February 8th, 2019
I’ve been on-record as someone who is agnostic and wary of organized religion, but who is deeply spiritual regardless. It’s a weird juxtaposition, a multiversal worldview, but it works for me.
I preface this story with that statement because I do believe in gifts from gods and messages from the universe. I think that sometimes there are grand designs and there are things that just can’t be coincidental. This story is about that. And it begins with @jimmykimmel.
I am in my fifteenth month of sobriety, and things are going well. But before that I was an inconsistent mess, to put it politely. One night, I was watching Jimmy Kimmel, and he spoke to me. He told me that I had less than a week left to find out if I could qualify for health insurance, and he posted a website for me to check out. I had never had insurance in my adult life, and it was one of the many reasons I was in such disrepair. So I sent in the form and I forgot that I had.
Fast forward a few weeks: I decided to stop drinking, cold turkey, on my own. Two nights after that ingenious decision, I started hallucinating. It was one of the worst nights of my entire life; I imagined (and felt) every kind of horror my body and mind could mutually inflict on me and it broke me down. During a respite from the brutal fight, I had a conversation with God, or the universe at large. I told him that if he would just make this stop, I would stop. I would be done forever. I promised. I would never, ever do this to myself ever again. I pleaded. Please. Just make it stop.
He did not make it stop.
When the sun came up and I thought the battle was won, I was wrong and I was brought to the hospital. They were asking me questions, and when they asked me my name for insurance purposes, before I could explain I didn’t have insurance, they said, “Found you.” I had insurance. I did not know this. Jimmy Kimmel helped me get insurance.
I spent a week in the hospital getting to a more solid state, and the memories of my time there are larger than life and stranger than fiction. For a long time, I wondered why no one answered my prayer that night.
Until I started to figure out they did.
Because I ended up in the hospital, I survived. Statistics will tell you that the key to staying sober is to not die first; this is proven science. Because I ended up in the hospital, I was given resources to truly start to fix me, a spiritual toolbox that I would never have found otherwise. Because I didn’t get away with it this time, because I didn’t do it alone, I knew that it MATTERED.
Everything I asked for got answered in a language I did not understand yet.
I used the insurance that I now had to repair the physical things I needed. I use my toolbox for everything else. This is a story to remind you to never stop speaking — because the universe, whether you believe it or not, is always listening.
The Den 