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In the now. During the summer of 2008, I met Professor Howard Campbell and shared some of my experience with him. At that time, I had no idea that people would be interested in the everyday life of a junkie on the U.S.-Mexico border. I had previously sent him an e-mail regarding his research on drug trafficking in the borderlands, but I did not expect anything more than a few passing words in response. For the most part, people in my situation who find recovery and take another shot at life find themselves in some sort of subaltern state when it comes to their past and present life experiences. The last thing I expected was to learn that someone might indeed be interested in these experiences and that I would be writing this book, sharing some of the most dramatic details of my life with a variety of unknown readers. Dr. Campbell was interested in what I had gone through, so I took him on a tour of the neighborhoods that I had lived in between 1998 and 2002. At that time, those places seemed distant from the life I had found in what I will call my post-Aliviane, or post-dope, experience. Dr. Campbell mentioned that he remembered me from my graduation from UTEP the previous spring. It felt odd to connect my present life in academia with my past life on the streets of Juárez and El Paso. The two seem so opposite and distant that it was almost as if I had been placed in another life, one in which I was able to actualize who I was and who I was becoming. Of course, this also involved a reflective return to who I had been before I started using chemical substances in order to feel good about myself. This dynamic change also involved a regression and a progression , senses of being and becoming that work simultaneously as the new self emerges from the chaos of active addiction. Recovery involves physical and metaphysical changes that must ocE p i l o gu e 212 Border Junkies cur in order for it to be fully actualized in the life of an addict. I am using the term “metaphysical” to describe the internal dynamics of individual thought processes and experiences. Change is the true essence of recovery. This is a commonsense notion predicated upon the idea that insanity can be defined as repeating the same behavior over and over and expecting a different result. As can be perceived from the trends and patterns of my experience in Juárez and El Paso between 1998 and 2002, my actions and the results of those actions were repeated again and again, thereby digging new, lower thresholds for what many recovering addicts describe as a bottom. Change is an age-old method for turning a life around and is explicit in II Corinthians 5:17: “Therefore, if anyone is in Christ, he is a new creation. The old has passed away; behold, the new has come.” I think that the first fundamental aspect of change in recovery involves a metaphysical awareness of one’s place beyond their physical positionality. Many describe this as a spiritual awakening : an epiphany in which the true meaning of self, society, and the spiritual or metaphysical world becomes increasingly apparent. For an addict in the early stages of recovery, this is a crucial part of the process, and physical recovery cannot fully happen unless this metaphysical selfawareness , or spiritual awakening, is experienced. My spiritual awakening allowed me to perceive my relationship to the universe around me. It enabled me to begin a journey of recovery with an open-mindedness that allowed for various possibilities. More than thirty years of living my way, artificially, had gotten me nowhere. After hitting a social, spiritual, physical, and mental bottom, I knew right away that the necessary changes involved accepting the idea of trying something new. My recovery required me to embrace something different from the behavioral patterns that had led me to administer my own self-destruction from the tip of a needle. Spiritual awakenings are not possible without personal surrender, that is, the surrender of self in order to stay in the now and appreciate the moment. Too many addicts attempt recovery from the standpoint of wanting to re-create an intense past experience or from wanting to help another—”I am doing this for so-and-so.” Although these kinds of reasons can...

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