[via email]
Fuck that old guy from the meeting,
Nothing is gonna break my stride. I went back to the same meeting yesterday.
I was pretty sure I wasn’t going to return to the same meeting after Creepy Oldtimer joked with me about pills. But I had promised someone that I’d be back the next day so we could exchange phone numbers, and it’s important to me that I keep my commitments, especially so early in my recovery.
So I showed up. And as I’ve been finding along this journey, Mick Jagger was right: if you try sometimes, you just might find you get what you need.
The greeter at the meeting, a sweet kid named Jesse, gave me a hello so warm and disarming that I found myself telling him about what had happened. What he said was just what I needed to hear to feel better and move forward.
“Just because someone has a lot of clean time, doesn’t mean they are not still sick.”
Mind blown.
I went into the meeting with a new resolve. This is MY journey, and I’m not going to let some asshole keep me from living the happy, joyous, and free life that I want to live. There are triggers around every corner, and I’m gonna need to figure out how to deal with them. This, apparently, was my first opportunity to prove to myself that this kind of bullshit isn’t going to send me back into darkness.
Today, they’re giving out coins in the meeting, and you can bet your ass I will be there to collect my first one.
Julie
Julie is a 40-something professional, married with a soon-to-be 10-year-old son. She has recently come to the realization that her decades-long Vicodin and marijuana use are keeping her from living the life she could be living.
In her own words, "I'm ready to live differently, and I think I'm already starting, even though I haven't stopped yet."