I love AA meetings and the people who attend them. I have never had an alcohol or drug problem, but I still feel more at home in a 12-step circle in a dusty church basement than I do almost anywhere else. If I had to pinpoint the origin of my love affair with this community of revolutionaries, it would be in a dusty church basement (where else?) in Wickenburg, AZ. My eating disorder rehab center offered transportation to the meeting, and since I didn't have anything better to do in the middle of the desert, I tagged along one morning. I squeezed in between an old, gray-haired biker in a do-rag and an older, grayer-haired cowboy complete with hat and spurs. ("And you felt at home there?!" I'm getting to it.) I nervously introduced myself, "Hi, I'm Cassie, and I'm an addict." The words felt awkward leaving my mouth. That wasn't really true, was it? I wasn't an alcoholic, wasn't hooked on drugs like those other people. The more I considered it, though, the more I realized how true the statement was. I was an addict, hopelessly dependent upon self-starvation to dull the pain of life. As the folks in that basement read from the Big Book and shared their experiences, I nodded and thought, over and over and over, "I've been there." Their pain was my pain. Our poisons may have been different, but our ailments were identical.
There's another thing I love about my friends in AA. They're never "recovered." They keep going back, keep returning to those church basements, month after month, year after year, decade after decade. After I had settled in to the Wickenburg AA, I got familiar with some of the regulars. Over the coffee maker one morning I asked one of the old cowboys why he stuck with it after over 20 years of sobriety. "Kid," he told me with his hand on my shoulder, "if I quit coming, I'll die." It was as simple as that. My pal, and tens of thousands of his comrades, understood an absolute about recovery from addiction: You work it, or it doesn't work.
Someone asked me recently if I think it's really possible for everyone to recover from addiction. The caretaker in me wanted to rush forward and insist, "Of course it is! There's always hope! No one is too far gone!" The realist in me (downer that she is) was much more cautious. I ended up telling my friend the truth as gently as I could: "I think anyone who makes up her mind to recover, and keeps making up her mind every single day, can stay sober, no matter how long or how severely they'd been down the hole. Some people just won't make up their minds, and in the time it takes before they finally come around, the damage can grow too great." I know that's not the most optimistic analysis, but I think it's the honest one.
At the end of the day, no matter how many thousands of stories I've heard in AA and in eating disorder treatment, I can only refer to my own story with any certainty. And this is what I know. Recovery isn't going away to rehab for a month or two and coming home fixed. Recovery isn't finding God and instantly abandoning all your vices (though the finding God part can be a really big asset). Recovery isn't quitting cold turkey because your loved ones ask you to. Recovery isn't a one-shot deal, it isn't neat and tidy, and it doesn't come in a bottle or a doctor's office or your dream job.
Recovery is the choice we make every single day to suit up and show up. It's the thousands of mundane choices we make daily that bring us closer to the life we want, and further from the life we had. It's being willing to sit through the discomfort, the cravings, the ache of loneliness and the fire of rage and the crushing emptiness of sadness, reminding ourselves that this too shall pass. Recovery is seeking out the people who will lift us up, and avoiding the people who will pull us down. Recovery is a state of perpetual motion. Like my cowboy friend observed, if we quit coming, we die.
