Morgan shares how recovery changed his life, his family and ultimately impacted his whole community.
I’m a person in long term recovery and what that means to me is that I no longer need drugs and alcohol to live my life. Addiction for me is a long story that goes back even before I was born. I think of my story as a spiritual infection of the bloodline. That’s how I sum it up and I hope through sharing that’ll make more sense.
I live in the Valley of the Yellow Medicine here in Minnesota, which could also be translated to the Minnesota River Valley. I’m a member of the Upper Sioux Community Reservation. I was born in Greenville, South Carolina. My parents met on the beach in Florida, kind of on a vacation in the late 70s, early 80s. On a little island off the coast of Florida. I had a really great childhood there. It’s a great community, very culturally diverse. I had no idea of the concept of racism at that time. There was a lot of partying, but it was like an upbeat party beach life. It wasn’t full of dysfunction. There would be these occasional bouts of adults fighting and stuff, but it seemed pretty normal at the time.
About first grade, some stuff had happened and we ended up having to leave the state. We moved to Minnesota and this was my first experience living on the reservation. That was my first experience with being put into a box based on my cultural identity. I was now a poor kid from the rez. That was kind of hard for me to take coming from such a culturally diverse community. At that time, the drinking and the partying that was going on with my parents took on a different tone. It was no longer the fun beach life of partying. It was just day to day alcoholism and addiction.
At the age of 13, I had my first experience with a death from addiction. My beloved uncle, who was like my big brother, passed away from an overdose. At that point, the partying in my family changed overnight. I know now that what happened was our family turned to that coping skill of drugs and alcohol to medicate the pain of losing our loved one. At that time, ironically, my dad had sobered up for a few years. As a young teenager, I was starting to butt heads with my mom. With my dad having found some sobriety, my mom sent me to live with him in South Carolina. It was a very good time there. I got into a band, had a girlfriend and a great network of friends and was really enjoying life. I was finding my place in that community. Things were going great. My dad was sober and I had a stable household. Then my dad started drinking again and I knew I was in trouble. I left that great community I was a part of abruptly and ended up back on the reservation in Minnesota. It was a real blow to everything I had come to love in South Carolina. I just felt like I’d lost everything. This was the point that I became aware that my whole life kept getting disrupted because of my father’s addiction problems.
By 17, I’d become horribly addicted too. Methamphetamine and oxycontin. Two months before my 18th birthday, I checked myself into treatment for the first time. It lasted a week and I found some things I didn’t like about it and made a big scene. Then I stormed out. I was well intoxicated by the time I got home from treatment. There just wasn’t really any support for recovery at that time. There was no knowledge.
By this point I was just trying to find some way to find normalcy in my life. I met a woman who had a three month old baby and I fell in love with this baby. And I think partially looking back, it was because I knew I had to be accountable when this baby was around. I had to keep myself together. I couldn’t be a mess. It was the first time I had something to hold me to a higher standard of life as an adult. So I just tried to manage my own addiction and that kind of worked for a little while. I was playing dad by day and addiction criminal by night. It wasn’t too long before all the cops in town knew my name.
After my dad moved back here, he died of cirrhosis. About six months after that, my grandmother passed away. It broke my heart into a thousand pieces because she had been helping me hold it together. She was a great role model in my life and at that point we had become really close. The next morning after she passed away, I woke up and my mother was in my bedroom. And she says, “I need to tell you something.” She told me that my first cousin had passed away that night of a heroin overdose. My first cousin was like my brother. We grew up together. We grew up competing for the same girls, always trying to one up each other, you know, and we just had this real brotherly relationship. I was an only child. He was kind of the closest thing I had to a brother at the same age. We really loved each other. So in losing my grandma and then my cousin all within 24 hours and six months after my dad, my world was completely shattered. What I knew was medicating emotional and physical pain. But the substances weren’t strong enough anymore. I mean, I was literally almost putting myself into a coma on a daily basis at that time. I was just trying to escape this pain that I was feeling.
Finally, the woman I was with threatened to take the kids and leave me the house and the bills. I knew I had no hope of managing my bills, my addiction, and a household. I just knew at that point… It was time to get real about what was going to happen. I was so miserable, to be honest. I would pray on a pretty regular basis not to wake up the next day. I think I must have known it was time to get busy living or get busy dying. I just couldn’t sit in that place anymore. Then I thought “You know what, let me go to treatment. I’m going to straighten myself out and just give me a shot to pull it together.”
