The Day My Blog Went Public

Disclaimer:  The first several paragraphs below include a political/religious opinion that I feel very strongly about, but I am well aware that some people will read my opinion and immediately hate me.  If that’s your choice, there is very little I can do to stop you.  I am not asking you to agree with me.  I respect your opinion as you should respect mine.  If you are averse to other people’s opinions and have no place for them in your life, please start reading backwards from the end of this post.  I have no idea why that is the suggested reading path, but it makes as much sense as not being open-minded about other people’s opinions.  End of disclaimer.

 

I had a really odd memory the day my blog went public.  I remembered back seven or eight years ago to when North Carolina passed that stupid Amendment banning same sex marriage.  The stupidity of the arguments was worse than the amendment itself, though, mainly because I had a feeling the amendment wouldn’t last too long.  As a country, we were just getting WAY too progressive for it to stand. And very soon, the Supreme Court agreed with that.

What I remember about the arguments in favor of the bill were that they were predictably hypocritical and probably shouldn’t have even been legal.  Our laws in this country are no longer based on the bible, so we should not be able to use that as a point of reference for the issuance or justification of an amendment to our state or federal constitutions.  For people in support of the bill?  Sure.  Have at it.  You can quote the preacher of Westboro Baptist Church for all I care.  But it can’t have any part of the political reason it passes.  Or shouldn’t.  But what did we hear NONSTOP around that time?  “The bible says marriage is between a man and a woman.”  “The bible says that homosexuality is an abomination.”

Ah, yes, good ole Leviticus.  Do we even need to address the hypocrisy of Christians over THAT book of the bible when it pertains to this argument?  If we’re not letting gays get married, we have to ban adulterers and people that curse their parents and polygamists and even deformed people.  And by god, if a man has sex with a woman during her period, we have to remove him from his people.  Forever!  Thus sayeth the holy word, right?  

I’m not being blasphemous here.  I’m only summing up the bible.  That’s what it says!!!!  It is impossible to win the argument that the Holy Bible is a pick-and-choose rule book.  Everybody in 2011 just picked one rule out of Leviticus and they’ve never really had any use for the rest of them (and yes, I’m aware that homosexuality is talked about in other books; it’s just that Leviticus REALLY skewers them.)

Anyway, I got sick of it.  It was just starting to piss me off.  We were legislating against love.  How is that our job as a government and society?  I still can’t wrap my head around that to this day.  Not only were we making laws against who you could love like this was some kind of communist state, we were basing our arguments around a religious text whose words are NOT supposed to influence our laws.  And if they did, we have to kill all the f**king adulterers and make sure the hunchbacks and retards don’t desecrate the church, by dammit!!  (And I’m not being callous. Go read Leviticus 21.)

So anyway, I had just had enough of it, so I went on Facebook and announced that I was gay and let it hang over the Facebook world for about twelve hours.  I shocked hundreds of people.  It was awesome.  I still to this day laugh about it in my head.  Yeah, it was childish and a little insensitive and a few people got mad at me, but I don’t regret it.  At all.  I guarantee you people thought, “Well damn, I know him. What if he came to me and asked me not to vote for this same-sex marriage bill?  Dear God, what if he’s in love with my son?!?!”  

The announcement that I was gay on Facebook gave that stupid bill a local face.  It forced people who viewed gays as lifeless, detestable orbs to look at a real person who shocked them.  I do NOT regret that.  Not even a little bit.

Anyway, the announcement a couple of days ago that I was an addict was not dissimilar to how I felt the day I lied and announced I was gay.  That’s the last time I remember being really nervous about the opinions of the general public.  It was an odd thought, but I guess there are similarities between gays and addicts.  We’re both outcasts and pariahs.

But just like I did seven or eight years ago, I put a local face on addiction with my announcement and blog.  Both times, whether you agree with me or not, I stood up for something.  Or stood up TO something.  I started a difficult conversation.  I’m proud of that.  

But can I tell you what else I thought Thursday night when I looked back on the day my blog went public?  I sat in my big chair that I’ve been ignoring lately in favor of sitting in the office and working on this blog, and I laid my head back and said, “Holy hell, it’s over.  I did it.”

