Leave the Light On. Jennifer Storm

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 to 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.