The Missing Link

Dawn is breaking on a beautiful April Spring day. It is chilly and I am slightly worried about the Jade plants that I have moved outside. Grass is growing and geese are singing. The mint has popped up after disappearing during our deep freeze this last winter. The willows are showing their early leaves, the walnut tree is budding, and the oak in my yard has lost its last leaf, a sure sign that warmer weather is on its way. I sit here tired from many days of exertion and a difficult period early this month. I am doing well. I have recently decreased a medication due to long term stability, so I am being careful with myself. Spring can be a triggering time for my mental illness. Some people suffer during the holidays, and some deal with mania in the summer. Spring has almost always been the time that I come close to “breaking”, or deal with psychosis. So I am keeping a close eye on myself. So far I feel fine, just a bit exhausted, and so I am taking a breather.

Today I get to run a 10am meeting for my recovery program. I entered this program in July of 2019. I was desperately trying to start a mental health support group here in my community. For a small time we had one, and then it disbanded during the pandemic. I found myself online, and I found that there are a great many resources at our fingertips using Zoom. I struggle with a few addictive tendencies as well as mental illness, which makes me dual diagnosis. Not to the degree that some people suffer with addiction, but enough. I was a steady and regular, sometimes heavy drinker. Giving up alcohol has been a big part of my mental health program. When I came into the program in 2019, I was desperate to find stability. I was coming out of a big episode in 2019, where I barely avoided the hospital. I had also suffered with breaks in 2016 and 2018, after nine years of stability and remission. It was time for me to get on the wagon, and to look at my using. I am not ashamed of this. I still have work to do with my smoking and sometimes with my eating, but I have given up the addictive substances of alcohol, caffeine, and gluten. I sometimes suffer with obsessive behavior around exercise and perfectionism, and the psychological addiction of an eating disorder that I have been in recovery for since my mid teens, is responsible for that. Yet another addiction from which I benefit from being in a recovery program.

There are so many different meetings online. You can go to traditional meetings, secular meetings, meetings in Spanish, and queer focused meetings. You can go to discussion meetings, meditation meetings, literature study meetings, and more. I also know there are other types of recovery focused meetings outside of AA. There are buddhist recovery meetings, there are smoking cessation groups, and there are dual diagnosis or mental health support groups. There is Overeaters Anonymous, Alanon, Adult Child of Alcoholics, Narcotics Anonymous and as I said, more. I personally tend to stay in AA, which is where many of these meetings got their building blocks. I also like to keep it simple. I am sure I would benefit from any and possibly all of these meetings, but I choose to focus on my drinking and mental health for the time being. Focusing on not drinking benefits my mental health greatly, and I love AA.

In a literature meeting that I attended on Monday, we were discussing that AA is somewhere between Science and Religion. I like that, it is the missing link. What it is, is peer to peer support. In the mental health field peer to peer counseling has been shown to really work. Years ago back in Seattle, around 2006, I trained to be a Peer Counselor. I soon moved out to Lopez Island in the San Juans after my last and longest hospitalization in 2007. We do not have Peer Counseling services in this very rural community, so I forfeited working in that field. Though much later on, I would discover AA, and learn the true magic of peer support in the guise of a recovery meeting.

I am leaning into AA and my recovery meetings this Spring. I get to do gratitude lists and write letters with a fellow person in recovery, I have a sponsor that I talk to regularly whom I adore, and I get to do service and run meetings which brings me a sense of purpose. I’m not sure what it is. It is not religion, and it is not necessarily science either. It is a delicate yet monumental thread that connects the two together. As I observe Spring coming into fruition, as the eastern part of the United States observes the solar eclipse, I am reminded that science can be spiritual, and that spirituality can have a scientific theme. Maybe it is not always important to define our experience, as much as it is important to just sit back in awe and appreciation for all that we have this very moment, in the here and now, as sober as we can be.