We’re excited to introduce you to the always interesting and insightful Lucas Cammack. We hope you’ll enjoy our conversation with lucas below.

Lucas, thanks for joining us, excited to have you contributing your stories and insights. Often the greatest growth and the biggest wins come right after a defeat. ther times the failure serves as a lesson that’s helpful later in your journey. We’d appreciate if you could open up about a time you’ve failed.

Enough

If Europe had been bad, Texas was worse.
We had run away from Arizona to Detroit to Krakow and Budapest. In each new place we replicated the same, familiar pattern, albeit with increasing ferocity each incarnation, until finally we crumbled and landed in Houston, Texas. We slogged through Houston’s armpit days and doldrum nights, negotiating short deals and long rests on borrowed sofas, in between day labor and shady jobs, all of it in any and every attempt to hang on to a dream that wasn’t ever really ours to begin with. The dream, in the end, belonged to the bags of black tar and the vials of fine, white powder, to the strykawka’s of compote and Ziplock baggies of pills and bills and weed.
Our artistic endeavors lay smothered beneath the weight of our addiction, the cost of the fix, all of our “near misses”, the actual overdoses, our dead “friends” and the increasingly frequent trips to the hospital.
She occasionally made fleeting stabs at a canvas or sheet of plywood with her crusty old oil paints on the nights we got really high, inevitably abandoning these attempts to the corners of rooms to collect dust and the carcasses of moths. I put pen to paper about as often. All but one of my guitars had long since been pawned. The alarm was ringing, it was time to wake up.
We schemed our way out, defaulting at first to our usual, self-managed rehabilitation with the degree of success one could expect. We had tried to go clean a hundred times over the years without any lasting change, so after another failed round of kicking, we settled on doing something more legit.
Formal, organized treatment.
Outpatient replacement therapy.
Medication.
Methadone.
Legal dope.
We did the research and called a couple of clinics and asked around.
The most accessible route seemed to be the state-run clinic, so we dropped in and signed up to their regimen, a program which proved to be profoundly sketchy and equally ineffective. Our doses ended up being just enough to keep us only marginally dope sick, a poor deterrent in quashing our desire for black market opiates. The facility, which we visited every single day to procure our medicine, was populated by throngs of jonesing junkies and easy connections. The scene was a mine field. If methadone treatment was our plan, we needed a different context.
Word of mouth led us to a clinical trial, run by the University of Houston. The program hoped to enhance the efficacy of methadone replacement therapy through maximum doses and free, rudimentary substance abuse counselling.
We abandoned the state clinic and submitted ourselves to the trial.
The higher dosage and the counseling steered us onto a less rocky road almost straight away, but looking back, these things alone weren’t what got us all the way through. There was something more to the way things played out. The program’s counselors called it divinity. NA and AA called it a higher power. My old religion of fortune said it was something else.
Luck.
We were damned lucky, in so many ways, ways I see more the longer I have a chance to examine. It’s bananas that a lifetime of stacked decks and long odds hadn’t landed either of us in a grave or a prison, and the grand bet, main event, opiate crash, was just getting underway.
Where we started from was impossible, like so many things that had come before, maybe even more so. There were a thousand ways we should have failed, much less any way we should have made it, and yet we did.
We didn’t die.
We didn’t get locked up.
We didn’t fail.
I’m sitting here, in my office, in our house on the hill with my children and fiancé, over twenty years on from taking the leap. Getting from there to here is bonkers.
We were blessed.
We were protected.
We were found.
We were saved.
We were lucky. A million to two, against the odds, jackpot, lottery style lucky.

The program we found through the university was smart.
As opposed to the state-run scheme, which provided just enough methadone to keep us from getting incomprehensibly sick, the clinical trial prescribed our daily dose based on our body weight. Not on how long or how much we had been using. Not how little we could eek by on, not on age or want; just straight up pounds and ounces, fed into a calculator to produce a quantity of milligrams. They didn’t even ask anything other than whether or not we were addicts and if we could step onto the scale. For their purposes, the rest of it didn’t matter. They had a thesis; we were perfect, needy little guinea pigs.
