Circumstance

Step into my world for a moment will you. Living in a place that for all intents and purposes I do not wish to be, yet because of "circumstance," I remain. I arrived in this godforsaken place two years ago and honestly at that time I had no idea what exactly I was getting myself into, truly I did not. Being of unsound mind upon arriving here in the downtown east-side of Vancouver, still in the depth of a full-blown addiction yet sober, I was certainly in no condition to even fully understand where I was or what I was about to embark upon from any reasonable perspective. Hungover and alone in a city I had not been in for twenty years, no friends, no connections, no home, no money. All I literally had to my name was the suitcase I carried and the clothes therein—most of my other personal belongings in a storage locker, unknowingly at that time, never to be seen again. I was starting over. I was in the downtown east-side.

I remember many years ago, visiting this area of town with my father. I was fifteen years of age and had just been relocated from Ontario. My father, in all of his infinite wisdom, thought it best to rip all five of his children away from the only life they had ever known, leave their friends and their schools, their relative quaint existence, and drag them across the country to North Vancouver so he could make his millions as it were. We as children and young adults really did not see this in the same light as him. We knew no one, we knew nothing of this city, we were scared and very quickly did as any teenager would do when faced with this set of circumstance—we rebelled. Dear Daddy decided the best way to show his son that not going to school was wrong and without an education, this is where I would end up. He had brought me to the downtown east-side to try and teach me a life lesson. He had brought me here to show me the horrors of addiction and he wanted me to know what "skid-row" looked like. Little did he know this area had not been referred to as skid row for a very long time—yet I played along. Daddy had a way about him, and it was always much less painful, metaphorically, to just humour him and go along with his charade of the moment.

I would have loved to have said, "Hey Dad, I was only skipping school, how in the name of God will this end me up on this 'skid row' of which you speak?" He has always been about the dramatics my father. I, being an intelligent young man, did truly see the point he was trying to make, and whether I appreciated this at the time is another matter, but I did understand. This was certainly not a place I wanted to be. It was an experience I never forgot. Some of the things he showed me were very new to me. I had never seen a man so completely obliterated from the drink that they had passed out in an alley, sleeping it off as it were. This place was filthy, the buildings were decrepit, the streets were dirty, the people were dirty, the language was foul coming out of the mouths of these people he surreptitiously paraded me through. My dad truly thought this is where I was going to end up.

Honestly looking back on that day and what I have now witnessed here, the differences are shocking. What I remember were the drunks—I think, simply because neither my father nor myself had any idea at that time what addiction truly entailed. That of the alcohol and the town drunk was really all he knew. Alcoholism was an issue within his work environment sure, as it is in any place of employment simply because the drink is universally accepted, it's legal and it happens. Drug addiction was another issue all together. Remembering this is the late 1970s, if people were aware of drug addiction, it was rarely spoken of, more so ignored. The line of thought was if we didn't talk about it, then it didn't exist, right? I knew of alcoholism, yet vaguely so. Sure, I was aware of the weed and the hash and of course I knew of the harder drugs, yet I had absolutely no concept of the complexity of drug addiction. I was fifteen and from a very small town in Southwestern Ontario. To this point in my life I had only ever had maybe half a glass of wine with Christmas dinner, a small glass at that. Now here I was, a full-blown alcoholic with nowhere else to turn in the downtown east-side of Vancouver about to enter addictions treatment with some of the hardest core users I had ever seen. I was frightened. This to me was a very unusual place for the likes of such a facility, smack dab in the middle of the highest ratio of drug abuse per capita in this country.

I now am encroaching upon five years of sobriety, and in all truth, these past five years, mostly spent in the downtown east-side, have been the most difficult challenge of my life. Would I change any of it? Absolutely not. The experiences of this, those involved with my recovery process, the constant yearn for the drink still to this day. All of which has made me whom I have now become. A sober, functioning, productive adult getting on with life in possession of all one's faculties without regret or remorse as to the past. I live my life as the happy and caring individual I have always wanted to be, always have been—without that mask of the almighty bottle.

Living sober...