13 minute read
Finding Faith
Finding Faith
And Learning to Love Myself
Words by Dennis Allen
In the last issue, I shared some history on why I think we have so many problems in the North. Though we’ve made great strides, we’re still riddled with social problems, which will take time and effort to overcome. My story and observations are my contribution to that effort. I don’t claim to have all the answers, but I’ve lived that life and I know my own truth. I hope you can find the strength to face your own truth as well. To me, it is the key to true happiness.
I left off my last writing saying that I had to find a power greater than myself to help me recover from the life I’d been living. I had tried to live life on my own self-will, using my own ideas and relying on no one but myself. But the truth was that I was scared. I didn’t trust anyone. I was so afraid that people would find out that I was scared, what others thought of me, that I was going to show them how smart I was. I was strong enough to do this on my own. So I sucked it up and went at it alone. But all I got was lonelier and angrier.
Sacrifice is a funny word, because it implies that I have to give up something, something that I liked and wanted, something I needed. In reality, I didn’t need those people, places, things and ideas: I wanted them. They either allowed me to continue in my addiction, or they were my addiction. And the truth is, when I did give up those people, places, things and ideas, I was able to stop the cycle and begin the recovery.
But recovery is a lonely place. I didn’t trust anyone, nor did I think anyone really understood me. I was that unique, of the nearly seven billion other human souls on this planet. I was so unique that no one could or would understand me. I was that special. But the truth was, Iwas scared. No one had ever shown me how to have faith. When you grow up with alcohol and anger, there is no room for faith.
I was lonely because I knew everything; no one could tell me anything. People get tired of trying to help you so they abandon you and carry on with their own lives. People have better things to do than take care of me. And because no one wanted to baby me, I resented them. That resentment was just another click in the insane cycle of addiction.
Though I’d quit drinking, I found other addictions. You can get addicted to anything – gambling, drugs, sex, food, control, rage, to name but a few. I knew what I was doing was wrong, and I’d feel guilt and shame. Actually, I’d swim in it. They gave me some sort of sick satisfaction. Then I would look back and regret what I’d done, which would lead to anger and self-loathing. And so to get relief from that toxic vomit of emotions, I would go back to using my addiction. It was jump in the river, wring, rinse, dry, jump in the river and repeat. It was insane.
When I’d finally had enough and wanted sobriety bad enough, I had to be willing to make changes in my thinking, because it was my thinking that got me started. It usually started with one of those great emotions I mentioned earlier – self-pity, anger, etc. And it started with giving up certain people, places, things and ideas. I had to make a sacrifice.
I had no idea what faith was. I thought I had it. I tried to convince myself I had it, but when fear is stronger than faith, then you don’t have it. And I didn’t. I had to start asking what faith meant. It started with learning how to have a conversation with another person. I had to put my trust in that person. I didn’t know how to do it, so I did it one little step at a time.
It started with me asking a guy to help me out. I’d met a guy who had overcome all the problems that I was going through. He was a problem drinker like me, he was a gambler like me, he was a control freak like me, he was scared like me. He was me in another body. But the difference was that he’d found another way to live. And it started with having faith.
Faith is a belief that everything is going to be all right. It starts with a belief, and I was not a believer. As a kid, I was told one thing but shown another. Even though we had a good life compared to a lot of other kids, we were still hurt. And hurt, no matter what colour or what flavour it comes in, is still hurt. When you are a child, hurt goes to the bone and stays with you.
My belief system was constructed as a child. When I was told one thing, then shown another, I did not know what to believe. My little brain became confused about what to believe. So I just quit believing. No matter what anyone said after that, I would not believe. I only believed what I wanted after that, which was that I had to do things on my own. That was the beginning of my self-will run riot. Because when you leave life-changing decisions to a child, then that child will fail, because he simply does not have the wisdom or foresight to make good choices.
What I needed to believe was that I was worth love, security and attention, things essential to a healthy selfesteem. For whatever reason, I was not given that as a child. As much as my parents tried, they simply could not give it to me. I’m not going to pretend or protect them, because that does no justice to anyone. But what they did give me were the tools to figure things out. And that’s what I am doing now, figuring things out.
Faith too is a funny thing, because all you need is just a little and then it grows from there like a seed. But I had to keep watering it, tending to it, cleaning it and paying attention to it, like a flower. How I did that was to create a relationship with this man who’d gone before me. I had to nurture our relationship. But instead of water, I had to use honesty. I had to be honest, for the first time in my life, with another human being. Up until that point, I had never been honest with others, let alone myself. I simply did not know how. I had damaged my spirit so badly that honesty was off the table, and it became a matter of survival.
When a kid does something wrong, he will automatically lie about it, but if he was raised right, he will eventually confess to it. But with me, when I told a lie, I believed it, and I hung onto it. Eventually, I became the lie. So when I met this man, my mentor, I had to start telling the truth. And the truth hurt.
