Leave the Light On

by Jennifer Storm

  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.

  5

  CHECKS AND BALANCES

  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 and wanted to follow my instructions perfectly. You see, I was also a people pleaser. I wanted to do everything right, which is impossible. Perfection, while a nice concept, is bullshit. There really isn’t anything perfect in this world, although the majority of us are still aiming at, trying for, and seeking it every minute of every day.

  So I set out on my quest to find the perfect, Buddha-like sponsor who would usher me flawlessly into this recovery thing. In my first meeting, a woman named Tina spoke and her words struck me. She was in her late thirties with badly bleached, dirty blonde, frizzy hair and a horrible complexion. Her face seemed to be covered in acne scars, which I later learned actually came from her picking her face for hours in the mirror while sketching out in a heroin- and cocaine-induced haze.

  I was immediately taken by her as she spoke of her own battle as a cokehead and alcoholic. She smoked a lot of crack, shot heroin, and got into a lot of trouble with the law. She seemed perfect for me! After the meeting, I walked up to her and asked her to be my sponsor and she said yes. To have a sponsor who had also done the drugs I had done and more was so exciting to me. Finally, someone who could relate to me!

  I spoke to Tina daily and sought her guidance on everything I did. In rehab, I had learned painfully that my own thinking had gotten me addicted, so it was time to start taking suggestions. One key example they gave me in rehab group therapy was my faulty thinking and my behavior with Matt—my sneaking around and trying to hook up with a guy I knew nothing about. In my head, I thought nothing of what I was doing. Seeing Matt was a convenient distraction for me and something I felt justified in doing because I didn’t see the harm in it to myself or others. My counselors and peers in the group abruptly pointed out to me that I was engaging in what they call in recovery “stinking thinking.” This is any form of thinking that takes you away from your purpose—the purpose being to maintain recovery. It would take me a long time to start putting these pieces of new information into practice in my life. It was critical for me to have someone with more recovery experience in my life to constantly reinforce these principles in my malfunctioning brain. As with any behavioral change, recovery must be reinforced and practiced daily. In many ways that is what a sponsor is—a behavioral modifier.

  The day Tina agreed to be my sponsor, I left the meeting and hopped into my little silver Toyota, one of my possessions that I still managed to have. Although it was falling apart at the seams, it got me from points A to B, which was good because Matthew lived in bumfuck turn left at Egypt, on the outskirts of State College. It took me twenty to thirty minutes to get into town for my meetings. Often I would go to a meeting that was in Center Hall, closer to our house. It was a great little meeting with people who were more rural than the professional types I encountered in State College. In State College everyone held degrees, and those in my meetings were often well-educated and established. They were lawyers, doctors, professors, or other professionals affiliated with the university. In Center Hall, I was among my own type of people—everyday workers with little educational background.

  Although the recovery text, meetings, and my sponsor were great for keeping me on track in recovery, I needed more. Like most people with addiction, there were core emotional reasons I was addicted, the majority of which stemmed from my early confusion about my sexuality and my first sexual experience being an assault. Instead of addressing these things, I learned to escape and to hide everything in alcohol and drugs. And though recovery allowed me to look at these reasons and begin to heal, more in-depth counseling was necessary for me to really unearth the entire trauma I had experienced.

  Often it is crucial to seek various types of treatment or medications to sustain recovery, and whatever is determined to be the best course of action is the best course of action, period. People in recovery sometimes offer a lot of judgment and misperceptions, including negative reactions toward medications, counseling, and people with a dual diagnosis. There are some who believe twelve-step recovery is the answer and the only answer, but I believe there are others who need more. I have watched people try to go off their meds because of others’ disdain for meds in the rooms of recovery, and all it did was drive them back to drink or to engage in other unhealthy behaviors. If people need medications or other treatments to sustain certain chemicals in their brains to obtain and maintain recovery, in my opinion they should listen to their doctors’ recommendations. Later on, they can always look for alternatives when they have some time
in recovery under their belts.