At the time I weighed just south of 155 pounds. Based on this, instead of the paltry 20 milligrams of methadone I had been given each day at the sad little window in the lobby of the state-run clinic, the study prescribed me 85 milligrams a day. They set her dose at 65. On top of this they gave us 30 milligram pills of dextroamphetamine, doled out by the sleeve, designed to hold the wolf of cocaine at bay. Instead of daily visits, our scrips were to be picked up in multiple vials twice a week from the university lab. All told, every week we were collectively given over a thousand mils of methadone and a few hundred of dextroamphetamine.
Courtesy of the program, we were going to be incredibly well stocked and on a trajectory to get as high as Saturn. This was the crux of the study; to get us subjects so inebriated that there was no need or desire or even possibility to augment our state further via illicit avenues.
It totally worked.
From day one, our doses had us flying.
We stopped buying instantly, and our meager revenue stream ceased to disappear into the chasm of the fix.
We drifted away from the dealers and other junkies.
Within a month we were able to rent a house in the Montrose and were given a beater old ‘65 Ford Falcon by my sister in Arkansas. We garnered enough clothes to manage the harrowing 2 months of Houston winter, and even bought a few groceries. House, car, clothes, food. Check, check, check, check. We were becoming normal-ish.
The weeks carried on, we picked up our meds and listened to our counselors. She found steady work, I bounced from dead end job to dead end job. We procured a couch from a thrift store and surrendered our inflatable mattress for a janky old queen-size. She even bought her own little car to navigate the increasing complexity of our separate endeavors. We settled into our new version of supreme inebriation whilst building something stable, and then leaned towards the premise of the whole clinical trial.
Recovery.
Detox.
Sobriety perhaps.
As fun as dex and methadone were, the program was set up to first get us settled and then to get us clean. This premise was written into the very conditions of the trial itself. Our participation was not to be indefinite. It was our choice as to exactly when, but starting somewhere between 6 and 12 months of our inception, they would gradually reduce our dose in five milligram increments until we were clean. The unspoken options from there were either to stay clean, get hooked again, or return to the state sponsored methadone program.
We discussed the process with our counsellors and each other.
She was motivated and eventually decided to start her descent as soon as she could. Right at the six months mark she began to reduce from her prescribed 65 mils down to 60, 55, 50. She progressed with aplomb, driven by her new potential. During the short time we had been in the study, she had built the scaffold of a new life, one outside of heroin and us, with new friends and secret lovers. She was eager to exorcise the shadows of our old world and was ready to move on.
I wasn’t so much.
I was lost and scared. I buried my head in the meds and avoided feeling by staying incessantly busy scrubbing doorknobs and organizing pens and doing graffiti on the Ford Falcon.
She grew.
I retreated, eclipsed by her success. If I could have felt anything it might have been jealousy, but I leaned into the haze of my inebriation and its mundane occupations and stayed mostly numb.
At the 8-month mark she was finished with the study. She was clean, if not sober, and had started attending classes at a local yoga studio. She was enraptured with her practice and had begun to save money for her tuition to become a yoga teacher. She was on her way up, a shining, brilliant, statistical anomaly. She was one of the lucky ones, and I, more than anyone, knew that there were limits to the bounds of luck, and that the likelihood that both of us would be so fortunate were slim to none.
It all scared me to death, so I stayed high and wrapped myself up in the vials of pink liquid and tablets of speed, it was the only coping mechanism I had ever known.
8 months became 9.
I acquired and lost jobs, I polished the toilet to a high sheen. I folded the laundry impeccably, I stayed insane. Ten months in, she began packing to leave for her trip to Los Angeles to study this new yoga thing. Her looming departure ate at me even more. Somewhere in the back of my head I knew she wasn’t coming back, not to me at least. Even through the medicinal clouds I could tell that there was nothing worth coming back to. I had become an empty shell of a man, doddling away at our measly collection of thrift store plates and hand-me-down knick-knacks. She was leaving to something, running from nothing. I couldn’t blame her.
