Category Archives: Personal

On Recovery

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CAUTION - ROUGH PATH, Bruin Path Sign, Mohonk Mountain House, January 2018

Today I mark 32 years of sobriety. Abstinence, sobriety, and recovery are often conflated. They’re not the same things.

I mark the beginning of my recovery in 1990, when I began individual counseling with a trauma specialist. Though I’ve lost track of the specific date, it’s early in the year, so 35 years ago.

Root Path

I got sober because drinking was interfering with my recovery, my need for which reaches from childhood with multiple, intertwined, roots. For me, sobriety was just part of my journey through recovery. I say “I got sober,” not just “I stopped drinking.” Abstinence was as necessary for my sobriety as sobriety was for my recovery, but I don’t equate sobriety with abstinence. Today, I have the occasional glass of beer or wine with dinner. I am still sober.

Path, Brine Garden

Abstinence is not the same as recovery. I got sober because drinking was interfering with my recovery, my need for which reaches from childhood with multiple, intertwined, roots. For me, sobriety was just part of my journey through recovery.

Recovery is not black and white, it’s not binary. Recovery chooses life. Those choices take many different forms, as varied and creative as we are. Real people are complex, their lives, complicated. Recovery is equally complex, and highly individual.

Native Flora Garden, BBG

Diary Entry, 2006-01-20

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[Transcribed from hand-written diary/notebook.]

DSC_5029

2006-01-20 Woodfield Inn, Flat Rock, NC 1:51 pm

In the bar at the Woodfield, waiting for the rest of my family to arrive for my parents’ 50th anniversary celebration. John’s sitting on the couch in front of the fireplace with his laptop. I’m sitting at a table by a window. Perfect north light on a cold sunny winter day.

I just got off the phone with my mom. She’s anxious, in her own words. Unusual emotional literacy, though I know she’s more than anxious. So am I. “Anxious” is how I feel waiting for the curtains to go up on the school play. This has much of that, and also more.

It’s bittersweet. We’re celebrating two people sharing their lives together. Lots of friends. Few family. How many years left? People love them. They’ve made friends here.\ – the only place they’ve ever chosen to live – as they have everywhere. How many years left?

So we celebrate the lives they’ve shared, and the life they live now. We enjoy the time we have now, and try to share as much of it as we can, separated by hundreds of miles, connected by technology, that tenuous thread.

Collecting and presenting family photos. They are reminders of still more bitterness, in our family’s past history. The wounds are largely healed, but family gatherings, like cold days, return the pains to remind us of what we survived, the times we lived through, the evil we faced and bore.