I just got home from a meeting and it is the second one I have been to in about seven months. Bad. I should be going to AT LEAST one a week. I went to my homegroup because I received a phone call from Denise asking if I could chair the meeting. I am not "allowed" to say no to this (unless I have an engagement I can't miss) so I say thank you for calling and get ready to go to my eight o'clock meeting. In my sick mind I am thinking I am going to be given a million guilt trips for being gone for so long so I start to get anxious and nervous. Instead I was received with open arms. Literally. Hugs galore.
It was a moving meeting a friend of mine was there and she looked tired. Tired and strung out. She shared that in February she had relapsed. This hit me deep. That could have been me. I stopped going to meetings just like she did. I stopped calling people just like she did. I isolated just like she did. I made excuses just like she did.
If you've never overcome addiction it is hard to understand what a relapse would feel like. I have had so many relapse dreams over the last three years that I know exactly how I would feel when I took that first drink or line or hit. It would be euphoria, ecstacy, misery and self hate all at once hitting you like a nine pound hammer right in the stomach. She said she picked up right where she left off just before she hit bottom. You hear of this happening but never quite believe that after so much time you go right back to how you were when you quit. That was a horrible, unhappy place for me and I was reminded tonight how easily I could go back there.
Being in a group of people sharing their fears, hopes, dreams and confessing things that most people would have a coronary over, is a powerful thing. We all have one thing in common: we are all addicts. This is a higher power than anything else I have ever experienced.