  My take on this was that it was up to me determine what worked for me, in consultation with a sponsor, therapist, doctor, or all three. The beauty of recovery was that it was mine and mine alone. I charted my path as it suited me. There were many road maps placed before me in the rooms of recovery, and many of them worked, so I was beginning to use what applied and let go of what didn’t apply for me.

  Still on the pink cloud “high” of early recovery, I was ready to learn everything I could and beginning to feel things I had never felt or had refused to feel in the past. Counseling, I thought, would be a great way to help me process my emotions appropriately. In addition to my program of recovery, I needed counseling to dive deep into my past assaults, to take a closer look at my dysfunctional relationship with my mother and how that played into my own addiction, and to really understand why I drank and drugged.

  I began to see a therapist who was located near St. Andrew’s church and was recommended to me by several others in the program. She was a middle-aged woman with whom I felt comfortable almost immediately. She had a wonderful way about her, wasn’t judgmental in any way, and put me at ease quickly. We began working together, twice a week at first. I had nothing but time on my hands, and my medical assistance was paying for my therapy, so I was taking advantage of it. We had to establish a time line, and I had to bring her up to speed on my life. That alone was exhausting. It is sometimes so much easier to talk with someone who knows you, but at that time, those people were few and far between in my life. So with every new encounter, I found myself telling my life story again. In hindsight, that was really a good thing because it made me talk about my past and expose my disease constantly and on many different levels. With my therapist this was on the most intimate of levels because she needed to know it all— the good, the bad, and the ugly—to fully understand how my mind worked and how she could begin to help me heal. She continually gave me homework assignments to do so I could see myself more clearly. We talked about everything. I found myself opening up to her easily, and before I knew it the hour was up and it was time for me to leave. She was helping me identify my patterns and understand my personality, both my assets and my flaws.

  Between my therapist and my sponsor, I was beginning to have some nice checks and balances in my life that had never been there before. I had people I could confide in and go to for guidance.

  6

  FINISHING SOMETHING

  BECAUSE I DIDN’T HAVE MUCH GOING ON DURING THE time between my meetings and my therapy sessions, I became obsessed with Oprah Winfrey. I had always loved her show, and it was one thing that had bonded my father and me in the past. For whatever reason, he always made sure he was home by 4:00 p.m. when I got home from school, and we would watch Oprah together. It was nice to have something that bonded my father and me, because we didn’t have a whole lot in common as I was growing up. I think I just confused and scared the shit out of him most of the time. He wasn’t equipped to deal with a teenage girl on his own. Since he and my mother divorced after my sexual assault and he stayed to raise me and my two older brothers, he was a little lost in the parenting department. He was used to the role of provider; but with my mother gone, he had to attempt to provide the more motherly, emotional type of support too. He had no clue how to do that, so instead we would sit and watch Oprah and try to connect through the topics on the show.

  It wasn’t as though I missed the motherly stuff, because my mother was not your stereotypical mom. She had been verbally abusive and emotionally absent all my life, so to have her physically absent as well didn’t seem like that much of a difference to me. When I would act out, as I had become accustomed to doing, my father would tiptoe around me as though I might scream or shatter at any time. In many ways, that was pretty accurate. Back then I was a walking live wire at all times, so no one could ever predict my emotional outbursts or severe mood swings.

  So now here I was years later, glued to the TV at 4:00 p.m. each day like an obsessed evangelist watching The 700 Club, waiting for my daily dose of scripture. In early recovery, people are like sponges; we soak up everything around us. I would go to my daily meeting and share my newfound Oprah enlightenment, which would always rouse a chuckle out of everyone. In fact, it earned me the nickname “Oprah Jen” for my first year at meetings in Center Hall.

  Instead of laughing at me, though, those people understood what I was saying and going through. They understood how new to all this I was and how, in early recovery, everything is a deep and new revelation.

  I was starting to go stir-crazy being in the house and not working, so I went to the local hobby store and looked around. Being alone for eight hours or more was too much for me, and I needed something to occupy my mind and my time. I looked around the shop at various art projects, stitch work, needlepoint, and paint-by-number kits. I had tried all these activities at different points of my life, but never finished any of them. I learned in rehab and in therapy that I had an issue with finishing things. I am inherently a perfectionist, and in therapy I discovered that once I had started using, I stopped tasks completely. I was afraid they wouldn’t live up to the enormous expectations I had in my mind, so it was easier to make excuses as to why I never finished them.

