10/31/2024
I wrote this a few days ago, was encouraged to share.
Tonight, I needed a meeting.
Tonight, I needed to be surrounded by people who help encourage me and who remind me that it’s okay to be human. I needed to surround myself with people who have no judgement and remind me that I don’t need to carry the weight of the world on my shoulders. The help me place it down and share my vulnerable truth.
The idea that we are in recovery because we are damaged goods never really settled well with me until I realized that being damaged means that we've simply fallen short of who we want to be as people. We are working to make ourselves better humans but also have to bear the stigma of, "Well I never drank, so I'm better than you." I had a huge moment of recognition that the reason why people in recovery feel better after a meeting is because people who are in recovery understand the value of recovery. The rest of the world doesn't. They "didn't have a problem like we do." We understand the value of little reminders. We understand that many of us bristle when we ask for help because help often comes at a cost. Many of us who are working our ways through this recovery journey are simply just working to heal internal wounds from an uncaring world. In that journey, we know that we are “the sinners” that get preached about on Sundays and we are what society deems as less than.
Tonight, I needed a meeting.
Tonight, I needed to be surrounded by my recovery community, my newly created family of humans who understand me before I even speak. Tonight, I’m grateful for the opportunity to feel less crazy and that there are others that are just exhausted. The world can be an exhausting place when you’re relearning new patterns and are constantly faced with triggers and stressors and your past and unsupportive people and your own brain that is screaming at you to just drink it away. It was easier then, right? That's the voice we fight daily- remember when you used to just drink after work like everyone else? Remember when you just pretended it didn't hurt?
The other thing I’ve learned from my recovery community is when life feels unmanageable, you have to change. You have to do something to manage it. The feeling of being out of control is a slippery slope and the second we get the idea that life was easier before, we've opened that closed door just a sliver and peek in. I needed to be reminded that I wasn’t the only one feeling that temptation. And tonight, my life felt unmanageable and I turned to the people who’ve felt it and lived it. In the process, I realized that true recovery is not time bound and it’s ageless and it’s personal. We don’t have a moral right to tell anyone else what they are doing is right and wrong, but we do have a duty to be honest. We have to show up honestly and authentically because that’s how we lead. Not by sucking it up and pioneering on, but instead by holding our lights as high in the air as we can, reminding others that it’s okay to hold theirs up, too. Collectively we become a beacon of hope that it is possible to recover.
Tonight, I needed a meeting.
Tonight, I needed to be surrounded by accountability and honest feelings. I had to be able to express how hard it is to be a deeply feeling human in a world that is just so used to masking their feelings with prescriptions and alcohol. Because that’s what the “real world” is. I had to be able to share how triggering it is to hear about how quickly people need to run home and drink. Or how my childhood can’t seem to leave itself in the past, no matter how much I try to feel grateful, I’m also really sad. I needed to surround myself with people who didn’t tell me I was wrong about my feelings. I needed to share my struggles around people that don't devalue my experience. I needed to talk to people who didn't make me feel stupid for being equally excited about life and fear that I'm not a good person. I needed someone to hear me without having to defend myself.
There’s a value in being able to lay down your struggles amongst people who are there to be well. There’s such a strong sense of gratitude that comes from someone reminding you that you actually did the right thing. In his song "Winning Streak", Jelly Roll sings, “And I've been losin' myself, I've been losin' my mind / And I've been standin' in the rain, just tryna stay dry / I was so ashamed to be in this seat/ ’Til I met a man who was twenty years clean/ He said, "Everybody here's felt the same dеfeat”/ Nobody walks through these doors on a winning strеak” and that’s it. That’s the lesson. We’re in recovery because life is hard and the real world is unkind and we don’t understand how people can be so cruel. But in the process we became the cruel humans who hurt us because it was easier when we were harming ourselves, we could at least control that. We self harm as a method to brace ourselves for when others hurt us. We turned to alcohol, food, gambling, s*x, social media, and drugs because somewhere along the way we learned that life was supposed to be awful and terrible and painful. And we have unlearn that. We have to hold ourselves accountable to the lesson.
Tonight, I needed a meeting.
Tonight, I needed to be surrounded by people who are working a different program that I am. Tonight, I needed to be reminded that the goal is recovery and the goal is progress, not perfection. Tonight, I needed to be reminded that programs only work if you work them. I picked an N.A. meeting because magically when my brain said, "I think I need a meeting,", there was one in 20 minutes. I walked in there and the accepted and loved me for who I was not in spite of my struggles, but because of them. I was reminded of the areas in my life that I have not been honoring and valuing myself. So when I am faced with triggers, it’s more tempting. I needed to feel okay with being angry and frustrated with a world so cold at times.
And we can’t build castles on sand. We can’t build safe homes for ourselves using routines and patterns that hurt us in the past. And we don’t need a home to feel at home. We need to feel safely at home in our own heads and hearts before we can work on the next part of the building. We have to work on our foundation because that’s how we can maintain that feeling of safety within our own thoughts and against our own thought patterns. Building our safe and secure foundation takes work. We are fighting for our lives some days and we no longer accept that self harm is the answer. We can’t build our lives while lying about our emotions. Meetings are safe places for broken humans working to put themselves back together where they can be honest about their brokenness. We are learning to feel emotions we used to numb through and some of us need to feel the lesson deeply before we learn. Some of us learn through hard knocks. Some of us never truly learn. But the there is so much honor in the process. But it hurts. And it's hard work. And it's frustrating. And it's DAILY. And I just want people to understand and acknowledge how hard I'm working just to be okay.
And that’s why, tonight, I went to a meeting.
And because of the recovery community we have at 1st Mile Active Recovery , I’m sober today. I still have struggles but because there is a place for me to feel normal and heard and loved without condition, I am not struggling alone.