All those years of doing things of my own free will had piled up into a logjam of resentment, anger, rage and loneliness. He showed me how to pull that pile apart, one log at a time. I would trust him, take one log out, then get scared and put that log back. I did that over and over and over, until one day, I saw the insanity of it. I was going nowhere. I was stuck. I was the biggest log in that pile. When I finally hurt enough to tell him that I was lying to him all along, then we were able to get the biggest log out of the way: me.
But I could not simply lean on this man for everything, because he is only human, and he has all the faults of any human. He told me, too. He said there are going to be some days when he won’t be around, or he might be going through his own problems and he won’t have any time for mine. So I had to find something I could depend on, 100 per cent, something that was going to be with me, at any time, through thick and thin, good and bad. And like I said before, I’d never relied on anyone but myself. And of myself, I was nothing. I had to find a higher power. I had to find God.
The only God I knew was the God of the Bible. And I’d made up my mind a long time ago that the God of the Bible was a hypocrite, because he’d never helped me out a day in my life. If he was so great and so powerful, where was he when I was in pain? Where was he when I was hanging onto my life by a thread, alone, scared and confused? The truth was, he was there the whole time, but I simply did not acknowledge him. I was using my childish notion that God was like a credit card, that he would give me anything I wanted, when I wanted it. But he didn’t, so I abandoned him.
I did not know that God was a power inside me. I did not know that I had the capacity to summon that power at any given time through prayer. I did not know that that power, that… God, could give me courage and strength to face anything in life. I did not know that God could teach me how to do the one thing I’d avoided my whole life, which was love. I did not love myself. And if I did not love myself, then obviously I could not love others.
The one thing I feared most in my life was this love. I felt so rotten inside that I simply did not believe that I was worthy of love. When in fact, love is the very essence of life. Love is the greatest motivator of life. Love drives people to do good. Love drives people to care for one another. Love is life. When you are afraid of love, then you have death. And that’s what I was, death in the flesh. I had to learn how to love myself. And that started with stopping killing myself with my addictions.
When I look at some of the happiest people in my life – my aunty Emma and nanung Sarah (God rest her soul) – they had one thing in common: they believed in God. They not only believed in God, but they did his work. Because to receive love, you have to give it away. And that’s what they did. They gave love, unconditionally, to anyone and everyone, no matter what. And what they received was love and adoration. The more they received, the more they gave it away. They were there for every celebration, every achievement and every tragedy. They were at every funeral they could go to. They were at every dance, every feast. They were love. I’m just using them as an example. I’m sure you have your own.
That’s what God is, that simple: love. It doesn’t have to be some off‐the‐wall, off-in-space kind of thing that youcan’t figure out. It’s that simple. But to me, I had to make it complicated, because “I was a complicated guy.” I was special. In fact, I was too scared to love. Actually, I had become too selfish to love. My addiction demanded every living breath in my body. I had no room for anyone else but me. Let me tell you a story about being special.
When you never feel like you are enough, that you just don’t measure up, then you start doing things to make up for it. There was this guy who used to walk around town, boasting about this and that, showing off his money, swinging his arms around for everyone to see, surrounding himself with weak people who depended on him and told him how good he was. When you didn’t pay attention to him, he got mad.
He was walking past this old man who was sitting on a bench smoking his pipe and enjoying his own company.
This guy walked past and the old man didn’t even flinch, which upset the guy, ‘cause he was so special, he expected everyone to notice him. So he turned aroundand pretended to leave something in his big truck, hoping that old man would notice him or his truck, but he didn’t. He got so mad that he walked a few steps past that old man, turned around and glared at him.
“How dare he not notice me,” he said in his mind. He stormed up to that old man and said, “Don’t you know who I am? Don’t you know how special I am?”
That old man just smiled and stoked his pipe with a matchstick. The guy was furious. So he started jumping up and down like a little kid yelling, “I’m special, I’m special.”There was a rosehip bush just beside the old man. He plucked a rosehip from the bush, ripped it open and took out a seed. The guy, his face flush with anger, sweat dripping from his forehead, watched in horror as this old man ignored him and took out this seed.
The old man turned to the guy and said, “Open your hand.”
The guy, who was breathing hard and shaking, opened his hand.
The old man put the seed in his hand and asked him, “Can you make another rosehip, on your own, of yourself? By just holding it in your hand?”
The guy became confused.
“What?” he asked, his bottom lip trembling now.
“Can you make this seed grow on your own?”
The guy threw down the seed and screamed at the top of his lungs.
The old man looked at him and said matter-of-factly, “But if I put it in a pile of dog crap… it would.”
The guy’s bottom lip hit the ground. He just got flat out punked.
“That’s how special you are.”
I think that the moral of this story is this: If you ever feel like a piece of crap, you’re probably not that good.
You see, even a piece of crap has more power than us. We blow ourselves up so much that we can’t even see the obvious, that we are just one little speck in this universe, and the world does not revolve around us. We are not God.
I wish you peace and happiness – and maybe a little dog crap – to keep you down to size.
Inuvialuit people survived
Strong will and mind.
Homes and hearts
Warmer than cold winters.
Faces of fearlessness
Smiles full with thankfulness.
As we Inuvialuit survive
With our strong will and mind.
– A poem by Alisa Nogasak
