LIAR, LIAR

I attended a CA meeting last night. Cocaine Anonymous. I was in the cafeteria talking to Steve when the CA members started filtering in and I thought, "What the hell, this can be my one meeting this week."
We'll back up. You don't know any of the criteria for my stay here in the Veterans in Progress program at U.S.Vets. This would be so much easier if everyone who reads this blog could read my mind.... or if you had walked in my shoes as a homeless vet being 'reintegrated'.
One of the program requirements is that I attend one meeting each week, and I get to choose which, to help me get in touch with myself and whatever problems got me to where I am. I sat in that cafeteria because I was too lazy to walk outside, go around the corner, and go up the steps to attend the relationships class. I figured I would save myself some steps, watch a bunch of ex-addicts whine for a while, and keep my case manager off my butt about community meetings with the least possible trouble to me.
Instead, I realized minutes into the meeting that I was in the exact wrong place. I listened to them discuss what they were, who they were, how they fought daily, and I didn't see drug-dependent failures anywhere in that room. I saw warriors who fight the good fight daily against a relentless enemy -- and win. I saw people who fight a relapse every day the sun rises, giving everything they have to stay away from a rock, a pipe, a swisher, a dealer - themselves.
I finished that meeting wondering if there is an FA meeting for people like me. "Hi, my name is Rollion Hampton, and I am a failure."
I am a failure as a Mom, a business person, a wife, a writer, sometimes as a human being. I haven't done much of anything right for fifty years. I'm not proud of myself. I don't know where I'm going in life or how to get there. I don't have much to tell about where I've been either for that matter.
It feels so good to admit that, get it off my chest finally. But if I am a failure at my life, and I am the only person who can live it, why the hell am I still here?
The truth is that I have only one reason why I am still alive. I know my sons deserve an opportunity to make more of their lives than I have of mine.