An ever-expanding view of recovery
The rules belong in the garbage
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“Is that OK?”
I’m halfway through a session, listening to one of my people recount the details of a decisive action she took inside of her marriage that was way outside of her comfort zone. She casts glances my way, which is to say, through the screen, waiting for my response, and I can feel her yearning speaking to me all the way from the front seat of her car in a city over 3,000 miles away from where I currently sit.
We’ve been working together since the beginning of the year. She’s shown up to today’s session wearing a vibrant, colorful blouse. Her cheeks are flushed, eyes bright. She looks more alive than I’ve ever seen her.
I ask her how she feels in her body as she tells the story. I ask her how she feels about herself, in the wake of having done a thing that just a few months ago she thought she could never do.
“I feel amazing,” she says. “I feel so clear,” and now she’s fighting to hold back a smile.
These are the moments worth lingering over, and so we do, we giggle and grin, breathing in fresh air wafting through an old window freshly cracked open, and now I’m pumping my fist in the air, I’m holding up a mirror, and the reflection is my absolute favorite: you are doing it, my friend. This is what it looks like.
*
When we’re used to feeling shitty, it takes time to build up trust that it’s possible to feel a different way. The way we build trust is to practice taking small, humble actions (slowly! over time!), and then to listen to, receive, integrate the signals that come in on the other side. We build trust when we practice causing less harm, and every time we take a step toward a general sense of good. As we allow ourselves to be guided by our own inner signals (my beloved lanterns on the path), we (slowly! over time!) begin to trust our actions, and it becomes less necessary to look externally for validation that we are OK. Now, it is absolutely guaranteed that we’ll continue to make mistakes and stick our feet in our mouths and be hella awkward in probably every social situation in perpetuity until the end of time forever, but: we know whose hands are on the wheel. Those are our hands.
Once we establish that it’s possible to feel good, then we take it a step further: not only is it possible to feel good, but it’s something we all deserve and are deeply worthy of. I’ll say it again: we are worthy of goodness. We are worthy of having lives that feel good more often than they feel bad.
Here’s an equation I just now created that is highly scientific:
Self-trust + self-worth = Possibility x ∞
Yes, recovery is about figuring out how to be a person in the world who no longer drinks, and establishing all the strategies/tools/resources/plans/rituals/routines/habits necessary to do so. But it is also about becoming a redwood tree:
Run your roots wide, let them interconnect, network. Fortify a trunk that can withstand fire, wind, famine. Stretch into branches that move and flow with the elements. Bear witness to the world around you, evolve with your surroundings, participate in the ecosystem, be nothing other than exactly who you are.
And this is 99% of what I do: give people permission to be exactly who they are.
*
The cultural view of recovery is still so extraordinarily narrow. I forget this sometimes, swimming in the water that I do. I forget about deprivation, FOMO. Shame, loneliness, dogma. Stigma.
The longer that I’m in this work, the more expansive my view of recovery becomes. Lately, what I hear myself repeating over and over is this: every single rule about recovery was made up. Someone just…made them up. In particular, I think of this when it comes to having a slip (you know the word, it starts with “r” and ends with “elapse”). This is an area where people’s programming is so entrenched - the narrative around going back to day one, that we have to start over.
To which I say! This was just made up! This isn’t true. If some person over there can make such an extraordinary claim, than it follows that so can every single last one of us. We can practice holding such authority, even if it’s simply over our own selves.
Now, I’m not aiming to be fast and loose about having a slip. I understand that some of us need rules when it comes to fucking around with alcohol. And, it’s also true that it’s not that way for everyone, and that’s OK. The fact that one person’s path might be entirely divergent from the next person’s doesn’t negate a thing about either path. The more whole we become, the more steady and solid we are in our own practice, the less we give a fuck about what other people are doing. We practice driving our own bus; we let everyone around us drive theirs.
A major part of what recovery is, particularly for those for whom this is a chosen, lifelong, and yeah, I’m going to say it, spiritual path—is becoming uncategorizable, because we’ve shed every last bit of programming that would have us believe that we are small, powerless, voiceless. Many of us find ourselves where we do because we lived most of our lives inside the always erroneous belief that there was something profoundly wrong or broken about us. This is where community comes in. We need the mirror, the reminders, the support, the examples, and yes, the accountability. We become accountable to each other, not to these shitty systems that want us numbed out and bereft of a life of depth, meaning, connection, and creating a world that works for all of us.
As our recovery practices evolve and deepen, we become aware of how the vast majority of the rules we operate under work for very few people. We begin questioning these rules; we throw the rules in the garbage. Best of all; we make our own.
*
Sometimes, I dumpster dive. I pull the garbage rules out of the garbage, spread the filth around, roll myself in it, absorb the stench and mess and muck of it. I wallow in the garbage. I become convinced that it doesn’t smell that bad. I create elaborate forts, I spend generations in hiding. At some point I exhaust myself, or a lantern shows up, and I clean myself off, return the mess back to it’s rightful place, collect data, learn, keep going, growing. Trusting, even when I am nose-deep in the same familiar garbage you’d think by now I’d know better than to shove my face in.
Sometimes, the garbage makes its way to the compost heap. The compost transforms into flowers that I can point to in the spring, and think to myself, damn, look at that. I did that. I put the flowers in a vase and stare at them, starry-eyed, ruby-red reminders. I offer bouquets to my people. I breathe in this much sweeter scent, and for a moment, their goodness is enough.
From the archives ~ this time last year:
⭐️Stop Micromanaging Your Life (-one of my favorites from last year)
SELF MADE is a newsletter for fellow 🌺late bloomers🌺 with a focus on recovery, creativity and unconventionality. It's written by me, Dani, a writer, coach, and recovery advocate in San Francisco, CA.
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This is so fucking good.
i love (love, love) this visual of dumpster diving. i'm fascinated by our propensity to look for answers where there are none (and deep down we know this and chose to ignore it!). perhaps, it's not so much a disillusionment as a quest for deep feeling/even if that feeling is harmful, simply because it is familiar. one of my first spiritual awakenings in early recovery (i was a little over 2 years clean at the time) was when my [second] sponsor told me that i didn't understand surrender, because surrender meant laying down my weapons. And I would come to a meeting, practice that surrender, then go back to my "little arms factory in my apartment" and make more. and it took me another 2-4 years to learn how to live without being a pain or grief factory because i had spent all my teens, and the majority of my twenties defining myself through that pain. which forced me to ask "who am i without this (pain|grief|depression|anxiety|trauma)" ? and it's something i'm still in the process of answering