I would just smile and say everything was okay. Matt and I would often go to meetings together, and I could tell from the vibe we got from many people in the rooms that our relationship wasn’t looked upon fondly. After all, we were each supposed to be focused on ourselves, but it was apparent that we were only focusing on each other.
My father and stepmother weren’t thrilled that I was living with a guy at that time either, but they managed to be okay with it because I was sleeping in a separate room. I think in many ways they were just so happy I was not home while trying to learn to maintain my recovery. We all knew my chances for recovery would have been slim at home. They encouraged me every day to find an apartment or place of my own. I needed to do the next right thing and take care of myself. It was becoming clearer that I was going to have to step up to the plate and take a swing—one that would unfortunately hit right in Matt’s heart.
NAVIGATING THIS NEW STATE OF RECOVERY WAS SCARY and I wasn’t sure what I wanted to do with my life, so I hung on tightly to a famous slogan in twelve-step fellowships: “Take it one day at a time.” Twelve-step slogans are the best because they just bring things home in a simple way, like “Keep it simple, stupid,” or “Progress, not perfection.” Some of them saved my life and sanity in the first couple of years I was in recovery.
I didn’t have a job at first; I thought it would be best to just take it easy for a while. Everything was so strange for me. The world around me felt very large, so I kept my reality based in the rooms of recovery. I worked the Twelve Steps daily by writing, going to meetings, praying at night, and doing a daily inventory of my actions. Each night I would sit down and assess my day and ask myself certain questions: Did I harm anyone today? Was I honest in my encounters with others? Was I true to myself? Were there any verbal amends I needed to make to anyone? This assessment was a great tool we used in rehab to help keep ourselves accountable in our recovery. After all, I am human and this was a whole new way of life, so making mistakes was common, but it was what I did with those errors in judgment that mattered. Did I learn from the mistake? Did I try to make things right? These were the thoughts that flooded my mind at night before I said my prayers and went to sleep. It certainly made hitting the pillow and drifting off to sleep much easier to do.
I made sure I hit a meeting every day. It was my only connection to people, because usually I stayed in the house watching Oprah, smoking cigarettes, and eating everything I could get my hands on. Matt’s father was very much a meat-and-potatoes kind of guy, and we lived in a rural area that was not conducive to my vegetarian lifestyle. So I found myself eating junk food—chips, cookies, macaroni and cheese from the box—all food with little nutritional value. Mostly I was eating out of boredom and loneliness.
The meetings I attended were a great way for me to process all the change I was experiencing, and I began to meet new people. There are different types of twelve-step meetings, such as discussion meetings, in which everyone just openly shares; reading meetings, in which the focus is on a passage in a recovery-related book; and speaker meetings, in which a person with more than one year in recovery openly shares about his or her past and how things are now. My first meeting in State College was a Sunday discussion group that met at 3:00 p.m. at St. Andrew’s Episcopal Church. Most of the meetings I ended up attending were held there. St. Andrew’s was set in the heart of downtown. It was a nice change from the rural area where I was living.
The church was located across the street from a large football field that belonged to the local high school. I would pull up out back and park to find several of my fellow addicts milling about and smoking and chatting. I always came to the meetings early to help set up, make coffee, and arrange recovery literature on the tables. It gave me more to do and an opportunity to meet with others before the meetings. It is suggested in recovery to always arrive fifteen minutes prior to a meeting and stay fifteen minutes afterward to meet-and-greet others. That time is often referred to as the “meeting before and after the meeting,” time set aside to get to know one another and discuss not so much our recovery or addiction, but the more personal details of our lives.
I had been to meetings in Lancaster, Allentown, and York, and the great thing I learned about recovery meetings is that no matter where you go, you can walk into any meeting and immediately feel at home. Walking into a meeting, there is a familiarity that I can’t really explain. It is like walking into your house after being gone a long time; the furniture may have been moved around a little bit, but the smell and feel remain the same.
The meeting rooms are always set up in a similar manner. Chairs are arranged in a circle, or in rows for a more traditional speaker format. There is always a table covered with twelve-step literature and portions of the fellowship’s recovery text that are printed out to be read during the meeting. Posters that display the Twelve Steps and the Twelve Traditions are often hanging on the wall. A daily reflection book, open to that particular day, is often set out for people to read. The aroma of strong coffee is always in the air, and lingering drunks and addicts clinging to their one socially acceptable vice are smoking outside the building. The best way to detect a recovery meeting is by the loitering of smokers outside any church building—they aren’t there for Sunday school!
For meetings at St. Andrew’s, I entered a huge, auditorium-like room in the church basement that was clearly usually used for larger church functions, such as dinners, because there were tables against the wall and a nice, big kitchen at the end of the room. The familiar large metal coffee urn was always churning out what was probably the worst coffee in history. Caffeine becomes a new addiction after rehab. I became hooked on Mountain Dew, a soda I had never drunk except in the summer when I would blend it with gin, pineapple juice, pineapple chunks, and ice. Hmm, that was quite the refreshing summer beverage. I was a master with a blender in my addiction, always the life of the party making crazy concoctions.
But now I was like my peers, walking into meetings clutching coffee or some other heavily caffeinated beverage. I wasn’t alone. Most newcomers (the term for people in early recovery) were also in a caffeine-induced haze. You could always pick us out by our large bottles of soda and the glazed look in our eyes. I took a seat in the circle of metal chairs. Another thing about recovery meetings—not only the worst coffee in the world, but also the most uncomfortable chairs your ass will ever grace, and you’re held hostage in them for at least a solid hour. It’s a small price to pay, though, considering the surfaces my ass used to fall on during drunken stupors. I was never a graceful drunk, and often found myself at the bottom of a hill or scraping my knee against the pavement of a parking lot after taking a nasty tumble. Or I would be in the filthiest homes, buying and doing drugs in some of the worst neighborhoods. Couches and chairs that held who-knows-what inside would hold me for hours upon hours while I did drugs.
So a metal chair was nothing for me to bear for one small hour.
BEFORE LEAVING THE HALFWAY HOUSE, I WAS TOLD I must do a ninety-in-ninety, which is to go to ninety meetings in ninety days, and also immediately get a sponsor to call every night. A sponsor would walk me through the program of recovery. She would be my tour guide, she would call me on my shit, and she would try to be a source of wisdom and comfort to me without being enabling. It’s a tall order, and one that needs to be filled with caution. As usual, being the “quick to jump to a decision without thinking” kind of gal, I filled that order with the same reckless abandon I had used to fill my beer glass— quick and sloppy.
As instructed, I got a sponsor at the first meeting I attended. I was a good student
