Worse Before It Gets Better

Tonight’s topic was recovery and release, one of the open ones where the chair shares a little of his own experience and then hands it to the room. It felt different than most topics, harder to get a grip on right away. Nobody spoke up for a while. I think a lot of us were turning it over in our heads. Eventually a few people did, and by then I had gathered my thoughts together enough to go next.

I started by saying that recovery works a lot like the physical side of getting sober. When an alcoholic first stops drinking, it gets worse before it gets better. You’re in pain, you’re sick, you might need a hospital or a detox to get through it. But that part passes. You get your body back. Your thinking starts to clear. You start to feel like yourself again without the substance running things.

Recovery works the same way once you actually start doing it, except most of that work happens in the mind instead of the body. First you have to take yourself apart. You start looking at your character defects, and here’s the part that gets people, a lot of those defects feel like they’re core to who you are. You think they’re just you. It takes a while to see that they’re not you at all. They’re just what’s been standing in your way. So you start dismantling them. You work the steps, you make amends, and none of it is easy. That’s the worse part, the part before it gets better.

Then you come out the other side and your mind is clear. There’s less running through your head at the end of the day. You take an inventory of what you’re grateful for and where you were wrong, and you get in the habit of admitting it as you go instead of letting it pile up. That gets faster the more you do it. Eventually you can put your head on the pillow at night and feel good about the day, feel safe in it, feel okay with the choices you made. You’re thankful for it, and you wake up the next morning grateful to start over again.

It keeps building from there. You become useful. People start to trust you, to value you, and you build real relationships inside this program, the kind where you feel connected and understood. All of that is what you get for doing the work, for actually participating in your own recovery. It’s rewarding once you’ve been through it and keep going through it. And it never really stops. Recovery isn’t something you finish. It keeps moving you down a different road than the one you were on before. I’m just thankful I found mine.