Strength Through Perseverance During Buprenorphine Addiction Treatment
It’s not often that I turn to the golfing community for strength or wisdom. Sports, in general, do little to pique my interest and golf… ugh. I mean, could there be a more boring sport to watch? No. I don’t think so. And could the people who play golf be less athletic? Let a professional golfer and a professional anything else face off and I’ll put my money on the anything else guy any day of the week.
But check this out. Here’s a golfing story that I not only bothered to listen to from beginning to end, but I’m actually going to repeat it for you here. So listen up.
A Golfing Story That Pertains to Buprenorphine Addiction Treatment
It seems Tiger Woods got some bad news about two weeks before he was supposed to swing his clubs in the U.S. Open: he had a double stress fracture of the tibia and a torn ligament besides. Not good news. You have to hoof around and play more than 90 holes just to be a contender. But Tiger, he didn’t give up. He said, “I’m playing in the U.S. Open, and I’m going to win.”
Alrighty then, Tiger. I mean, it’s not like it’s easy to win the U.S. Open, even if you aren’t dealing with a double stress fractured tibia and a torn ligament. But Tiger persevered and—that’s right—he won, despite his bad knee and the fact that it only got worse as the days passed.
The Moral of Story is not the Winning
That’s right. Yeah, Tiger had a bad knee and he won the U.S. Open despite that fact. But the interesting part of the story is that he didn’t whine about it. He didn’t do interview after interview harping on his injuries. Instead, he just set a goal, announced the goal, and made it happen.
And How Does This Apply to Buprenorphine Treatment?
Getting clean is hard and, in my opinion, staying clean is even harder. It’s an infinite goal that can become overwhelming. Life, in general, can be overwhelming and when you’re dealing with opiate cravings, it’s easy to use it as a shield to deflect criticism or as a scapegoat for why things aren’t going better.
I met a girl once who never brought up the fact that she was a recovering addict. She didn’t collect chips at meetings or have ‘sober birthdays.’ When it somehow came up in conversation, I was genuinely surprised that she was struggling with the issue of opiate addiction. And I was impressed that she didn’t feel the need to use it as a crutch, an excuse for bad days or bad moods.
Not that I think it’s a bad thing to celebrate sober birthdays. It was a huge part of my recovery to get chips and know how many days clean I had. I needed to have that in order to remind myself that things were much once worse than they could possibly be now and that even if I didn’t always feel like I had accomplished anything, at least I had managed to stay clean for X amount of days. But still, I can’t help be impressed by those who don’t need the validation, who allow the past to actually stay in the past.
What do you think?
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