Freedom Is A State of Mind

I used to love going to Narcotics Anonymous meetings when I was in recovery in San Francisco. Every single day I went to at least one meeting and when I had the whole day to myself I'd go to three, even five.

One thing that weighed most importantly in what made a meeting worth attending was whether it was frequented by the people with whom I shared quarters in the rehab.

Naturally, if they went, I didn't. Out of the maybe 60 people at the rehab there were only about two I could tolerate running into at a meeting. It was understood that I had my own thing going, which piqued curiosity somewhat. When asked what meeting I was going to I would lie; I wanted to keep the useless hordes away from a good meeting the way environmentalists attempt to keep tourists away from virgin beaches.

There was something for every flavor of sobriety. If I wanted to hear a tranny's life story, there was a meeting for it. A couple hours later there would be a choice of language. There was also a location option - you want to go to the foggy part of town, or the sunny part of town? There were meetings where the coffee was good and there was Coffee-Mate....and in others were there was good coffee, Splenda, half & half and Coffee-Mate. Some meetings served cookies and cakes. Some even had beef jerky and Caramel Diet Pepsi.

You could opt to go WASP male alcoholic on Nob Hill, Black recovering crack head South of Market , Latino in the Mission District, Haight Street Hippy, Castro Queen. You could even go to a No Scents Allowed meeting if your sinuses weren't doing too good.

It was like having 2 or 3 parties going on at a given time. The freedom of choice was like a high in itself.

And then in Makati I got squeezed into four meetings a week, seeing the same people, as it were, week-to-week. The same people who were either useless ornaments or annoying individuals. People whose stories didn't inspire me and who didn't deserve to know details of my story.

These people must have taken it personally that I wouldn't share much of myself with them. If they thought I was one of those assholes who thinks he's better than everybody else, they were right.

Rather than finding a maintenance plan for what had been a successful program in San Francisco, I found a group of chain-smoking, sugar-addicted, big-fish-in-little-pond with unhealthy habits and cloying personalities. Aloofness, for its absence in that group, would have been a virtue.

There was no possibility for my own brand of sobriety here unless I would wing it and do my own thing.

Understanding that micro-culture and juxtaposing it the macro has helped me see what exactly has been choking me in this country. It is the lack of options.

One may argue that anything is possible, even in this country. However true that may be, the fact that there is usually only one road for everyone to take to get to a certain destination limits the sense of personal freedom immeasurably. The road less travelled, if I may indulge myself a cliché, is depressingly rare.

And for a picky mothafucka like me, having only one way to do something is just as much of a prison as having no way to do it.