As she prepped for her upcoming trip, she pleaded with me to come with her to yoga. My tattered machismo told me that yoga was too girly. I feigned confidence and ironed our socks. I didn’t need some hippy sh*t, I was punk and rock, so much so that I bought us a doily.
She continued to ask me to join her every day.
Finally, after a few weeks I agreed. It was almost eleven months into the trial when I did. The writing was on the wall. I was looking at my detox in a few weeks’ time, and, at the rate I was going, most likely a return to the state-sponsored, probably-lifelong-route on the other side of it. Despite my excuses, I finally concluded that I had nothing to lose by trying a class.
I was right. I didn’t have anything left to lose. I was out of time, chances and even people, so I took up the offer to give it a go.
It was 8 am, on a clear, spring morning, just a couple of days before she was to leave for California. We loaded up in her little hatchback and drove from our house to the yoga studio, located on a small back street in the Rice University village.
We parked outside the homely looking, antiquated, concrete block building with an awning over a single glass door. We walked in, and she introduced me to this odd little world of strangers. My initial hesitance felt immediately confirmed. Everyone was older, affluent, square.
She was warmly welcomed, I was jealous, despite the fact that the community she had become part of was not-cool or hip or even remotely close to our age group. She was part of something. There was respect and love and joy, and none of it had anything to do with me. I almost walked out on that premise alone. It hurt. She was doing so well, even better than I had suspected. I was still so f*cked up, and, on top of that, yoga was for pussies and burnouts, not for a rock star like me.
I was handed over to someone so I could register for the class, she went to speak to some friends. I considered how to escape again, but my manners kicked in. I had already said hi to these people and agreed to join class for the day, and plus, she had the car keys.
After pleasantries and logistics, I was ushered to the bathroom where I abandoned my jeans and donned my yoga kit for the morning, the only semi-suitable gear I owned; a pair of basketball shorts, which, after years of opiates, almost fell off my 6 foot 2, 155-pound frame.
I left the loo and found a spot in the back of the room, behind a gaggle of old ladies. I watched the machinations of the little community, hoping that I was invisible, but certain that I was not.
Everyone had someone to talk to before the class began, I stood alone, still ready to bolt should a plausible opportunity present itself. I kept my evacuation route close. The glass door was right behind me, with the Texas, morning sun beaming through, adding to the increasing temperature of the room.
I listened to the banter and judged the banterers, and watched cars arrive and park outside. As new folks entered, I contemplated sneaking out in just my baggy shorts to navigate the thoroughfares home in my bare feet. My tentative plan, and the hilarious, outrageous story that it would most definitely become, felt more congruent with my self-image than staying to do yoga with this odd mish-mash of people.
I looked for an opening to carry out my escape, but then she came back, bringing me a towel and yoga mat and bottle of water.
Sh*t. I had real estate, equipment, and a beverage. I was trapped. She wished me luck and told me to go easy.
I had no such intentions.
If I had been roped into what I was certain was going to be a lame, hippy-dippy class, I was going to kill it.
The room filled, the temperature increased and 9:00 approached. People took their places and quieted down as the teacher, Mike, whom I had met briefly on the way in, started his instructions. He was an older gent, with a real, honest to goodness, rural, Texas accent, that he applied liberally to instruct the class. Given his diction, it was actually pretty “hat-danged” entertaining.
After a bit of southern fried, general info, we did a stupid breathing exercise.
I rolled my eyes. The class was aiming to be all I had assumed.
Lame, easy, woo-woo nonsense.
Still, I gave it my all, I was determined to win. I was going to breath the sh*t out of that breathing exercise and show all these oldies and housewives how a real man breathes. Then, somewhere into the second set of “pranayama deep breathing” my ears started to ring and my arms began screaming. As we progressed, I was barely able to perform the simple movements that the old women in front of me seemed to do with ease.
