The Problem With Early Recovery Is ...
… The problems keep coming in sheets and torrents and waves. The solution comes in little slivers and dabs and drips.
For me to choose the recovery lifestyle is an extreme solution. I won’t touch it until I see that I have an extreme problem.
I have a full-time problem that does not respond to a part-time solution.
I try to negotiate with a thing that can’t be negotiated with.
Whenever I do plead with it, just trying to keep it to a dull roar, the price in misery and danger increases as if all the small print in the contract I signed with beer and cocaine comes to life and starts dancing on my grave. “But wait … I’m not dead yet !” Oh, sure I am.
I sit in those damn meetings knowing, I just fucking know, I will have to drink again.
And this ain’t my first rodeo. I have (perhaps) tried the recovery gig before. Many times. What in the hell do I do with a thing like this?
Re-Treads Unite !
The ole “keep coming back” is a laughably far cry from any credible promise when I have to go home after the meeting and claw my face off, right?
If you are living in this space, I get it. In my gut … I get it.
I know in my gut, for years and years, what it feels like to sit in a meeting AGAIN knowing full damn well I’m not getting what all the other people are getting, whatever that is.
I got no smiles. I got no friends. I got no peace. Only thing I got is maybe a sponsor who seems to only chew me out and bark orders at me I still don’t understand. That I got in spades.
My name is Joenonymous. (“Hi, Joe”). I am a chronic relapser with some time this time. Took me twelve years of near constant relapse to get it.
Now I understand it.
Now I help you.
When I share in recovery I got no business talking about anything else besides how I got sober and how I stay sober. By the book.
Every meeting here is a newcomer meeting. Laser focus on the problem and the solution. There is exactly one of each.
If you are living in the relapse rattle trap, please read this site. Read the “Get Sober” tab. Read all of it. I’m going to spell out with all possible clarity the confusing secret of recovery that cost me so much skin to learn. Almost killed me.
Don’t wait for anyone to hand you shit in recovery. Program of action. That’s what they told me. Meetings are free. This website is free to you. Do that until it works, or read this. Something … do something.
Sounds like I just said “keep coming back.” Crap. Sorry.
-Joenonymous
This Isn't You?
What I wrote above is a fairly classic, though perhaps narrow, description of what people face as they consider coming into the 12 Step recovery lifestyle. If this isn’t you then …