I went to a native based treatment center. This man came up to me when I first got there. He had two really long braids and really dark skin and shells in his ears. He said, “Hey, Morgan” and then he started naming my relatives. That man started working with me and really helped me reflect on who I was as a person. I’ll never forget once when he had given me homework to do. The question was: “How do you feel about your lying?” I was supposed to have it in this book but I didn’t have it. I had done it on a separate piece of paper. So I was sitting there with my book, holding it up, acting like I had all my answers done. This was a common theme that followed me through school.
He said, “Morgan, what’d you write for that answer about how do you feel about your lying?” I held my book up. “Well, I wrote that I’m really embarrassed at how good I am at lying.” And he said, “Oh, good answer, good answer. Hey, let me see your book there once.” And I pulled back, I said, “No, no. It’s, it’s okay. I got the answers written down.” He says, “Why? Let me see your book.” And he grabbed my book and he saw there were no answers in there.
“Oh, man, you are a good liar.” The whole group laughed.
And he said, “So let me ask you, Morgan, are you a liar?”
I said, “No, I’m not a liar.”
“So you just lied to me?”
“Well, I didn’t lie. I had it on another sheet of paper.” Everyone laughed.
“Morgan, are you a liar?” The whole group’s now waiting intensely for my answer. I kind of understood they wanted me to say yes.
“Okay, I’m a liar.” And the whole group clapped.
I remember this was a defining moment for me. I realized I had to start being open. I had to start being honest. My Mentor told me “Congratulations. Admitting you were a liar is the first step to being an honest person.” I worked with that guy throughout my time in treatment, and it really changed my life. He was a spiritual leader for the nation, and that was my first experience with a cultural man who was a mentor in a good way.
Treatment changed my life. It changed the way I thought about things and the way I looked at things. But something you might hear me say, if you know me, is that recovery occurs in the context of community. When I came home, that’s when the real challenge started. I knew nobody that was sober. Everybody in my life was in active addiction in some way, shape or form. And I felt like I was on an island. It was just a day to day struggle of how do I stay sober. I was still trying to hang out with the old homies and they were supportive to a point. Then they would get a phone call and tell me “Hey, I gotta run somewhere.” I knew what was going on and I knew all you had to do was say “You know what, I’m gonna come with you.” I ended up getting so racked with tension and anxiety, I thought I was gonna have a breakdown.
I remember feeling like I didn’t know what to do. And I wanted to stay sober, but I didn’t know how to do this, how to maintain it. Then someone said, “Why don’t you go check out an Alcoholics Anonymous meeting?” I was very close minded to AA. I honestly kind of thought AA was a cult. But every time my dad had sobered up, he went to AA. I knew it helped him, so I thought, “What the heck. I’ll give it a shot. I have nothing to lose at this point.” I went to that first AA meeting and I remember coming out of there and I was smiling. And I remember, touching my face and thinking “Hey, I’m smiling!” That was my first week home from treatment.
Going to that meeting, I found something that helped. It was working. A guy I’d known from back in the day was in that meeting and he says, “Morgan, you need a sponsor, man. I’ll be your sponsor, okay?” And so I started working with him. And he said, I want you to try to hit 90 meetings in 90 days. Well, we’re in a rural community here, you know, where I live, the town I live. There was two meetings. It was Tuesday and Thursday. I went to those meetings religiously. And I started trying to find more meetings. I started building a network of guys that went to other meetings. So we would travel around and go to other meetings. And I spent probably the first three to six months in recovery just wandering around town, trying to keep it together. And I would be so relieved when it was the day and time to go to a meeting.
Eventually, I did start meeting guys in the community. I became known as the guy who was always on his way to a meeting. Someone rolls up to you and says, “Hey, you want to go party?” You don’t want to be rude, you don’t know what to say. My answer was always, “Look, I can’t do that right now in my life, but I’m headed to a meeting if you want to come with me.” They used to joke and call me the AA Nazi. They’d say, “Don’t go talk to Morgan about anything. All he’s going to do is say, ‘Well, come on, let’s take you to an AA meeting.’” But through always throwing that out there. I started getting calls from guys who were like “Dude, I’m unhappy in my life. Could I go to an AA meeting with you?” And we started developing a posse of guys who were all willing to go to meetings.
