The road taken

Courage.

The road to recovery can be daunting.

It’s paved with night sweats, dreams of using, endless meetings, gym sessions, counseling and medical appointments. And those are just the basics. There’s the prickly core of it all — honest reckonings with so many people, including yourself.

Then there’s the general drag of being a functional human being — reading self-help books, listening to people who can’t stop talking, being upset by the news, and lusting over things I can’t afford.

If you laid all that out for me when I was an addict, I’d have offered a resounding ‘no thanks’. And crawled back into the nearly complete coffin I had built for myself.

Do not want.

But there was something about the process, eased, of course, by love that made this journey increasingly painless. Eventually, all those awful rituals — making my bed, going to the gym, applying for school — began to feel, dare I say, good.

I think it’s all about the honest reckonings. They came early — first to family, then whatever friends I had left, then neighbors and eventually, complete strangers.

“I am an addict!”

Most essentially, I had to tell myself that. I wish I had the courage to do it earlier. Because after that, this became a journey, not of recovery — but redemption. You can get pretty high on it. And sure, the road is daunting. Until you’re actually on it.

Then you may wish it never ended.