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
Resident of the Day!
The last month at Portage I was looking for an escape route. Now this wasn’t a literal, Shawshank redemption, crawl through the sewers kind of escape, it was escape through focus, which I was determined to be on anything but my role in the community, the therapeutic model, or even my alcoholism, it was, often, on everyone else and THEIR problems.
And planning my marriage to a guy I'd spoken to once, puzzling over the logistics of whether it’s OK for addicts and alcoholics to get wasted on important days like their own weddings. Surely this whole abstinence thing was just a suggestion, there must be cheat days, just like with diets. Surely I’d be allowed some reprieve. I wasn’t expected to live a joyless life forever, right?
And Just by that line of thinking, I should have known I was missing the point, but I was almost a decade short of believing, even theoretically, that a sober life is its own reward. So long as I saw sobriety itself as suffering, and alcohol as a privilege that had been removed, I was not going to last long.
Though I knew mine and Rehab Guy's marriage was unlikely, it was a stand-in for all the other occasions that would be robbed of pleasure without alcohol, events that could theoretically be considered ‘exceptions.’ If I only got drunk on special occasions, that isn’t a PROBLEM.
Talk to me about it! Interactivememoir@gmail.com
Share this with someone you think might relate to it. Ask for help if you need it. We never know what little things might make a difference in someone acknowledging their own need for help.
Join the Facebook group!
https://www.facebook.com/groups/156764336366378
If you like what I’m doing and find it useful or entertaining, recommend it to a friend, subscribe, rate it, share it, or all of the above!
Looking for an outpatient resource? Get in touch with my friends at Basecamp:
https://www.basecamptreatmentcenter.org/contact?fbclid=IwAR0EGE-HGH92qoQVJ46K66rNzIRJBPnmH16sSg2MU9q9LQjA1YMbbx7lOEM
Thanks to Bensound.com for the intro and outro music
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