I recently came to the realization that, for a good portion of the last few years, I’ve been steadfast in the activity of ‘not-dying’ as opposed to truly ‘living’. In the fall of 2022, I made a decision to not end my life and instead reached out for help. At the time, I had been “dry” for just over a year. (I put dry in scare quotes because I sure wasn’t sober, not emotionally.) I had hit a new rock bottom without booze.

I was eight years removed from my last AA meeting. I had not only left the recovery community, I had left my academic community (I quit my PhD). It was three years since I buried my father after living with him for four years, and being his personal support worker until his passing.

How did I fall so far? It had been twenty years since I went into treatment for alcoholism and then joined AA. I spent thirteen years in recovery before (unwisely) leaving the program and going out on my own. I called myself “post-recovery” and was completely in denial about how much I was suffering. In the spring of 2014, in a great deal of emotional pain, I decided to lean away from AA instead of into it. This fateful choice led me to a seven year relapse–primarily an emotional (and spiritual) relapse as opposed to the drinking kind.

Today, I’ve been back in recovery for over ten months, and I’m two-and-a-half years removed from my last drink. I have a sponsor who I meeting with regularly. I go to three meetings a week. I have worked all Twelve Steps (a secular version), and I volunteer to do service in all three of my groups to help them run. I’m looking for someone here at my meetings to sponsor, to guide through the Twleve Steps (secular or traditional).

It’s hard to see one’s own growth. I feel like the caterpillar that has dissolved into an indistinct goop of organic matter in the cocoon. And as much as the transformation of the caterpillar into pupa into butterfly is a natural process, so is the healing experience of recovery. It takes the time it needs to take and will continue on its course so long as I do the work. A Chinese proverb applies to this aspect of the journey in recovery: You can’t pull on the shoots to help the plants grow.

Yet, I feel stuck. I know I’m further removed from not-dying, but I don’t feel closer to truly living. I guess these are the terms of life which I must accept for now. A fundamental act of living is to accept life on life’s terms. Where I’m at is where I’m at. I’m a newborn chick pecking at its shell.

Recovery is not a straight line. I’ve come to incorporate my seven-year relapse period into my journey and make it as much a part of my recovery as the previous thirteen years and past ten months. I may even one day come to gratitude for having experiened it, as painful and lonely as it was.

I realize this post is one more rambling, navel-gazing indulgence of self. I don’t expect people to read through this stuff–it is in the writing that I find solace and healing. But I still believe that there may be a reader out there who will find something they can relate to, and in that discovery find a connection to their own humanity.