I was angry and wanted to quit. My absurd, naked-in-public escape plan cropped up, but a stew of stubbornness and shame overrode the instinct to flee.
I was not going to be outdone by grandmas and soccer moms, which was 100% true. I wasn’t going to be outdone by them.
I was going to be outdone by me.
We finished the breathing (phew), and I slammed myself into the next exercise, still gauging my obvious excess of natural talent against the practitioners around me, despite my growing dizziness and my face pouring as much sweat as I had cumulatively excreted in the previous five years.
Then came the sensation, all too familiar to a lifelong partier: a salivating queasiness, followed by the beginnings of a wretch coming from deep down in my gut. The sweat on my body began to feel cold, my face went numb. My ears rang louder, my head began to spin, all of the signs were there.
I was going to barf.
I tried to suppress, even to the point of easing up on the pose we were doing, some half-moon nonsense, but the reflex was inevitable. I became certain it was unavoidable and made for the exit. I threw open the door and made it three steps before crashing to the ground in a heap next to one of the luxury cars that occupied the lot. I emptied the contents of my stomach, splattering the expensive rims of the vehicle I had landed adjacent.
At first, I was relieved. I took a few breaths, the nausea evaporated, but then anger emerged in its place.
I was sure I had been pranked, set up to fail. She wanted to slam me before hitting the road, it had been the plan all along and I was embarrassed and ashamed and pissed off. I was out, I was leaving, that is as soon as my legs worked again.
But my legs weren’t ready, nor was any other part of me. I was finished throwing up, but I was far from ok. My head still wobbled and my ears shrieked and my heart pounded like a jackhammer in my chest.
I spotted a garden hose wrapped in a tidy coil by the door.
I crawled to the spigot and turned on the water and proceeded to lay in a slice of sun and drink with my head propped up on a concrete parking block. That hose water was the best damned thing I had ever tasted, 30-year scotch be damned. I gulped and gulped until my body settled down and then I turned off the tap and laid still and felt the breeze on my skin and the sunlight on my chest. I watched the sky and the trees and immensely enjoyed being right where I was at. It was a level of euphoria I hadn’t experienced since my first, fateful shot of dope in the arm on her couch so many years before.
I stayed there for a very long time and rode the waves of goodness as they slowly replaced my suspicion that I had been bamboozled. I thought that maybe, perhaps, possibly this whole yoga thing, that left me floored 15 minutes in, wasn’t exclusively for pussies. Sure, sure, it wasn’t for me, but I could give it a splinter of respect at least, and I did like how I felt, lying there on the concrete.
After a few more minutes of bliss, I gathered my senses and remembered the puddle of vomit I had just produced, and I managed to hose down the car and the pavement and wash the remnants away.
The class wrapped up and, as people began to leave, I returned to the room to get my things and say thanks before I left, never to return. I still felt good, but I was embarrassed. I didn’t think I could deal with being as bad at something as I clearly was at yoga. If they asked me back, I would respectfully decline. There had to be something else out there that would keep me out of the state funded clinic. Maybe Karate. Maybe Tai-chi.
I made my way through the thick, humid air and retrieved my things. She was talking to the teacher, Mike. I approached and they both smiled. I felt a wave of shame and made an attempt to explain, I had eaten too recently (the day before), I didn’t drink enough water (I totally had), normally I would be fine, but thanks for the class anyhow.
Mike stopped me and said simply, “It’s ok son, you did alright, better’n I did my first class. I’d love it if you came back and tried again.”
I didn’t know what to say.
I didn’t want to disagree, but I was fairly certain I had not done alright. It was nice to be welcomed back, even after spewing my guts out in the parking lot. I said thanks again but declined, playing the ace up my sleeve, my sure-fire, iron-clad avoidance tool that no one could repute: I was broke and out of work and couldn’t afford the fee for the classes. Then, without knowing anything about me except that I knew her, Mike dispelled my excuses and proceeded to offer me a job.
