Living with Rex Chapman

I'm reading a book supposedly by the Dalai Lama, "An Open Heart - Practicing Compassion in Everyday Life".👸

It's not very well written, but no matter. I'm not reading it for its literary merit, but inspiration. I want to strengthen my connection to the divine. I was raised in the here and now by my secular mother, but my father was a religious man, and I share his genes, too.🙏

Years ago, I started to wish an enemy well. I forget now where I got the idea but I decided to try it. And it worked. His behaviour didn't change, it just didn't affect me anymore. Wishing him well, sincerely wishing him well, freed me up from the bad feelings I'd not realized were the real problem.💃

Anyway, I'll need ongoing refreshers in letting go if I'm to get through this life in one piece.💪

Sunday morning on CBC radio I heard an interview with Piya Chattopadhyay and Rex Chapman. I only know Rex Chapman as a Twitter wit, I didn't realize he's a famous basketball player, but the interview was about his book, "It's Hard for Me to Live with Me: A Memoir".😎

He stole my title.🙇

My Blond Companion's would be: It's Hard for Me to Live with Her".😃

Anyway, I didn't know much about Rex Chapman except he's hilarious and biting and just an excellent all-round Twitter personality. But he also had an opioid addiction AND a gambling addiction and spoke of both during the interview. He's so eloquent I finally understood just how terrifying the opioid addiction crisis really is.😱

He describes how he felt when he took the first pill, prescribed for an injury in the later stages of his basketball career, all his anxiety melting away, feeling like he was a better person, even, kinder, more sociable, able to connect with strangers in a way he couldn't before. And I could imagine what that must have felt like for him. Not for me, not now, anyway, but for him, then, the way he'd described himself as a young man.😬

I have never felt so lucky to feel good naturally, in spite of issues I've blogged about many times, because I do, I feel good naturally. I wrote my regrets in one column, my values in another, and how to live now in a third. It all added up to more than just sober but sober is certainly the magic decoder ring. Like I said, I'm lucky, and for that, I'm grateful. 💖

Eventually Rex Chapman was up to 40 pills a day, bankrupt, charged with shoplifting, because, of course, to keep feeling good required increased amounts of opioid. He says he's just lucky he got out of it before he got into injecting heroin.😷

It's a stunning story, and yes, he had a long hard fall from grace, but it sounds to me like everybody who gets addicted to opioids ends up at the same bottom.💩

Gabor Mate describes addiction as a coping mechanism for trauma. And while Rex Chapman doesn't talk about trauma, he does talk about privilege, and how he was let off the hook so often, knew why and felt guilty about it. He also talks about having a black girlfriend at one time, and the relationship not being approved of, particularly in the American south. He wishes he could go back and tell that young man to stand up for himself, for others, use his platform, his privilege, for better, instead of wasting it as he did.😇

Don't we all, or most of us, fail ourselves, others, in one way or another, but as someone once said, "The best time to plant a tree was forty years ago, the next best time is now". Hence why I'm brushing up with some reading on how to do better.💁