Climbing Everest Without a Sherpa and a Toothpick to Climb

               In less than 36 hours I start the last 8 months of the first chapter in life's 3rd act. It seems my intermission has lasted 20 plus years and has jumped the middle age years to the young AARP years. I should be looking at this with excitement and joy, but truth be told it seems I am about to climb Everest without a Sherpa and a toothpick to climb. I know it seems ridiculous for a man of my age to be this overwhelmed but it is the voices of past that have kept me dormant for all these years. I hear them now as a child would hear an air raid siren during the blitzkrieg, crying for their mother who laid under smoking rubble. The demons of a child do not go away when the child becomes adult, if anything they become more ferocious with age and dormancy. It is at this point I should be enjoying life to the fullest but with the past playing wicked games in my mind I find myself at this point doubting myself.
               12 months ago this weekend I was among thousands whose lives had been ravaged by the disease of addiction, I was at the World NA convention here in Philadelphia. I saw I was not alone in my struggle and I came upon a part of my past that actually was the portal to this new found freedom within. The Reading Terminal train shed was a part of my past in those early years of those dog days of summer in Philadelphia's rough and chaotic Rizzo years. I had been influenced by the need to be wanted and followed a group of teens who taught me to feign adult and to give myself to the everyday working man .....whether it was for a couple of twenties, a joint, or a black beauty I would find a dark corridor or an empty stall in this gargantuan shed and give a little bit a piece of my soul for the taking. I found my self last year in this huge cavernous area that had been gutted like a wild behemoth and transformed into a mighty hall that welcomed thousands from their plight of addiction and comforted them with words spoken in many tongues from across the globe.I changed that weekend and I knew it would all be better if I just surrendered to the desire of using.
               This has become so surreal and I feel as if I am living another life....I pinch myself sometime in bed and wonder if death will take me at the moment of achieving great accomplishments. I think of Johnathan Larson the composer of RENT and how at 36, just a few days before the opening of the musical he died.... after his death the musical went on to receive the Pulitzer prize for Drama and a mantle full of Tony's posthumously. It also scares me we are the same sign and born a few days apart.....I am so afraid I will not get to see what I have to offer be graciously accepted by others. I am afraid I will never get to know the love of another man who loves me for me , faults and all. I want to live the next 20 years with good health, with success in my writing and in my work in psychology/drug counseling . I have lived under the guise that my life was nothing and I harbored resentments and jealousies toward a sister whom I don't think will ever call outside of obligation and duty....I want so much to go back 35 years and change things that so maybe there might have been a chance at a normal brother/sister relationship. In the end acceptance is all I can muster up the strength to do. Its these fears back in the farthest part of my brain that keeps me from moving forward with the muster of  the survivor so many people think I am.
                I sometimes think that maybe for all the pain that I had caused my mother and sister I am doomed to suffer for the years of pain that I have caused. That God I was taught to fear has played many tricks with so many people I love, I am afraid to step up and go against the odds. I have seen the truly good be struck down with  hardships that it is that fear that I am next that keeps me from grabbing the reigns and taking control of my life.
                As I prepare for these next months of school I am reminded of when I first went back to the street I grew up on, and remember how as a young boy I would have to walk to school, and think how long this walk was and that it had to be miles.....that long walk to a child was only two blocks to this adult.....so these next 8 months coming up seem an eternity to this scared adult.....but in reality, it is a gust of wind that is sweeping me forward into a much better place than I am now.