“Nothin’ much, just cleanin’ the bathroom and mirrors and such, but it’ll pay for yoga and get some change in your pocket,” he said. “The only catch is, you have to come work every day, Monday to Friday, and you have to practice.”
I was fresh out of excuses and taken aback by the hospitality. I stammered and then the word “yes” fell out of my mouth and before I knew it, I was given a set of keys with the instruction to come back the next day so we could cover the particulars after the nine am class, the same I had just partially attended.
Trust was something I hadn’t felt in a long time. It sat awkwardly in my pocket with the keys as we left.
We drove home and spoke in the car on the way, she told me that what had happened to me happened to a lot of folks and that she was glad I had taken Mike up on his offer.
At home I told her about what I had felt after class, and we carried on talking the rest of the day about life and hopes and dreams and plans and it was the best day we’d had in months. We discussed my dose reduction in a few weeks, and she said I needed to be strong, that it was hard but that I needed to keep going to yoga and to stay close to Mike because he would help. She gave me a hug, the first in a while. Then we kissed and made love for the last time we ever would, and then slept deep and long.
We woke the next day and drove to the yoga school. I read the sign on the door as we walked in: Yoga College of India. I didn’t know a thing about yoga or India. My usual, reflexive, dismissals returned: yoga is lame, these people are lame, they don’t even like rock and roll. It’s all oldies and moms and what could I possibly have had in common with any of them?
None the less, I re-rationalized myself into staying, mostly because things had been better between her and I. I felt that I could endure the lame people and silly yoga thing if it kept us close, and also I needed the job, so I guess it worked out. Either way, I was still convinced it would be short term, and as soon as I could, I would shift on to something manlier, something cool. Kung fu, carpentry, Krav Maga.
At 9:00 the class began as before. Breathing, followed by half-moon. This time I paced myself and made it 20 minutes before evacuating to the parking lot to throw up again.
The same scene played out: vomit, hosepipe, drink up, clean up, lay still, enjoy the clouds, the perfect, white, puffy clouds, the sun, the breeze, the feeling of goodness and even some joy.
I stayed and waited and after class I met with Mike. He showed me where the cleaning supplies lived. I was given a list of to-dos and to-don’ts and then left with the place all to myself. It was odd, almost absurd to me. I was certain I was being filmed. Me, a junkie, left to my own devices in a space not my own. What was Mike thinking? There might have been a drawer full of cash, there was certainly a statue of an elephant that would have been worth something. There were some paintings, a bin full of clothes, a fridge full of drinks.
A few months before, things might have been different, but instead of pissing in the corner and stealing the elephant statue and leaving, I stayed and cleaned and I made the place shine. It felt good. I had done something right for the first time in as long as I could remember.
I called her when I was finished, she came and picked me up and we ate lunch at Whole Foods and talked about yoga over expensive salad and mediocre pizza, just like two normal people. We laughed and she shared some of her insights, and even though I was sure I’d be moving on to Jui-jitsu and lumberjacking, I was all too happy to soak up the time with her before she left.
We drove home and did chores, she finished packing and we spoke more before bed. She told me to use her car while she was away, as the graffitied Falcon had mostly died the week prior. She said she had paid the rent for the two months she was gone, that she wanted to make sure I had somewhere ok to live so I’d have a decent chance at starting over. All I needed to pay for was food and electricity and gasoline, things I could muster with the small paycheck I would get from the yoga school. It was the second profound act of kindness in as many days, and I was grateful and scared and hopeful all at once. We kissed and embraced, and I thought we would make love again but then she began to cry, like someone had died, which, I guess we both had in a way. I held her until we fell sleep. The next day she woke before sunrise and said goodbye. She carried her little paisley suitcase out to the street where her yoga friend picked her up and they drove away to California.
