Leave the Light On

by Jennifer Storm

I just felt nothing for him sexually or romantically. It wasn’t him— he was a sweetheart. It was me. There is a really good reason that counselors and others advise you to not be in a relationship during the first year of recovery. Everything is so raw and new, and the focus really needs to be on yourself and your program. However, this is not an easy concept for newcomers, especially us young ones, when we are finally feeling alive again in our bodies and hormones are raging. The sexual energy in a room full of young people in recovery can be a whole other type of intoxicating. It is quite surprising that on any given day you don’t walk into a young people’s meeting and see them all dry-humping each other like dogs in heat.

  Matt did not take it very well when I told him, so I knew I needed to get the hell out of his house ASAP.

  7

  STICKING WITH WINNERS

  BY BREAKING UP WITH MATT, I HAD JUST THROWN my newfound routine and stability into upheaval. It was clear after dumping him that I had worn out my welcome and needed to move on. Even though I knew it was the right thing to do, I found myself very emotional after it all. I was sad for hurting him, but I also immediately missed the attention and “love” I thought I had received from him. I cried a lot about it—not so much over him but more for myself and the void I felt inside me. It was confusing, because I also found myself ecstatic about my new ability to vocalize my needs and actually follow through with them. So much change was going on inside me that I felt like I was on a daily roller coaster, and the ups and downs were making my head spin.

  My sponsor, Tina, offered to let me live with her while I searched for an apartment. So I moved into her condo, closer to downtown State College, which was where I wanted to be anyway. Everything was new—my room, the coffee maker, my surroundings, the neighborhood, everything. It freaked me out a bit because I was so used to my old routine. 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 t
o 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.

  8

  NEW FRIENDS

  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, and extra money to go out to eat or anytime I needed something. They frequently sent me notes of encouragement that said how proud they were of me. The cards reaffirmed that I was on the right track. They made me lighten up when I opened and read them, and I proudly displayed them.

  When I caught Tina in her lie, I called my parents and told them my living environment was no longer a safe place for me and my recovery because my sponsor was using. My parents knew enough about the program of recovery to know that the most important thing is to avoid people, places, and things related to using. After talking, we determined it was time for me to get my own apartment. This was something my parents had wanted me to do from the start. To this point in my life, I had never been on my own.

  Before meeting my father, my stepmother was a fiercely independent woman. She had always provided for herself, and I knew she wanted me to experience that kind of freedom and security. My father was different. He always had been in a relationship, and up to that point, I had mirrored his actions. My parents had saved a good chunk from the insurance money left by my biological mother when she died three months before I went into rehab. Her death from breast cancer was one of the catalysts that got me into recovery. The pain of her loss was too much for me to bear, which helped me hit rock bottom quickly. My father and stepmother were smart about my inheritance when I got it after her death. Knowing that I was a mess and still using, they requested that I give them the money and allow them to dispense it to me as needed. For some reason I actually agreed to this, probably because I was such a mess, but also because I was making good enough money tending bar to feed my drug habit. So I didn’t push the issue with them as long as they paid my bills and rent. Thanks to them, I ended up with a couple of thousand dollars left over. I used the money to find a cute little one-bedroom efficiency set in the woods about a mile from the Pennsylvania State University campus.

  The apartment was an adorable space on the second floor of a two-story brick building in a large complex. Located off the main road and away from the more traditional student apartment complexes, it sat on a winding road nearly hidden in the woods. It was surrounded by trees, and a stream ran through my backyard. I could sit for hours on the wooden deck off my bedroom just reading, journaling, and enjoying my surroundings. It was quiet. The apartment complex catered to older students and families, and the managers screened the tenants carefully to try to avoid the typical party scene that would play out across the street at the more traditional student housing. It felt like an oasis, which was exactly what my soul needed at the time.

  My parents loaded all of my former belongings into a U-Haul, brought along my cat that had been living with my brother, and drove up to help me move into my new apartment. I didn’t have a ton of stuff left over—a bed, a dresser from my childhood (off-white with little pink flowers), a TV, a coffee table, and a black high-top kitchen table with two chairs that my mother had bought years ago and which I’d kept after her death. My parents and I went out and bought a futon so I had a place to sit and watch the small TV I had.