Addiction has been a huge part of my life for twenty years.  This blog has been a gigantic part of a very positive future for at least six months (four months mentally preparing and two months creating,) and the aftermath of all of that was entirely favorable.  Like entirely.  I expected some asshole to say something like, “Well, if you hadn’t gotten yourself addicted, you’d have no reason to have a blog.”  That didn’t happen, though. I’m sure that guy is just waiting for his time to pounce, but if so, I hope he’s prepared to be highlighted on my blog very soon thereafter.  Of course, if his critiques are warranted and intelligent and respectfully articulated, he will still be highlighted on my blog, but I would probably thank him. That could definitely go two vastly different ways. And I’m open and prepared for either.

Anyway, I sat there in my big chair the night of September 20, 2018, and I was truly exhausted.  My idea of patience is waiting until the cinnamon rolls actually exit the oven before I eat them.  And I had stressed over this blog for six months.  To me, that’s like living in biblical times and waiting at the bus stop.  You’re going to be waiting a long freaking time.  And it FELT that long.  I was tired.

But a lot went into this.  It was a LOT of work.  It wasn’t just the website building and writing content and brainstorming and all the technical learning curves.  There was a gargantuan mental hurdle to overcome.  I give all the credit on that one to my wife.  She supported me from day one.  At the suggestion of a blogger friend of mine, I gave my wife veto power over every word I published, and you would never believe the one thing she vetoed.  ONE thing.  All those words and all those articles and she vetoed ONE thing. I had written on my front page intro that we didn’t have a happy marriage those first three years.  She didn’t like that.  She said, “It wasn’t all unhappy. We had a LOT of happy times.”

She is just amazing in so many ways.  How can we see those first three years so differently?  I look back and see a woman who was constantly nagging me about drinking and begging me to stop and snooping around trying to find stuff and catching me in lies and all of those lies leading to a LOT of fights.  My memory tells me that happened five or six days a week.  HER memory says, “It wasn’t all unhappy.  We had a LOT of happy times.”

She makes me believe there is a God somewhere that loves me.  Nobody else could have been responsible for sending me such a blessing.  It’s like he knew it was time for me turn my life around and he sent me the perfect angel to help me spin.  I had to be the one to quit and take my life back, but she gave me the love that made me want to.  It’s just amazing to me.

So I wanted to write this post about the day my blog went public as much for me as for anybody reading it.  I just had this feeling, however it went, that this was going to be a pretty substantial day in my life.  I would either come out the other side excited as hell at what I can do with this platform and the lives I could touch and just all the gumdrops and lollipops with which dreams are typically stuffed.  Or I would come out the other side with those old feelings of regret and dread and depression and that stupid, physically impossible, delusional wish to turn back time.

I regret nothing.  The people in my life built a man up on Thursday, September 20, 2018.  I don’t watch the news very much, but I know pretty much everything that’s going on in the world from reading online, and it seems like all I see are assholes, bitches, fearmongers, bullies, anger, divisiveness, backstabbing, disrespect, hatred, and a bunch of phuchwads that couldn’t negotiate or compromise on how to slice a damn pizza.  Where are the decent f**king people in this world that just want the best for mankind, no matter what?

Well I can tell you where some of them are.  They are stuck inside the Facebook tab on my computer.  You people rock.  You built a man up this week.  I was tired as shit after many weeks of stress leading up to this, but I have gone to bed these past couple of nights with a confidence and a courage I haven’t known in decades.  My wife propped me up for a lot of years, and I’ll need her more than anybody when tough times hit, but sometimes you have to get outside the walls of your own house to rebuild a broken foundation.  I sincerely thank you guys for that.

With that, I just wanted to recap a few highlights from the day.

Morning

I knew when I woke up that Thursday was the day.  I’d been planning it.  The date had no significance other than I had to pick one, so why not pick one close to the weekend in case I had to spend the weekend crying?

So I got to work and the first thing I did was text some of my oldest friends to let them know about my blog.  These are the friends with whom I spent my high school and college years.  These guys were my clubbing mates and my golf partners and my groomsmen and my poker buddies.  I had not spoken to them in at least three years.  None of them.  I completely shut them out of my life.  That’s a pretty good indication that you’re closing in on rock bottom, you know?  I see that now.

So I texted them and was just as open and honest and contrite as I possibly could be.  It wasn’t hard.  I wasn’t pretending even a little bit.  I typed it out before class started because I knew I was going to cry.  And I did.  I told them I was sorry for disappearing, sorry for shutting them out of my life.  They had no idea why.  I just disappeared and never responded to anybody when they texted.  Pretty soon, they just stopped.

