BY: Marc McMahon

Have you ever felt like you're all alone and nobody cares and maybe you should just disappear and die?  Like there is never going to come a time in your life when things are ok and are going to stay that way forever. When you can wake up in the mornings without that empty, gnawing feeling in your gut that tells you something is not right but you can't for the life of you figure out what. When you no longer feel cracked like an egg in its container as it is slammed into something more than it can handle, contents barely being held inside. If so I just want you to know your not alone, sometimes I feel that way too.

Sometimes I feel like I am never going to get this recovery thing long-term and that I am always at some point going to fall prey to the demon of relapse. I say all of that so you know if you are feeling that way to that you're not alone, not by a long shot. I say all of that because I have learned often times how we feel is not necessarily the way that it is more like our perspective sometimes gets skewed from the negative emotions we are feeling from the last poor decision we may have made, take my relapse for instance. But I must say this, I have learned or am learning that no matter how bleak I may think my future looks, that there is always hope. No matter how dark my world gets hope is always shining its ray of sunshine and love down towards us.

That if we stand firm and hold our ground eventually our outlook will change and hope and love will shine through. Sometimes we can do this on our own simply by giving ourselves time to process the events that sadden us and sometimes it takes someone we look up to or who supports us to show us that it is there. Either way despite how we may feel hope is always alive! Even when we can't feel it, see it, or touch it, it is there and will always be there just waiting for us to welcome it in, back home to our hearts, where it belongs.

We were not created and born on this earth to live a defeated life, as a matter of fact, the good book says "I know the plans I have for you, plans to prosper you not to harm you. Plans to give you hope and a future!" That is a promise my Higher Power gives to me and that I cling to for refuge at times. There is something to be said for hoping for the best even though you may be experiencing the worse time you have ever had in your life.

For keeping your chin up and pressing forward despite getting kicked in the jaw occasionally by life and its circumstances. For having enough hope to get back up off the ground and say I am not finished yet and try again.To show the disease of addiction that you are a fighter, a soldier who is willing to do whatever is necessary to stay clean. Someone who is learning they are actually worth something and that maybe they deserve happiness too. To show others and to prove to yourself that you are capable of change and that all the pain you have been through in the past was not for nothing. To one day be able to stand on the other side of darkness and look in the light no longer regretting the past. Taking the pain that your demons meant to kill you and using it to hopefully help heal somebody else.

That is where I find my peace today as it pertains to my addiction. I find it in helping others whether in face to face conversation or chatting over the computer, or via an article such as this one I am writing for my website here. Somehow through being as transparent as I humanly can be and by sharing all of me, the good, bad, and the ugly. I have been able to come to terms with much of the suffering that my addiction caused.

Helping Others Helps Me

It's even helped me overcome the self-hate I had for so many years. It has helped me come to terms with the hate of self I had over the number of people I hurt while in my addiction and that was huge. Those are the feelings that almost killed me, the ones I tried taking my life over. The ones that helped keep me in active addiction for the better part of 20 years. The ones that told me the world would be better off without me and at least this way I would not be able to hurt another person again.

Those were some very dark days. The 3 darkest days I have ever had. And you want to know what all that darkness in my life back then had to teach me? It taught me Hope is Alive, that no matter how far down the scale I had gone I am capable of getting back up and doing it again. That if I do not lose faith, work hard, and stay honest with myself and others I can not only get back up and do well. But get back up and do better than I  did before and possibly become better than I have ever been in my life.

Then it taught me if I can do this, anybody can. I have been trying to share that message and this story of hope with others as often as possible for the past three and a half years. It has not only become crucial to my recovery, but it has also become something that I love to do as well. Thank you all for taking the time to read my ramble and I hope you all have an amazing day. Stay blessed my friends.

About The Author: Marc is a 50-year-old Author, Speaker, and Soldier in a war to loosen the grasp that Substance Abuse has on our society. He is a Father, Son, and friend to all those seeking refuge from this incorrigible disease. Marc resides in the beautiful Pacific Northwest where he enjoys, writing, hiking, and kicking the disease of addiction in the teeth, every chance he gets. As Marc always likes to say, “be blessed, my friends!”