  While we were moving things into my apartment, my father dragged my bed up the stairs into the tiny bedroom. As he hoisted it on top of the already existing box spring, my eyes were immediately drawn to a faint, red stain that covered a large portion of the mattress. I was transported back to that night—the night I hit my rock bottom, the night of my last drink and drug, the night I sliced away the flesh on my wrists in an attempt to kill myself. Tears flooded my eyes and my father became uncomfortable and said, “Oh, I forgot about that,” and just like that, he flipped it over to its other white, clean side.

  I stood there for a couple of minutes trying to regain my balance and focus on the present. He asked if I was okay. I just nodded. He mumbled something about the bed being so new he didn’t want to throw it out, because I had just purchased it only three months prior to the incident, and blah, blah, blah. The “incident” is how we refer to what I did. I assured him it was fine and I was fine, and truly, I kind of was. The mattress, even white side up, would serve as yet another reminder for me, just like the soft scars on my wrists served as vivid reminders. At this early stage in my recovery, having as many reminders as possible was good. Anytime I would remotely think my old way of living wasn’t that bad, I would look at those scars and they would scream a different story.

  This activity is called “keeping it green” in the recovery community. It is about not shutting the door on our past, but allowing it to stay open enough for us to remember how bad it was at any given point in our addiction. Sometimes we call it “playing the tape all the way through.” For example, if you think you want a drink, you play that scenario over in your head all the way through to its inevitable conclusion based on your past experiences. For me that would mean picking up a drink, then another and another, eventually craving cocaine and finding a dealer, staying out all night getting high, spending all my money, finding myself utterly desperate and depressed when the drugs are gone and the sun is shining in my face, disappointing my family, and losing my recovery time. I usually only get halfway through the scenario when it dawns on me that I am much better off not picking up that first drink.

  That first drink—it’s always all about the first one. You can’t get to the other parts of that scenario without picking up the first drink, and that day, thank God I had enough tools from being in recovery for a while that I could talk myself out of the first drink. I also didn’t have the desire to drink, really. That had been lifted from me very early in recovery. But I had the occasional craving and needed to deal with it just like everyone else.

  At the time, I was reading a lot of recovery books, which really helped reinforce the principles of the program and gave me differing viewpoints on recovery. I wanted to learn as much as I could about recovery and how to continue on the path I was taking toward healing myself of my past wounds. So I began reading as much material as I could get my hands on. In meetings, there were often lots of books relating to recovery that brought me a deeper level of understanding of these concepts. I read these books whenever I felt like I needed an extra dose of recovery or when I was bored and found myself with time on my hands. In early recovery, keeping yourself busy and surrounded by the program is so important because it is easy to get sucked back into negative thoughts or to indulge the occasional self-pity
or depression that naturally arises when making such major life changes.

  I also began keeping a journal of all my thoughts, feelings, and daily occurrences. My therapist suggested it would be a good idea to maintain a daily journal to keep track of my progress and to help sort out my feelings on paper. I began to realize how helpful this tool was since I had a million things running through my head at all times. Fears, doubts, excitement—you name it, I was experiencing it, so it was good for me to spill the contents of my overflowing mind onto paper. Doing so helped defuse a lot of my fears and allowed me to process through emotions productively by writing them down, almost problem-solving or counseling myself while writing. Often I would start to write about a fear or a problem I was experiencing, and by the time I was done writing, I had figured it out on my own.

  Some days I would just sit on my little deck and write about how peaceful the world around me seemed and about the vast contrast between my old life and my new. It helped me see the little things I had to be grateful for each day, which was especially helpful on those days when I was feeling particularly lonely or down on my luck. As great as things were going for me in my new town and new life, I still missed my family, my friends, and my old life—well, at least the good parts of my old life.

  Because I needed to put space between myself and my former sponsor, I quit the job at the biotech firm. I was fortunate to have enough money to afford my apartment and live for a while without having to work full time. I knew I needed to start looking for a job soon, because the money wouldn’t last forever and it would be good for me to have something to do during the day. Ironically, sometimes a lot of free time can be hard to manage. I began putting applications in at the mall at various retail stores and responded to an ad in the paper from a travel agency looking for a leisure travel agent. In my past I had worked as a corporate travel agent for a year, so I thought I might have a good shot at getting the job or at least an interview. Until then, I decided to focus on myself and my recovery.