The church was located across the street from a large football field that belonged to the local high school. I would pull up out back and park to find several of my fellow addicts milling about and smoking and chatting. I always came to the meetings early to help set up, make coffee, and arrange recovery literature on the tables. It gave me more to do and an opportunity to meet with others before the meetings. It is suggested in recovery to always arrive fifteen minutes prior to a meeting and stay fifteen minutes afterward to meet-and-greet others. That time is often referred to as the “meeting before and after the meeting,” time set aside to get to know one another and discuss not so much our recovery or addiction, but the more personal details of our lives.
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.
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