everything except himself

This is part of what I’m submitting to creative writing for an upcoming meeting. The rest of it is at home, so I’ll add it when I leave college for the day.

I stood alone at the onset of the part,
Blinded by the spotlight's piercing dart:

"Who can say what a man is?
The choice is only his."

I drew that line from a mem'ry,
Some great fire's puff of smoke caught in a chim'ney,
And now I find myself in a haze,
Trying to think back to those days,
The days that seem so far away,
Like the brief curtain draw 'fore a play.
And though for now it be gone,
It will again shadow the spot I act upon.

Is it greed to want attention,
To want to effect some lasting retention?
Or is it only honorable to pass without mention,
To fade from the forefront into declension?

Before this curtain fall,
I will strike you all;
I will present you with my every day,
And sell it to you in a most colorful way:

I will steal a face from my audience,
Wear it like a mask in every sense:
After a time, I will consume it,
Take another, and assume it.
And, when I am floating in a sea of two-sided faces,
I will call you from your places:
"Here is your trial:
Find yours amongst the pile!"
And I will pick them from the sum,
And hand them out to everyone:
"This is the story's maxim:
Yours is the same as his, as hers, as them!"
And I will take the mask that's left,
And place my face into its cleft,
And just as you will go to interrupt me, burst,
"I am man!" and interrupt you first.

So, you probably don’t know this about me, but I feel like talking about it. My family has had to deal with drugs for a long time. Growing up with my dad has irrefutably shaped me to be who I am today. He wasn’t doing drugs at the time I was born. He didn’t do them as I was growing up. He doesn’t do them now. However, this man, who’s now over the age of 50, has struggled with the effects that drugs have had on him ever since he quit so long ago. He quit cold-turkey, but the immediate effect of taking drugs is not the extent of the damage that drugs are capable of doing.

As a child, I grew up in a household of yelling. I’ve developed this habit, which I still have to this very day, of eating quickly. This was caused because of the fights that took place between my mom and my dad over the dinner table. If I ate quickly, I could run away from it. That never changed the fact that he was always angry, and he was angry about everything. I couldn’t understand his anger as a child.

One of the biggest things I never understood was that my dad didn’t care if my mom cried. It never seemed to bother him, and she’d sit alone at the dinner table crying well after the fight was over. It took someone else who had had drug problems to help me understand.

One day, I got to hear a speaker talk about his own drug addiction and the effects that it had on his life. It was shocking to hear this man’s story: it sounded exactly like how my dad used to act. The man recounted being angry all the time, not being about to make rational decisions, living day-to-day, and the list goes on. This man helped me understand my dad’s position. There was nothing my dad could do about fixing his life by himself: my dad couldn’t be happy. It moved me. This is the only speaker I have ever gone up to and thanked, personally, for telling his story. What surprised me more was how much he cared that my dad had been helped. This man certainly knew, having gone through it himself, how much a real problem drugs can be to someone’s life and the lives of everyone around them.

On top of that, one of my cousins was just recently taken to jail. He’s out now, but some weeks before going to jail, he contacted his mother (my aunt). She was in tears before us (we were visiting her on vacation there). She was trying to decide whether to let this whole thing play out, to let her son just live his life, or to intervene. She was trying to decide if my cousin was crying out for help, and she was in tears over it for a long time. This woman is not weak by any standard. She’s one of the strongest people I know, and, yet, here she was crying over my cousin. There were drugs involved. There had been drugs in the past. His father had been a dealer at one time. I was at a loss for words, when I should have encouraged her.

Long story short, we had dinner with him before our vacation was over. He went to jail after the court proceedings finished (there was property and other people involved). It meant a lot to me to see him clean up over that short time we were there. It had nothing to do with us; it was all his mother, and I guess that’s the way it ought to be: people that are close to drug users and care about the actual person need to step up and try to help, because that person may want and definitely needs help to face their life. The resilience of my aunt in dealing with her son, my cousin, really left an impression on me.

In my family’s case, it was my mother. She kept trying to get my dad to go see a doctor. She cared enough about him to ignore the hateful things he would say. He didn’t see that he had a problem. It was really his inability to admit that he had a problem which made me unable to understand him. As I came into being an adult, I began to understand, after seeing him able to be happy, that who he had been was not who he was as a person. Really, all the yelling and anger was how his mind had been affected by the drugs he had taken in the past, showing through in his conversation (for lack of a better word), in the way that he would get mad at the littlest things, and how he would not, under any circumstances, take responsibility for anything in his life. The impression that I got from him, before he got help, was that he had obligations, yes, but, beyond that, everything else wasn’t his fault. Thinking back to some of things he said, it was really quite ridiculous. However, there is a lot to say for seeing a person for who they truly are and not losing hope in them and continuing to support them to a point where they can deal with their issues. That was finally going to a doctor for my father, taking medicine until the problem was under control, which was that my father’s brain could not produce the chemicals needed to allow him to feel happy. He still gets angry, sometimes he yells, but that’s who he is as a person; he no longer goes off the deep end; he’s human, and drugs will take your humanity away from you, like it took my father’s. However, care is the greatest thing, I think, that you can give to someone who is affected by drugs. In both my father and my cousin’s case, that’s what ultimately brought them back to a point at which they could be happy as people.