Northwoods Recovery: A bona fide miracle

Life was an endless battle on all fronts; if my wife/girlfriend wasn’t giving me grief I was shoveling it at her, bosses were always unfairly on my case — I mean, just because I was usually wasted doesn’t mean my work wasn’t up to snuff — so lack of appreciation compelled me to quit jobs faster than I could find them, which naturally lead to unpaid rent and angry landlords. Of course somehow I managed to keep myself in dope — my salvation, or so I thought — but doing so came with its own problems; between getting ripped-off and arrested, staying supplied with the drugs I needed was another war entirely. 

Keeping myself high on whatever drugs I could buy, beg or steal was all that made this crappy life barely tolerable. 

So when luck and dope finally ran out and I was facing long years in prison, what choice did I have, really? Seeing no other option, I tried killing myself, with no more success than usual. 

In a life that saw me stumbling from one failure to the next, this latest and greatest failure paved the way for what was completely unexpected; my greatest and most rewarding success. Surviving that chunk of colossal stupidity ushered me into this new and totally different way of living I call Northwoods recovery, where I now reside with unaccustomed but most welcome peace of mind.  

 I don’t believe the sum of my experiences in addiction or how I came to be in this recovery are markedly different from any other recovering drug addict’s. We are all survivors of addiction’s insanity; while actively consuming lethal quantities of toxic drugs we risked our lives, our health, our freedom — everything we should hold dear — in a desperate attempt to make life slightly less miserable.  

An effort doomed to fail. But when finally forced to admit to addiction — at rock-bottom and nowhere left to turn — and our responsibility for it, the door to recovering opens, and only then can we begin the long healing process.  

After some painful months of detoxing, of strict abstinence, clear understanding dawns; we’ve been granted a bonafide miracle, and every day we get to live that miracle all over again.  

 For me, belief in miracles, in God, began the same day as my recovery. For us, gratefully recovering addicts, ownership of this miraculous life is best expressed in one simple statement: We do recover.