My Name is Chris but most know me as Tha Joka.

April 16th of 2006 is my clean date. The day before was the last time I ever drank a drink of alcohol or ingested a drug of any kind.

Growing up I never thought I had a problem with drugs or alcohol but after I dropped out of high school this notion soon began to become clearer and clearer. I always thought of myself as my parents hippie hand-me-down. I was a pothead becuase HE was a pothead. I was an alcoholic becuase my Mother was an alcoholic. I know now that the drugs were a very small part of my problem. In this past year of being clean and sober I've found out more stuff about myself than most could hope to accomplish in a lifetime of soul searching. I was a victim of my parents past and their choices but they were not the ones who put the joint or the bottle to my mouth and they certainly did not make me smoke/drink it!

Soon after High School I was living the dream that Kiss had sang about. I stayed up all night ever night and partyed every day. I did what I want when I wanted to do it and fuck you if you tried to stop me. Pretty soon the good times had ran their course and I was living in a trash can for the very first time in my life. This scared the hell out of me but soon after being homeless for the 3rd and 4th time I became more comfortable to this sort of thing. During this time I really wasn't living any kind of life...I was merely surviving for another day and I was barely able to do that!

Everyone in recovery always asks me what my drug of choice was. My answer everytime is "what do you got?". 1 was always too many and a 1000 was never enough! The reason I bring this up is becuase even though there isn't too many things I haven't done my real demon was Meth. I used it for the first time when I was 18 and as bad as this sounds the first time was straight into the blood stream. After this the sky was the limit. I did so much one time that I stayed up a month straight and after waking up after sleeping for 3 days straight I walked into the bathroom to see a man I have never seen before. As I stared into the mirror and looked at this stranger staring back at me I wondered to myself where this had all began. I wondered back to when I was 12...

It was December 20th of 1995. I had woke up to my Father shaking me awake with the saddest look on his face that I had ever seen. He tells me that my Grandmother had just had a very bad heart attack. Soon we were on our way from Woodward, Oklahoma to Liberal, Kansas. We were on our way to the hospital where I was born. We had opted to stick around and Christmas had finally come. My Stepmom had brought all the presents from underneath the tree with us so that us kids could have our Christmas...even if it was in a hospital waiting room. I never opened my gifts...I gave them to a couple of boys my age that were bed stricken. I only wanted one thing for Christmas that year...I wanted my Grandma to be there next year. At around 9:00 I had retreated to the chapel with only one thing in mind, me and God were gonna have a one on one. I prayed for 2 hours straight...I prayed for him not to take her just yet. She was like a mother to me and there for a little while when my dad was homeless she WAS a mother to me. At 12:15 I had decided to go up to her room to talk to my Grandfather who had never left her side. I walk in to him walking out and to the sight of the doctors pulling the plug on my Grandmother. The doctors had estimated if she was to come out of her coma she would be a vegetable so my family opted to pull the plug. After I got back home I never went to church again. Never again did I ever pray to God and this is when my addiction really took off. Since then I have never again accepted a Christmas gift or celebrated Jesus' Birthday.

During my active addiction it was this distance from God that allowed me to be so cold and calculating towards myself and others. But I know now that even though I had walked away from him he had always been right behind me trying to catch up to me.

Right at the end of my active addiction I was at my worst and I had definitely hit my rock bottom. As they say...I was sick and tired of being sick and tired. I was doing so much Acid that I should be brain dead and institutionalized. I was smoking at least 2 ounces of Pot a day, from dusk til dawn. I was drinking myself stupid every weekend and woke up every Monday crawling through my own waste. My Uncle had this very same problem with drugs and when I was very young he had become so depressed that he crawled between his two mattresses and shot himself in the head. The reason I bring this up is everytime I tried and failed to kill myself it seemed as there was always a supernatural intervention involved that would make sure it failed. I beleive this to be my Uncle watching over me.

During the last 4 years of my active addiction I always kept in touch with my Pops. Most of the time just to call and ask for money...which he always gave to me for whatever reason it was. One thing he always told me on the phone was how much this one twelve step recovery group was doing to help him. I never listened and kept on slowly killing myself. Pretty soon my worl came falling down around me. I lost my girlfreind, my job, my home, my car and everything I held near and dear to my heart. I'll lay it out right here...my true intentions were to kill myself and put myself out of my misery. The last thing I wanted to do before I offed myself was to visit my Dad one last time. He drove from Oklahoma to Arkansas and picked me up and I stayed at his place for a week. I always say me getting into the rooms of NA was a fluke and here is the reason why. My Dad was going to take a vacation from work, church and NA meetings to hang out with me. I talked him out of taking off from work and church and to talk him out of going to his meetings I opted to go with him.

I remember my first NA meeting very vividly. As my good freind Happy says...I was shaking like a dog shittin' double edged razor blades! I crouched down next to the trash can in the corner and listened as everyone shared straight from their hearts about how much NA had helped them. My ears opened and my eyes widened and for the first time in my life I had realized that there is a better way to live. At the end of the week I had already had a job and had already been to 3 NA meetings. My Dad, his best freind and my sponsor today and me were on our way to a NA convention and that is when I told my Father I wanted to stay and give this thing a try. My Pops was psyched and that weekend we had a blast. I went back to Arkansas one last time to get the rest of my stuff and never returned.

To this day I look back at the person I used to be and laugh to myself as to how much I've changed this past year. I have alot of good memories from this past year but two of the best memories were to of the birthday nights at the Step Forward group in Ardmore, Oklahoma. The first is when my Pops got his 4 year medallion last year. I stood up and said a few things and got to give my pops his 4 year medallion. This year on April 16th on birthday night my Pops got to return the favor and got to give his only son his 1 year medallion. When I was speaking up in front of that whole place and the 200 people in attendance I couldn't help but look over at my Father and cry! This program has given me so much but in the end I'm most grateful to it for it giving me the chance to meet my real Dad. I'm most grateful for the chance to get to know my real Dad.

Nowadays a single day doesn't go by that I don't look at my 1 year medallion and rub the hell out of it. I worked hard for it and it definiitely wasn't an easy year! We have a saying in my home group...

"The newcomer is the most important person at ANY meeting becuase we can only keep what we have by giving it away"

My mission...to be that example that my Father was to me. To be an example of how much better life can be becuase of NA. Think I'm lying? I went on an NA camping trip this past weekend and woke up at the crack of dawn. I didn't have to crawl through my own waste to do it either. I walked down to the lake and sat on a rock and watched as the sun came up. I've never watched a sunrise in my whole life and at that moment I felt the most beautiful peace in the whole wide world.

Chris "Tha Joka"