I also said I really wanted to see every one of them.  I wanted my friends again.  There won’t be anymore drunken beach trips with the guys or poker nights where I could easily drink a case of beer, but we’re all married with kids now anyway.  We can at least grill a hot dog sometime, right?  I hope we can anyway.  I got a great response back from all but one or two.  But those couple used to suck at texting anyway, so it might be coming.  If not, I have a few more friends than I had yesterday.

Afternoon

My planning period (I’m a high school math teacher) is the last block of the day, so I’m free of the hormonal humans by about 12:30 every day.  I was ready.  I knew exactly what needed doing to post about my blog on Facebook and officially make it public (yes, I admit to doing personal stuff at work, but I spend about ten hours a week doing work stuff at home, so I can justify it with the boss if I need to.)  

So I had about an hour’s worth of work to do before I could put it on Facebook.  I had to publish Thursday’s blog post, publish my dlee3.com Facebook page, test to see if Facebook would find a preview of my site when I posted about it (it did, it just put a picture on it that I didn’t want; I’m a technical idiot and still have no idea why,) and finish typing out the actual Facebook post where I announced the blog.

All of that went well with the exception of one interruption.  My wife texted me LIVID because some stupid bitch at my son’s preschool literally parked six inches from my wife’s door.  

Now how the hell is a pregnant woman supposed to get in there?  This was a distraction (somewhat humorous, I might add,) but I still got it all posted to Facebook and my blog updated before the bell rang at 2:00.  

And then I waited, nervous as hell.

Late Afternoon and Evening

When my first wife died back in 2008, and the years after, I could post something on Facebook and get somewhere around seventy-two million likes and thirty-four thousand comments, but that slowly dwindled away as time went on.  That’s to be expected, of course.  My wife likes to joke that part of the reason I used to get so many likes and comments was because all the single ladies were awkwardly flirting with me by liking everything I put on Facebook.  Who knows?  She might be right.  I’m female stupid anyway.

But in the past year or two, I really have only put pictures or videos of my kids on Facebook and I will get about twenty or thirty likes and maybe half a dozen comments.  Just slowly inching my way towards a completely anonymous death.

Thursday, however, I got thirty-seven comments, over fifty thumbs up or hearts, at least seven shares, and over a HUNDRED people have liked my dlee3.com Facebook page.  And not a single negative comment.  Not one.  That’s pretty impressive for somebody who had all but disappeared.  And really, really humbling.

What has impressed me most has been the sincerity in the comments people have made.  I’ve gotten a few texts as well, and they are all just amazing.  If you are reading this and you are petrified of life after addiction, and just terrorized by how people might react to you (both of which are completely realistic feelings and you actually SHOULD have them,) I hope you are paying attention.  

Ignore those assholes that are glorified on national news, ignore the media hoarders that believe hostility and divisiveness sell and somehow advance our country.  Ignore those drama-seeking reality TV dimwits that get pissed because their housemate slept with somebody they had a crush on in kindergarten.  And ignore those glory-seeking pissants who get offended because their hairspray was made in a nut factory by white Mexicans.  Those aren’t real people.  That’s just not real.  None of it is.  Give real people a chance to surprise you. 

That might not be a shocking realization for “normal” people, but as addicts, we struggle mightily with the perceived opinions of those “normal” people.  We believe those opinions are full of judgment, disparagement, condemnation, and stereotypes that keep US in the closet just like gay people.

If you’re out there and still suffering from addiction, look at what I have written here.  Look at what I witnessed this week.  My fifteen months of sobriety didn’t mean anything.  I’m sure some people looked at that and said, “Wow, that’s pretty impressive,” while some people probably said, “Ooo, that’s not a lot.”  It doesn’t matter if you have one day, one year, or one decade.  If you are sincere about your desire to stay sober and sincere about your desire to pay it forward, the people in your life will help CARRY you forward, even if they barely know you.  Because guess what?  They ALL know somebody who has struggled, even if they never have personally.  They’ve ALL seen somebody overcome something, whether it be addiction or abuse or an eating disorder or even a completely self-inflicted wound.

I truly believe after this experience that people love watching other people learn to love life again because it makes their light burn a little brighter, too.  It just makes people feel good.  And that means people ARE good.  Give them a chance to prove it.   Give them a chance to help you.  Just give life a chance.  I just can’t imagine that you’ll regret it.

