A change,
(A change would do you good)
Would do you good,
(A change would do you good)
I think a change,
(A change would do you good)
Would do you good.
(A change would do you good)
- A Change Would Do You Good by Sheryl Crow, 1997
It was, oddly, a minor ‘90s pop song with a mundane but infectious chorus that would help launch Guelph city councillor Mike Salisbury on the road to recovery after years of drug addiction.
“Sheryl Crow put out a really annoying song and I just thought ‘she’s right. I’ve got to do something different, I just can’t keep doing this',” says Salisbury, 51, remembering the moment 20 years ago that propelled him on that sometimes bumpy road.
And while he fears what discussing his past might mean in the political realm after two terms on council and plans for a third, he is willing to do so in the hopes that his experiences might in some small way help others who are where he once was.
“The biggest message to people is that recovery is a very real possibility,” he says.
“Even though people often can’t see it from the weeds, they can’t imagine anything other than what they’ve got, the key message is that it is possible and that those people should not be written off.”
Twenty years ago Salisbury had just had a business go under for the second time, was sleeping in his office because his marriage was crumbling, his car had been repossessed and he was getting high almost every day on just about any drug that didn’t involve needles.
It was time to make a change.
“I just got sick and tired of being sick and tired,” says Salisbury, who represents Ward 4.
“At the end of the day, the environment of addiction just wasn’t conducive to living. I think it coloured everything.
“I didn’t have any emotional capacity. I couldn’t feel joy, or sadness or happiness. It was all flat.”
He wasn’t addicted to a particular drug. He was addicted to being high and the relief from the feelings of self-doubt and self-worth that he knows was at the core of his drug addiction.
His two businesses failed, he says, in part because he couldn’t handle success. Didn’t think he deserved success. The drug use was a manifestation of that.
“The interesting thing with my experience with addiction is that it really deals with self esteem,” Salisbury says. “I could succeed and do things, but I couldn’t handle success and I got really good at imploding.”
He was fine with failure. It was success he had trouble with.
If his back was against the wall, he came out swinging. When things went really well, something inside him said “that’s not you.”
“It wasn’t external. It was internal. It was me being unable to cope with the situation and tearing it down.”
Born and raised in Brampton, Salisbury started using drugs in his early teens and it took off from there. Deathly afraid of needles, there was never any shooting up. But that was about the only limit on drug use that continued for years.
He’s not interested in telling war stories from the drug front, not interested in reliving the moments or adding juicy anecdotes.
“But basically, at the end of the day, there really wasn’t anything I wasn’t willing to try. I had my favourites.”
It was hard to picture himself as an addict. He functioned. He ran businesses and had employees. He had a family and a nice car. He was successful, in that sense.
“My vision of what I thought an addict was? That wasn’t me. For the longest time, I just thought ‘I’m not that.’”
When his wife started suggesting he should get help, “I thought she was crazy.”
“I totally thought I was on top of it. I totally thought I had control and that it was a choice. I likened it to my morning coffee. I didn’t at all see it as a problem.”
Salisbury felt he didn’t need drugs all the time, just that he chose them all the time.
But he says that if he knows anything about addiction, it is that it is a slippery slope.
“I looked at that stereotype and said, ‘that’s not me.’ But it very easily could have been… At the end of the day it’s not a question of ‘if,’ but ‘when.’ It’s progressive. It just gets worse.”
Sheryl Crow aside, it’s hard for Salisbury to pick a defining moment, of when he hit the proverbial ‘rock bottom,’ because he says for years he just kept bouncing off the bottom and kept going.
“I think the final straw was losing my second business, sleeping in my office because my family life had come apart, having my car repossessed and going ‘how did this happen. Again.’”
The answer to the question, “Have you had enough?” was finally, “Yes.”
“The fact of the matter was, there was unmanageability in my social life, my family life, my business life. At the end of the day I just got tired of being me. Of a sense of hopelessness.”
Outwardly, he looked fine. “But I was dead on the inside.”
He didn’t get into recovery to stop using drugs, he says, he got into recovery to be happy.
“I liked using. I liked it a lot. But I was just so frickin’ miserable that I was so unhappy that I was willing to give that up.”
Recovery road has not always been a smooth one.
Salisbury admits that he has slipped occasionally, the last time around a year ago, when he got high for the first time in years.
“I wish I had 20 years of uninterrupted clean time,” he says.
The question of why he would use after almost seven years of abstinence is one of the few questions Salisbury has no answer to.
“I ask myself the same thing,” he says. “I don’t have an answer to that. I wish I did.”
He knows it’s a lifelong challenge, a process of perpetual self-improvement, and he has had help through programs offered by the Homewood and a 12-step program that he says has been extremely helpful.
“At the end of the day, the changes since getting clean have just been so far and beyond what I could have ever imagined… I wanted to learn how to feel.”
It took years to decide to stop. Or at least try to.
“There was no shortage of indications that things were unmanageable and progressing. But it still took years.”
Salisbury, who now has two university degrees, a successful business and a healthy relationship with both his two grown daughters and his new partner, believes you cannot overcome addiction alone.
“If addiction is a disease of isolation, then by definition you cannot do it alone,” he says. “You cannot solve the problem of isolation by yourself. You can stop the behaviour, but you cannot stop the underlying issue by yourself.
“I can fix this on my own is a flawed concept. Let people in.”
Salisbury hopes his story will resonate with someone, somewhere. That his experience might help someone learn about themselves and their situation.
“This is who I am. Maybe this is an inspirational thing rather than a story about being broken somehow,” he says.
