Addicted to Recovery: The Interactive Memoir
Warning: This might be hard to hear. It was hard to LIVE. Having an honest dialogue about what active addiction was like isn’t pretty, but I’m hoping that even if you come for the train wreck you’ll stay for the recovery conversation. Settle in for notes from the thick of two decades of substance abuse, mental health struggles, romantic obsession, rehabs, hospitals, institutions and general despair, to the last few years of coming out the other side. I've had a lot of time to collect insight about recovery, and to stay sober I had to be as obsessed with getting better as I was with staying sick, and I hope to share some of that insight with you. Through writing a memoir about my recovery from alcoholism and mental illness, I realized, my recovery is an ongoing process, and also an interactive one, based on shared insight and dialogue. So why would a book about those things be any different? I want to share my story while engaging in a conversation about the nature of addiction and recovery, to share tools and crowdsource far more wisdom than I could export on my own. Join me as I read chapters from my memoir and join the discussion about recovery, addiction, mental health, spirituality and humanism. I invite you to e-mail any questions or comments to: interactivememoir@gmail.com
Addicted to Recovery: The Interactive Memoir
Not At All Like The Movies
My first rehab was awful. Often, when I externalized my misery in one way or another, I can look back and say, naw, well, that was really more of a me thing. Yet with this rehab, I look back and still think it was awful.
Was I miserable the whole time? Absolutely. Was I also sober the whole time? Yup. For many of the residents there being in portage meant they weren’t on the streets, they were away from abusive relationships, they were out of prison, and many, probably, just not DEAD, and that’s not trivial, and many of my objections were, in perspective, kind of trivial. Maybe all the ways it was a bad fit for me are exactly the ways it was just what someone else needed.
Not everyone gets 12 plus shots at recovery like I did. Many people don’t even get one. So if you’re in a place that isn’t helping, or a program of recovery that doesn’t resonate with you, or a community that makes you feel bad, there’s no harm in investigating the other options.
My misery was partially due to my skewed expectations. I’d romantically assumed that rehab was a delightful teahouse of tortured artists, who would gather their heavy hearts together debating existentialist philosophy and comparing poetry. I’d constructed a vision of a kind of creative retreat, surrounded by people like the ones who wrote the addiction and mental illness memoirs I so cherished, that we’d be huddled together on a couch near a fireplace after curfew because we MUST, we absolutely MUST continue our esoteric forays into the deep cellars of the soul.
My illusions were quite viciously shattered.
Talk to me about it! Interactivememoir@gmail.com
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Thanks to Bensound.com for the intro and outro music
Here is a list of suicide crisis hotlines by country:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_suicide_crisis_lines
Here are links to support groups with an online presence that can be vital in recovery:
For a comprehensive list of 12 Step Meetings:
https://12step.org/social/online-meetings
Smart Recovery:
https://www.smartrecovery.org/community
Refuge Recovery
https://www.refugerecovery.org