  That fear of imperfection kept me from finishing various things in my life. I barely graduated high school because I skipped so many classes and so many days that the administrators said I was too delinquent to attend graduation. The ceremony was seen as a privilege, and I didn’t quite earn mine. After that I attempted to take some college-level classes, but stopped attending the classes midway through the semester because I just didn’t feel like going. I was only twenty-two years old, but during my time in the workforce I’d had more than thirty-six jobs in almost as many fields: waitress, hostess, bartender, insurance claims adjuster, travel agent, receptionist, shampoo girl, medical assistant. You name it, and I had tried it—but never finished it. I would decide one day that I wanted to go to college and would start filling out applications, and then toss them aside to collect dust on my desk. Another day I would decide I wanted to be a flight attendant, call the agency, get the application, and tell everyone I was going to pursue this career, only to find the application months later sitting on top of the unfinished college applications. I was never committed to anything, so it was easy to abandon things. As I left for rehab, my former counselor looked at me and said, “Well, you are going to rehab for thirty days. Finish that.” I did finish rehab, so that was my first completed task to date.

  My new therapist was also big on getting me to finish at least one simple task. So as I stood in front of this wall of crafts, my eyes were drawn to a paint-by-number kit that showed two wolves and beautiful moonlit scenery. I picked it up and looked it over. It seemed easy enough; it came with the canvas labeled with numbers to show you where to paint each color, a plastic row of paints with coinciding numbers on them, and a cheap paintbrush with hard, plastic bristles. I decided if I was going to do this paint-by-number thing, I was going to take this work of art seriously, so I moved over to the paintbrush aisle to pick out a real paintbrush. I found a nice brush and went to the counter to pay for my new project. I didn’t have a ton of money at the time, but my living expenses were zero under Matt’s roof, I was able to collect a little bit of unemployment from my last job as a waitress, and my parents would send me some money every now and then.

  When I arrived home, I pulled my purchase out of the bag and opened it with excitement, mainly because I was just happy to have something different to do with my time. I was fine when at therapy and meetings, but that only took up at the max three hours of my day. I was left to fill the other hours, which at this point was making me nutty. So with much anticipation, I set up a little painting studio in Matthew’s living room, right in front of the TV, because it was close to 4:00 p.m. and Oprah was coming on. I began my hobby and became quite enthralled with this new activity.

  I found painting very calming,
which was exactly what I needed. I carefully filled in each numbered space with the corresponding paint color from the box. This became part of my daily routine. Wake up, drink coffee, avoid Matthew’s advances, go to a meeting, on some days go to therapy, come home, eat lunch, paint and watch Oprah, wait for Matthew to come home, go to a meeting with him, usually just come home afterward, spend some time watching TV with his dad, and go to bed. The painting became the highlight of my daily life. Realizing that saddened me. I really was starting to feel as though I needed a job or some type of purpose.

  By the way, I did finish the painting, and it was quite brilliant if I may say so myself. I framed that bad boy and gave it to my oldest brother, Jimmy, for a Christmas present. To this day, he still has it hanging on his wall. It is my one-piece ongoing art exhibit, and I am damn proud.

  After finishing that artwork, and as a result of continual attendance in therapy, it was clear to me that I needed to get a job, get out of Matthew’s house, and get out of the relationship, for that matter. I had been discussing the relationship in therapy, and, although my therapist never told me what to do, the day I mentioned it might be healthy for me to move out and end it, she was elated. It was becoming more and more difficult to pretend to be his girlfriend anyway. We never spent much time alone; we didn’t interact as a couple in terms of kissing or having sex. Eventually, one night when he came into my room and attempted to slip into bed with me while his father was out, I had had enough, sat him down, and told him I was just not ready to be in a relationship—that I needed to focus on my recovery. I didn’t have the heart to tell him that was only half true.