Coupled with work and a house group every day this came to be very taxing after awhile. My schedule was as follows. Wake up, work, dinner, House Group, meeting, chore, bed. That was my routine for 5 months. And I had no problem with it what so ever. I like going to meetings because 90% of the time I get something out of it. Sure there are days when you just feel plain sick and a meeting is the last thing you want to do, but tough nuts you gotta do it.

The only thing i had a problem with was the House Group.

Wow, talk about the biggest pain ever. It will be one of the first things I blog about once I get out of here. It amazes me that an hour and a half long group can literally almost drive me insane. Last i checked the group was supposed to help you in recovery! So obviously they must be doing something wrong if the only thing running through my mind as I count down the minutes til it ends is "Can't wait til this is over so I can go to a meeting and learn something HELPFUL"

But that is for another time. A few more days here and my time will have come to an end. I got here during the summer in 100 degree weather and am leaving now in the freezing cold.

Where does the time go...?

Update in the World of Sean

I really wish I could post as much as I want to I just don't have the time. I have more access to a computer these days but ironically the moments where I really need to express myself are usually those few moments while Im laying in bed. Reflecting on the day and such.

As you probably DIDN'T notice, the blog title has changed to Above the Influence. My buddy JC came up with the idea. At first it was going to be a temporary change until I came up with something different but the more I see it the more I like it. Plus it's pretty fitting, no?

So yesterday I completed Step 3 of 12 in the program so I'm pretty proud right now. Step 4 is gonna be a bit more difficult but I am definitely up for the work.

My time here at this Sober House will be coming to an end in the not to distant future. While I will miss it a part of me is really glad. When I first got here we were all one big happy family for the most part. most of us all got along and the program here was run a lot differently. But new people took over and changed everything and nothing has been the same since. When I used to look forward to getting off work and coming home to hang with my friends here has now turned into just dreading it. There are some people here i still get along with but the majority make me want to rip out my hair.

The one constant thought running through my mind whenever I'm at home is "Oh please god just shut the fuck up". I used to want children but this experience has tainted those dreams. Living with 20 people who act like they are 5 (ironically they are all older than I am) eventually takes its toll. Luckily Im stronger than I used to be and can handle these situations.

Damn, I was getting in the groove there but now Im getting kicked off the computer. Im gonna try and post more frequently since I always have something to get off my chest by my computer restrictions keep me from doing so. Blah.

Til the next episode...

New Blog Name

Im looking for ideas for a new title for my blog. "Under the Influence" is obviously not really appropriate anymore given my circumstances. Though i did really like it. Heh...

So throw some ideas this ways and we'll see what we come up with.