Out of the Woods. Diane Cameron
for us and for those around us. We can be trusted now. Enough of our amends are done so that we can laugh when we talk about the past with those who witnessed it up close. Our lives are rich and full.
At ten or fifteen years we have truly rich lives both in and out of “the rooms,” and now we have to balance “the rooms” with the rest of our lives.
We also now understand, in a new way, that there is no secret contract with God and no special deal for people in recovery. Yes, we are special because we have the gift of recovery but we are, at the same time, not so special.
We finally get it that we absolutely don’t have control. The things that happen to other women will happen to us: trouble with children, problems at work, financial difficulties, divorce, betrayal, cancer, disabilities, and people we love will die and we will grieve hard.
Recovery cannot spare us those things. Recovery doesn’t keep us from being touched by human life. We understand—quietly and seriously—that this is real life. And we’ll take it, and we say thank you.
THE COLORS OF RECOVERY WILL CHANGE
When I celebrated my fifth year of recovery, my friend Miriam made a quilted wall hanging for me to mark that significant anniversary. Miriam was ahead of me in recovery and she had celebrated her twelfth anniversary. Quilting was one of the passions that she’d reclaimed thanks to recovery and she was, much to her own surprise, very good at it.
The quilt panel that she made for me she called “Stages of Recovery.” It is a vertical panel that links four quilted squares on a deep burgundy background. The panels represent four stages of recovery and they begin at the top with a distinct checkerboard of black-and-white panels. This top square, Miriam told me, represents the start of recovery and the black-and-white necessity of not using your addictive substance or behavior. The stark contrast is about following the rules and doing what you are told. The black-and-white color scheme is clearly, “On/Off” and “Good/Bad.”
The panel below that one is another square with a strong black base and side columns of pure white, but with a deep pink band across the top that dips down to touch the back squares. “This is your pink cloud phase,” Miriam said. “This is where you are so happy to be in recovery; things are starting to get better; you see the gifts of the program and you just want more.”
I do remember that time of my recovery well. I talked about recovery to everyone. I carried recovery books and pamphlets home with me for the holidays. What? Not a table topic for Thanksgiving? This is the time when some of us begin to proselytize. We are so proud of ourselves that we break our own anonymity, and we can’t understand why everyone isn’t following our lead and joining a twelve-step program. Life is going to be fantastic from now on, right? Alas.
The next square down on my “stages” quilt is a square that includes neat rectangles made of black and white and pink prints. It’s pretty but not regimented like the stark black-and-white square at the top. This third square has something new: Now there are also deep gray squares scattered among the printed ones and a solid charcoal gray square at the exact center.
Yes, this represents that the gray of recovery and the gray of life have arrived.
The last quilt square is the shocker. The bottom piece is made up of many small squares seemingly tossed at random. Some are the now-familiar black and white and pink ones and there’s even some gray, but mixed in are more squares of candy red, bright blue, acid green, deep purple, tangerine orange, and a dull mustard yellow. There is no order in this stage. This square is distractingly messy, but it is deeply and happily colorful.
For years I disliked that last square. The other sections with their deliberate and limited palettes were graphic and sharp—and orderly—but this last square with its messy mix of too many colors always bothered me. But that bottom square signifying the “messy but colorful” part of recovery is what Out of the Woods is all about: messy progress, happiness, not perfection.
What we know now is that, as women in recovery, we need each of these stages and we need them in this order. When we are new, we need to submit to and embrace strict rule-following. “Don’t use—no matter what.” “If your ass falls off, pick it up and take it to a meeting.”
Then, as recovery starts to take, we are embraced in and humored through our “pink clouds,” but they too run their courses. The gray enters our recovery and we find that it’s a time when working with a sponsor and good recovery friends matter.
Discernment is a skill we have to develop in these gray years. Our recovery becomes our own; we make choices based on recovery principles, but our choices may not look like anyone else’s.
Then, if we keep coming around and we keep growing, our lives become more colorful and yes, even messy. This is when we have to figure out what our recovery will be like for the long haul. This may also be the time when newcomers or people in the black-and-white stages will question or challenge our commitment. They might say things like, “If you don’t go to three meetings a week you are going to use.”
Those in their own pink cloud stages will wonder at our suffering or our struggles. “She must not be working a good program if she is sad.” Or “She needs to practice the Third Step and everything will turn out fine.” They will want to believe that if they get their recovery “just right”—kind of like Goldilocks—then they will be spared the realities of human life that everyone experiences as we age.
Finally, in that colorful and messy stage, we will have fewer “shoulds.” We might have a sponsor or a few close recovering women friends. We might leave the marriage that in early recovery we worked so hard to save. We might have a baby—with or without a partner. We might leave our law practice to be an artist while our best friend gives up her successful pottery business to go to nursing school. There are no right answers. Plenty of confusion and new problems appear for sure, but we are guided through these times by a strong foundation of deep recovery.
As a newcomer I was attracted to those who looked good on the outside—often those who spoke well, were successful at work, and seemed to have it all together.
WHO HAS WHAT YOU WANT?
In early recovery I heard this advice over and over: “Look for someone who has what you want, and ask them how they got it.” That was also the advice I was given for how to pick a sponsor. As a newcomer I was attracted to those who looked good on the outside—often those who spoke well, were successful at work, and seemed to have it all together. But when I look around the rooms today, it’s not always the shiny stars or fine talkers who have what I want.
I started thinking about this when I was trying to encourage a woman I sponsored to do more step work. “But I’m not using my drugs of choice, and I don’t feel like I want to use them,” she told me. I tried to tell her that I want so much more than only abstinence from my recovery.
It’s true; I want more than abstinence from alcohol or other drugs or behaviors. I want more than a saner schedule or a good marriage. I want the whole enchilada. I want a deeply changed mind and heart, and I want peace, serenity, and joy. I also want the highest quality relationships possible—with my husband, family, friends, my higher power of course, and, yes, with myself.
But here’s where it gets tricky. That good, changed life comes with longevity; more time in recovery does equal more exposure to new ideas, concepts, and learning as we go, layer upon layer, through the Twelve Steps. But those changes and that growth are not directly correlated to simply accumulating days in recovery. And not everyone in the rooms wants the kind of deep, continual life-changing recovery that I am describing. I find that I still have to look around the rooms and ask myself, “Who has what I want?”
It’s possible to have thirty-five years of recovery and still be miserable and unhappy and filled with resentment and fear. (Sorry, but it’s true.) We share the rooms with some people who have been around a long