And then it was just me.
Me in the empty apartment, save for the stray cat that mostly disappeared after she left anyhow.
Me, by myself, on the long nights of scrubbing silverware with no one to show the glimmer and shine.
Me on my way in the mornings to the yoga school that I always despised on my way towards and always felt grateful for on my way home.
I made just enough money to buy Ramen and peanut butter and bread and to keep gas in the car and the lights on at home.
It took me a full two weeks of attending class every day to make it to the end of one. It would be years before I found any sort of proficiency within the confines of that completion. Yoga, it turned out, was not for pussies. It was hard as hell. Even on the opiates, the class hurt. It burned and screamed and it shone light into the dark corners of my mind, something I hadn’t anticipated a silly, heated stretching class could do.
Through the following weeks of practice, I found a new strength forging behind the veil of painkillers, and a growth that dissipated the pain. I got better at the class and at being me.
I learned names.
I made friends.
Though no one invited me to dinner or drinks, I had a good few coffees out with other practitioners. We’d talk mostly about yoga and places we’d been to or would like to go to one day. The conversations rarely delved into what I had been before coming to the school. These new, odd people seemed to only see where I was in the moment, as if my slate had been wiped clean.
I leaned into the practice and learned as much as I could. I was loaned books and I borrowed tattered copies of “yoga journal” magazine. At night I would clean the house and read and eat sh*tty food. I started to practice on my own in the afternoons and on weekends, including one Saturday I spent in jail for a forgotten traffic ticket. I did my yoga right in the Houston central holding cell in front of fifty other crims and cons and ended up teaching an extremely fat, black man the opening sequence from the class to the proclamation that, “yoga’s better than the chronic.” He was onto something, it was. I was feeling pretty damned good.
Spring leaned towards summer; Houston returned to being the armpit that it is for about 8 months of the year.
My D-day loomed, the beginning of my detox, but I felt less and less scared with every class, every breath.
And then it began, my termination spiral, the reduction of the meds that I had been on for a year.
85 milligrams was dropped to 80 for three days, then 80 dropped to 75. I barely noticed a thing.
I practiced, I cleaned, 70 milligrams was a breeze. Then downwards to 65 mils; my first two weeks were done without too much drama. I felt a little stiff, a little sad sometimes, but the class each day eased all of that and I carried on, blissfully, even forgetting at times that things were going to carry on down.
When I got into the 40s things started to hurt, akin to a normal junkie’s lull in heroin. Nausea, aches, insomnia, depression. I dealt with it well, I had become almost used to these things over the years.
Things decayed from there.
40 to 35 was like being sick on psychedelics, 35 to 30, like the flu with a vengeance. Cold sweats, bad dreams, restlessness, aching teeth, and over it all a looming sense that the clouds of sobriety were about to burst overhead, drenching me in something awful.
I was barely well enough to drive to the school, but I kept at it. After practicing I’d feel better for most of the day. Nights on the other hand were hellish. The lake of shame and loss I had kept at bay for so long behind a dam of opiates flooded into the corners of my mind. Guilt and sorrow, embarrassment, fear. I was drowning and the world seemed incomprehensible from under the waves.
I held on for dear life to my daily routine: Leave the house by eight, get to class. Clean, take your time, do it well. Mike relied on me doing my job. So did I. My routine and meager responsibilities were the only thing I had left as 30 milligrams dropped to 25 and 25 dropped to 20.
By then, it took every bit of my will and resolve to get through each day. Somewhere between the pain and fear I found the wherewithal to get dressed and drive and practice and clean, but the process, that had previously taken just a couple of hours, had begun to stretch out. Instead of cleaning from eleven to one after the nine am class, I was barely finishing in time for the afternoon influx of students at three-thirty.
I couldn’t eat, my skin felt too small, my bones felt too big, and my sleep disappeared completely. I sweated and froze and itched and writhed.
