But it was a positive change, at least at first.
Tina’s place was beautifully decorated and clean. Her mother was very wealthy. Her father had passed away, leaving her mom with a bundle, and she took care of Tina and paid most of her bills. Tina’s condo had several bedrooms and a nice hot tub in the basement that I could retreat to when I needed it. It also offered me freedom from Matt. I felt as though I had more privacy and breathing room.
Tina hooked me up with a job with the company she was working for at the time. It was a biotech firm, a field I knew nothing about, but it was good pay. To help the company plan for a big conference, I was crafting correspondence, booking the conference locations, and having a blast. It felt so good to have purpose again and to be needed in a broader sense. It felt amazing to have a place to be each day, to be accountable to someone, and to be getting paid!
At Tina’s house, though, I was aware I was still in someone else’s space, so I was careful about my actions. I stayed in my room most of the time because I felt more ownership over that space. Plus, I was slowly noticing things about her that were red flags to me. She was often locked in her room most of the night. She rarely socialized with me. She seemed out of it a lot of the time. I couldn’t quite put my finger on why my gut was telling me she may not have been the person she presented.
When I got into recovery, I had a whole new outlook on people and a naiveté that surprised me. I assumed everyone in recovery was just as honest and willing to work the program as I was. I assumed I could trust everyone in recovery. It was an assumption that I quickly learned was wrong. People from all walks of life come into the program, some for the right reasons and some for the wrong reasons, some who are sincere about getting help and some who aren’t.
There are people who are mandated by the court to come into the rooms as part of their sentence, and you can usually spot them a mile away. They sit in the back of the room, they don’t speak much, and they fly up to the meeting leader’s chair to have their papers signed as soon as the meeting is over so they can get out of there. Not all of them are like this, of course. Some court-mandated attendees do get through the program and stick with it, but many just do their time and get their papers signed.
There are also those who come in and expound upon the text of their twelve-step fellowship, quoting every passage and page in the book like some kind of evangelist and trying to make everyone believe that because they memorized the book they are some type of recovery god. All the while they are hitting on the eighteen-year-old newcomer walking through the door or secretly gambling away all their money every Saturday night at a poker table.
Then there may be a girl who sits all the way in the in the back week after week, never saying a word. Everyone assumes she isn’t getting it and will relapse any minute, until one day she does speak and says something incredibly profound and announces that she actually has five years of clean time.
As with any group of people, everything is not always what it seems. Recovery is a microcosm of society at large. So many of us come into the rooms of recovery having done some horrible, illegal, and unethical things, and yet overall most recovering people I’ve met are some of the most creative, loving, honest, and pure people I know. Many are still faking it just to make it. It took me a while to figure out who was who. I wasn’t always as sharp as I wish I could have been. For example, I briefly dated a guy I thought was just as into recovery as I was, only to find that he enjoyed another compulsive disorder and would try to get me to watch porn every night. I befriended and became the sponsor of a younger girl who told me horrible sob stories that broke my heart. Later I would learn from her mother and her that she was a pathological and compulsive liar and the stories were all lies. I kept hearing people in the meetings say, “Stick with the winners,” but my radar was still a little broken in that department and tended to guide me toward the familiar. I had made it a habit of sticking with the losers for so long.
Tina and I got along very well, but as I gained more time in recovery and my radar slowly began improving, it became clear to me that she wasn’t as into the program as I had first suspected. As I became more involved in meetings and began to meet more people, I started to hear rumors that she was using. She was always one to talk the talk so well, but after a while I began to see through it. I think because we were living together, working together, and going to meetings together, I got to really see her day-to-day actions. She made unethical decisions with her mother’s money, often making up stories about why she needed large sums of money, such as a car repair that wasn’t real, and then she would go shopping. When she came home from work, we would chat for a little bit, but then she always locked herself in her room for the remainder of the night. I didn’t think much of it initially, but eventually I began to have my own suspicions about her behavior.
One night after she locked herself in her bedroom and she thought I was in mine, I stood outside her door. I began to smell the all-too-familiar scent of marijuana wafting from her room. I knocked on the door and confronted her. She was all red-eyed and trying to say she was meditating and burning incense. I was no fool. I knew that smell, and she knew that I knew. I just walked away from her and went into my own room.
The next day I fired her as my sponsor and called my parents to let them know that I needed to get out of there right away. My parents were understanding immediately, and they began to treasure and protect my recovery as fiercely as I had. I was very hard on myself at first. Here I was, thinking I was making the right choices and doing the right things, but I was living with a sponsor who, instead of helping me with recovery, was lying to me and getting high right under my nose. I was so afraid of what others in the program would think of me. Would they think I was getting high as well? And I was ashamed at not realizing it sooner. I couldn’t believe I hadn’t realized she was high. I felt betrayed. And stupid. Once I had been able to spot an addict from a mile away, yet here this woman was, getting high right in the same house I was in, and I hadn’t caught on. It was that naiveté again; I guess I just wanted to believe she wasn’t using.
After that I found it difficult to sit in meetings and listen to Tina say all the right things and continue to stand up and get recovery chips, claiming that she had continuous recovery and clean time, which I and everyone else knew was bullshit. It wasn’t my place to call her out in the meeting, nor was it anyone else’s. After all, she had to live with her lies, and for anyone who has ever attempted recovery, that can be a hell unto itself. Coming into the rooms of any support group and making that first admission of having a problem tends to really put a damper on ever attempting to use again, because now you are aware it is a problem, and that acknowledgment echoes in your head and at least reduces if not ruins any high you attempt to achieve.
Tina’s lies made me want to scream every time I heard her. And it hurt my feelings to know this person I once trusted enough to ask to be my sponsor was a hypocrite. So I avoided her and began to mix up my meetings so I was attending those I knew she wasn’t attending. It was best for me to find new meetings and new people to hang around. It was how I started learning to stick with the winners. Unfortunately, Tina was no winner in the program, and I wasn’t going to be a loser ever again.
Many years later, after I had been living in Harrisburg for a while, I got a call saying that her body had been found on the side of a highway just miles outside of State College. She had been shooting up and overdosed in her car. She died alone in her car on the side of a road with a needle sticking out of her arm.
MY PARENTS WERE VERY SUPPORTIVE OF MY NEW LIFE and wanted nothing more than to help me. If I called and needed something, they were there immediately. They mailed me care packages to ensure I had basic needs, like beauty supplies, cigarettes,