I remember one day, there were 10 of us walking to an Narcotics Anonymous meeting, and we were laughing so hard because we thought, what do the people in this community think? We are all well known for being in that drug world. Being in the newspaper for crawling the street at night. We were laughing at the thought that they’re probably boarding up their doors and windows. But we’re all going to N.A. It was kind of this funny, ironic thing.
Around that same time we started getting a posse of guys going to meetings. I got a flyer that there was going to be an Inipi sweat lodge ceremony on the reservation. There was a guy running that ceremony. And he said, “you want to be firekeeper for this lodge?” At this point, I was desperate to do anything to stay connected to my culture. So I said, “Yeah, absolutely.” And so he says, “All right. Every time we have sweat, you need to be here. You need to start this fire, you need to tend it and make sure we can keep carrying the ceremony out.” So I started my teachings and started working with a spiritual mentor. I started to find this peace and fulfillment in my life. I had also found a passion for seeing other people succeed in recovery.
One day my mom came to me. She said, “Son, I want what you have.” At this point in my recovery, I don’t even think I had a wallet. I remember having to get out of treatment and get a wallet, get a new ID, get a toothbrush. I had two pairs of shorts and two white T-shirts. So it was a whole rebuilding process of my whole life.
“Mom,” I told her, “I don’t have anything. I don’t know what you want. I don’t do drugs anymore. I don’t have a job. I don’t have any money.”
She said, “In your eyes, son. I want what you have in your eyes.”
And I asked her “Happiness?”
“I think that’s what it is.” So she asked me to help get her into treatment. Recently she celebrated five years sober.
All I ever wanted growing up was to have a healthy, wholesome family life. I believe that’s why I jumped in with both feet when I met this woman with this young baby at 17 years old. I was a baby. I was 17 when I was raising this little girl. And I think what prompted me to jump into such a role at such a young age, I was searching for that thing I never had growing up. I was searching for that wholeness, that family togetherness. And I learned in recovery that by staying in recovery, I have the opportunity to end that spiritual infection of this bloodline that goes back – this sickness that has been keeping my family in this devastating loop. I finally have an ability to stop it. When I realized that, I realized this is a really sacred duty. This is a sacred responsibility to end the hurt so it doesn’t have to keep going. Realizing that really helped me. It helped pour concrete on my feet in recovery. I know that this isn’t just about me anymore. This is about my children and my children’s children and so on and so forth.
A few years ago, a group of us were really wanting more cultural engagement in our recovery so we started having Wellbriety meetings. Wellbriety is a 12 step program based in our culture. We started having meetings in my backyard, and at a coffee shop. We did that for about three, four years. Then we were approached by an organization that wanted to help get us established. So we started providing peer support in the community. We’re really proud of that. We started doing outreach to the local jails and to local treatment centers. We go out there, we have Wellbriety meetings and we just talk to the people about what recovery has to offer.
We have a location in Montevideo where we have 12 step meetings. Our goal with creating our meeting schedule was to make sure that between A.A., N.A. and Wellbriety there’s a meeting in our community every day of the week. We’re happy to say that seven days a week in my little town you can hit a meeting and you can sign up with peer support.
I was recently asked if I wanted to go to California and do what I do out there. I gotta say I love the idea of going to California, but you couldn’t pay me enough to leave the community now. When I was an active addiction, I would have told you I hated living here. I didn’t feel like I was a part of anything. I felt judged and restricted. But when I turned my life around, I realized that this was a community that will walk alongside you on your journey. If you’re willing to show up for yourself, they’re willing to show up for you too. And I think that’s one of the greatest blessings I’ve had in recovery. I am part of a community that is so engaged in the healing process.
My message to people coming into recovery in small communities and those who are in ethnically diverse or challenged communities is if you’re going home and these resources that you need are not there, it’s possible to build these things for yourself. Three guys sitting in a backyard with a Wellbriety book was how this all started. Kind of like, if you build it, they will come. It is possible.
It’s a great time to be in recovery.
~ By Morgan, clean and sober since 2010