I looked at the calendar that the study had printed outlining my detox. There were still almost two weeks left. It seemed like it was just drawing the pain out, so I made the decision. On a normal, terrible Tuesday, in late spring 2001, I decided that I was going to jump off the cliff of my detox and just stop.
It was early in the morning when I came to my conclusion, I hadn’t slept much in days. I had two days’ dose left, and I guzzled them both, a 40mg salve to preface the fall. The move might have been stupid, if only because it showed me how much relief getting high proved to be. As my last dose crawled into my tissues and took hold, I felt all of the pain and sorrow lift. I took advantage of the levity to come up with a plan. I was scared and didn’t want to detox. I considered signing up to the state program again, but recalled how low the dose was, almost ensuring some involvement in the illicit scene. I didn’t feel I could go back to all that, strangely, because it didn’t fit in with my yoga. I considered begging the clinical trial for a delay, but then dragging things out even more sounded worse than the trajectory I had in front of me. It seemed like the path I was on was set.
At eight I got in the car and drove to my usual class, feeling decent with the larger dose in my veins. I had a good practice and did the cleaning in record time, and then I left to hit the grocery store for provisions. I stocked up on water and Gatorade and beer. I bought aspirin and Tylenol and chips and then went home to have the only decent sleep I’d had in some weeks or would for days to come.
As I slumbered, I dreamt of my childhood in Denver and Tucson.
The dreams were sepia, tattered feeling; the events were basically the same as I had lived them, but with even the nice memories tinged by sadness. The Christmas joy and bike riding memories felt distant. I had drifted so far from the child I saw in the dreams; the aspiring musician, the artist, the athlete, the Jedi knight. It felt impossible to reconnect with the person who had been those things.
I awoke in the early hours, dry mouthed and wet faced, to empty methadone bottles and a half sleeve of dextroamphetamine. I feverishly scoured the house to make sure I hadn’t misplaced a stash and came up empty handed.
There was nothing left.
Pain ebbed in with the grey of the sun, and despite the warming air I felt cold.
The prospect of withdrawal scared the sh*t out of me. I considered jumping off of a bridge or driving the car into a wall at top speed. I thought about stealing some money or selling something and copping a bag or finding a new junkie girl to hitch my wagon to, but, despite the immediate relief this all would have presented, it all sounded horrible, like more of a pain than it would have been worth.
For lack of being able to think of anything better, I stuck to the plan. I said it out loud, I made it a chant.
Stay clean.
At 8:00 drive to class, practice.
Clean the studio, come home.
Stay clean.
I dragged myself out of bed and made myself get ready and I headed to the school. As I drove, I descended deeper into the abrupt detox I had chosen for myself, almost falling asleep at the wheel, even in the face of the layers of pain that leaked into every tissue, organ, bone and joint in my body. My cognitive ability was 10% at best, navigating rush hour traffic in the Rice University village was well out of my reach. I cut people off, I got hooted at, folks yelled. I prayed that no one would actually road rage on me as there was no way I could contend with a conversation, much less a fight.
I wound through the back roads whenever I could and made the studio lot at a quarter to nine. I parked and shuddered and considered walking in and just quitting.
I thought about how the conversation would go, entailing both complexity and conflict that were well out of my grasp.
I was stuck.
Being a junkie and dealing with periodic withdrawal had been hard.
Being a methadone addict detoxing was orders of magnitude worse, but the idea of giving up and running away sounded inconceivable. Suffering the consequences of my life ended up being the easiest thing for me to do, so I got out of the car and walked the forty feet to the door and went in. I set up my mat in the back of the room, right on my old spot near the door, just in case I needed to evacuate and re-live my hurling days from when I had started.
I waited, the room filled, class began.
The sounds in the room hit like a cheese grater on my rapidly fraying nerves. The heat reached inside my body to my muscles and bones, and my skin felt like I was sweating acid, which I may have been. I kept on.
I made it through the breathing exercise, though each repition took me another rung down the ladder, further into the pit of my suffering. I got past a couple of poses, but by the 30-minute mark of 90, I couldn’t go on.