The hardest thing I’ve ever done in my life is battle addiction and its many demons.  It can be REALLY hard and REALLY debilitating. But it’s 99.9% mental once the physical dependence is gone.  And somewhere in that 99.9% is this ridiculous mindset that you are a lesser person, an unworthy person, and somehow, a very important person.  What I mean is that we emerge from addiction and stare at a world that we think is staring back in judgment and condemnation.  That’s wrong.  Why?  Because we aren’t that f**king important.  We think the world is staring at us and there ain’t a damn soul staring.  We just aren’t that important.  So give people a chance.  I’m thankful today that I dropped the anonymity because I got to see a beautiful, loving side of people.  It makes me want to repay it tenfold.

One quick story before I finish.  A guy named Brice messaged me Thursday.  I have not seen or spoken to him in about three years.  I used to coach golf at the high school where I teach, and Brice was one of the best golfers at another local high school that we played against three or four times per season.  He was a great high school golfer by his senior year. 

I was drawn to him not because of golf, though.  It was because he had the kind of inviting personality you see on fully grown people that you admire.  You know, the kind of people for which you instantly feel a pang of envy because they just seem to have life by the balls?  He was still a kid, though, and he seemed to not need or want to rush life along too fast, and one reason for that, I think, is because a couple of years after I started coaching against him, he lost his dad unexpectedly. 

Talking to him after that, there was just a maturity and appreciation for the process of life that you just don’t see in high school kids.  If you’re local to me, you might even remember his dad.  His name was Jim Connors.  He was the local sports director for Time Warner Cable News.

When I started my career at 21 after college, I went into banking.  I hated it for a good seven or eight years. I had this dream of starting my own business because I didn’t want a boss anymore.  It was ill-conceived and poorly planned, but my dad went along with it because he loved and trusted his son.  With his backing, I could actually finance the business, and soon I had the beginnings of a family entertainment center.  It started out with batting cages and an arcade, but I had much bigger plans for it down the road.  I had visions of adding a driving range and a community pool and putt-putt.  Just big, expensive dreams.  It failed miserably, but at least I once had dreams.  That’s a good thing.  I remember having dreams.

That’s not the story, it’s just the background.  So Jim used to bring Brice up to the batting cages when he was little and they’d go hit for a little while and then come inside to shop for baseball cards.  I didn’t really remember Brice when I met him again years later on the golf course, and during the years I coached against him, he never told me the story he told me this week.  He had told me that he used to go to the batting cages, but never this exact memory of it.

Somewhere in one of my earlier blog posts, I made a reference to having started a business that failed.  That is not a false statement. It DID fail.  But Brice told me in his message this week that I did NOT fail.  He said, “My greatest memories as a kid with my dad weren’t at the golf course.  They were at your batting cage.  I sucked and at best would get a couple of hits, but after I was finished, the highlight of those trips were inside your shop where he would buy me baseball cards.  Obviously, he is not here anymore, but anytime I pass by, those memories are there.  So I hope you know even if you think you failed, you gave me memories with my dad.”

Damn.  Just damn.

I guess if I was to analyze that enough, I could say that our words and actions and our place in life create memories for OTHER people that we never really consider.  Or never even know about.  I had no idea somebody had such a profound memory of something that, to me, is such a difficult memory that I wish it could be ripped from my brain with dull hedge trimmers, even if they had to rip out some good memories with it.  It’s that bad a memory to me.  Failure weighs REALLY heavily within me.  Always has.  Especially when that failure was the direct result of my actions and my addictions.

His story made me wonder, though.  Will somebody have a memory of this past Thursday – the day they found out Denton was a drunk – that will be wildly different than my memory of it?  I’m not that f**king important, so probably not, but what if?  I hope it’ll be because my words and my struggles have touched them in such a way that their life is better today because of it.  What if somebody read my blog and decided it was time for them to REALLY put a plan in place to get help for their addictions? 

If it wasn’t that poignant, and I’m SURE it wasn’t for most people, I just hope they remember that they know a guy with some experience and wisdom with addiction that they can turn to just in case they ever need advice because somebody they know or love is struggling themselves.  And of course I hope it’s memorable enough that they keep reading my blog, whether or not addiction affects them or not.

Thursday showed me that I don’t give people nearly enough credit for the goodness of their hearts and the benevolence of their words.  Mostly, I think I saw how powerful and potentially influential we can be as humans when we have a powerful message.  For my entire adult life, the most powerful messages I ever exhibited were lying about being gay and acting like an amazing single father when really I was a reclusive drunk who miraculously fooled everybody.

I think my message is better now.  I look forward to seeing how powerful a message it can be.