thoughts about recovery

I wonder about what recovery really is and I don’t know the answer. I didn’t think this was something important to consider while “in treatment”. I didn’t even stop to think about what being “in treatment” really even meant for my future. I thought it was obvious that recovery and being “in treatment” meant I had been really fucked-up for a long time, and now, I just wasn’t going to get fuck-up again once I got home, simple really. I remember about two weeks in, I wanted to go home. I was sure I was going home. They had an intervention with three other people. One being a woman who’d been a pastor, I guess still was, but one who’d lost their congregation due to her second relapse. I’d been feeling bad about making an idiot of myself in seminary, so she made me appreciate my situation of being in rehab about 33 years before her (I was lucky). I told them, no offense, but I wasn’t listening to anything they were saying. Not to be rude, or because I’m a bitch, but because my mind was already made-up and it wasn’t going to change, no matter what. Period. Being my first, and I still pray to God my last visit to rehab, I told the three interventions “I got this”. All being recovering addicts, and multiple visitors of various rehabs in their pasts, they all got offended. “You got this?” one woman said in a pissy tone, “Then, fine, go if you’ve got this.” Now I totally understand why that remark is offensive to a recovering addict, because sometimes I do not even know what this is. Or why whatever this is—is. I will probably never, ever “get this”. Some will come closer to figuring it out than others, but I don’t think any of will ever completely get “it”. When I thought of recovery while in treatment peaceful things like meadows, babbling brooks, butterflies and unicorns came to my mind. In the company of mostly well intentioned, kind, like minded people and professionals who cared about our well being and healing—I think, I must have thought the experience, the rite of passage of the rehab experience in itself was going to somehow make me a different person. I didn’t have the sense to fear that somehow I was going to be the one to make this change of self happen. Now, recover seems much more like war than the peace times I’d envisioned. It’s disappointing in a way because I often times, again, I feel ways I’d naively thought and hoped and prayed I’d never feel again. I still have thoughts and desires I despise being attached to. So first what recovery has become is disappointment in having to feeling everything I tried to drug into oblivion, but never successfully did. Recovery is living with those feelings and not being fucked-up, of course it’s war. Yet in this recovery sometimes there is somehow peace in the midst of war. Like a rainbow that shines through in the middle of a bad thunderstorm.