I stood and wavered and tried to face it as best as I could.
The world became pain, sadness, emptiness, disappointment, shame, despair. Memories flooded in and disappeared, every mistake and embarrassment I had ever made echoed in between my ears through abrasive clouds of regret that whirled into vortexes, sucking away every ounce of energy I had. My family and long-lost friends sneered, my childhood and teens ground at my soul. But the worst part wasn’t what had been in the past, it was where I found myself in that very moment. My girl was gone, my bands were gone, my art was defunct, my family was far. I had become a half-assed janitor, and the one little thing that I had been starting to be able to do, a stupid yoga class, was slipping away from me too. I was nothing. I was sh*t. I was worse than sh*t and I crumbled into a ball face down on the towel and I cried.
I was finished.
I wanted to leave, but I couldn’t move. Heck, I could barely breathe. I was failing and knew I was well on my way to failing some more. I was still supposed to clean after class, but I couldn’t conceive of being able to stand or walk, much less clean, wipe, or vacuum. Even the sad little responsibility I had been given felt insurmountable.
I cried, as silently as I could, and sweated and stayed still except to make myself smaller, thinking that at least I might take up as little space as possible. It was the least I could do, to become less sh*t.
The class wound on and then down, and the music played, and the students left.
I stayed in my fetal, fecal pose and lamented my failings and then heard someone come into the yoga room.
They propped the door open.
The breeze was a dream, a pleasure I felt unworthy of having. I heard the person move about the room, and eventually open the closet and move things around. I managed to peek. It was Mike, the studio owner, who had just run the class, the one I had failed at. He was gathering supplies to do the mirrors, a bucket, a squeegee, some cloths.
He began cleaning the handprints and sweat stains off the walls of glass, cementing my failure as he did.
I couldn’t even muster an apology.
Mike was fulfilling my only responsibility in the world. I was sure that he’d wrap it up and then ask me for the keys before he threw me out like the garbage I was.
I listened as he progressed, across the front and down the side of the room and I waited in dread for his verbal proclamation of my worthlessness.
He completed cleaning the mirrors and returned the things to the closet.
His footsteps approached, the soft pads of his feet on carpet became deafening, like the sound of a wolf closing in that I was too beaten to run from or fight.
He stopped next to me and knelt down to deliver the blow, and then he laid a hand on my shoulder.
“See you tomorrow, son,” was all he said.
Then came the sound of steps moving away, the door closed behind.
I couldn’t wrap my head around what had just happened.
How had I not been fired? I couldn’t practice or work, I had no worth.
But then I felt something I never had before, something subtle, yet grand, and it’s stuck with me since, and it’s this:
It isn’t what I do or don’t do that gives me worth in this world.
Potential doesn’t even add up, I have meaning even without that.
I breathe, my heart beats.
I think.
I feel.
I am here.
I am Luke, and I am enough.
Without saying as much, Mike showed me these things.
He showed, not told, and it’s the only way I ever could have learned what I did.
I felt it, I cried it, I stayed still on the mat and let what I’d learned percolate through.
After an hour or two I leaned on this thing, this little blip of a blip of light, and I used it to get up and walk to the door and lock up and drive home to shower and shake and vomit and weep until the next day came, a day that I would know, at the very least, that even if I struggled and fought and ultimately failed, that it would alright because I was enough.

What’s the most rewarding aspect of being a creative in your experience?

In solo endeavors, the process is the point. I love making, to a fault. Songs, visual works, furniture, houses, gardens, stories. It’s all a window into the way I work, and in that maybe a glimpse of a shred of how things work.

Collective work is always, always about the connection. Problem solving and delving into the creative process with others has the prerequisite of clear connection and the profound self work that is required by all parties in sustaining that clarity.

Contact Info:

• Website: https://www.patreon.com/c/lucasmilescammack
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Image Credits

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