Going Back

Seven years and one day.

That is how long it had been since I walked through the doors of that treatment center — not as a patient this time, but as alumni. As someone who made it out.

I went to catch up with an old friend. A gentleman I had been in treatment with seven years ago, right before the world shut down and COVID changed everything. We had kept in loose touch the way people from treatment sometimes do — not every day, not every week, but with the kind of quiet understanding that you don't need to explain yourself to someone who watched you fall apart in real time. He was there. He knows.

That is the strange alchemy of treatment. You are thrown together with a group of strangers at the absolute worst moment of your life, and somehow — in the trenches, digging out moment to moment — you bond in a way that is almost impossible to describe to people who haven't experienced it. These people watched me cry for three weeks straight. Not occasionally. Not in private. All day, every day, in front of everyone. And at night I seethed with an anger I didn't know I had in me. I did not sleep — not one wink — for the entire duration of my stay. I was completely unmedicated for the first time in my adult life. No meds. No booze. No weed.

It was rough does not begin to cover it. My emotions swung wildly and without warning, like a door in a storm. I had no control. I was so pissed at every person I felt had done me dirty. I had a list. A long one. But that is a prior article — we are not talking about the list today.

Going Back

Walking back in felt surreal. The building looked different. They had expanded. There were way more people.

I sat in on an AA meeting while I was there. The speaker had one year under his belt. He was nervous. He stumbled over his words, circled back, lost his thread. I recognized it immediately — not because I was judging him, but because I had been him. That particular uncertainty. The way you open your mouth and aren't quite sure what your story is yet, because you are still in the middle of it, still sorting through the wreckage to figure out what actually happened to you.

I didn't know my story either, once.

That changed when I started writing. When I started this series. What began as a way to process became a way to understand, and what I understand now — sitting in that room, listening to a man with one year try to find his words — is that the story was always there. I had just buried it. My mind had pushed so much of the abuse so far back that I had convinced myself it wasn't abuse at all. That it was love.

What I now know was a trauma bond. Years of systematic abuse and erasure, dressed up as love, until I couldn't tell the difference between the two.

No fucking more.

People ask me sometimes what inpatient treatment actually does that AA or white-knuckling it on your own doesn't. The honest answer is: it removes you. Completely. You don't go home at night to the same couch, the same refrigerator, the same phone full of the same people. You don't get to slip back into your routine and tell yourself you'll try harder tomorrow. Inpatient takes away every exit. There is no leaving early, no "I'll start Monday," no glass of wine to take the edge off a hard session. It is twenty-four hours a day of being with yourself — your actual self, not the version you perform for other people — and that is terrifying in a way that nothing else is. AA is powerful, and I mean that sincerely, but you can still go home after a meeting. You can still avoid. Treatment doesn't let you avoid. It sits you in a room with a therapist and a group of strangers who are all falling apart in their own specific ways, and it makes you look at the thing you have been running from, sometimes for decades. That is what happened to me. I had no meds, no alcohol, no weed, no distractions — just me, a plastic chair, and seven years of things I had never said out loud. That is what inpatient does that nothing else can replicate.

The 60-Day Chip

I decided to take my 60-day chip.

I walked up and did what we do.

“Hi. My name is Kristen and I am an alcoholic.”

I haven’t said those words in years.

I walked up and took the chip and stood there for a moment longer than I needed to, because I didn't want to let go of it too quickly. I haven't held one of those in years. I forgot what it feels like — the weight of it, the specific smallness of it in your palm, the way it means something enormous and fits in your pocket at the same time.

Sixty days. It fits in your palm and means everything.

It is sixty mornings of choosing differently. Sixty nights of sitting with yourself instead of numbing out. Sixty days of building something that can actually hold weight.

I am proud of it. I am saying that out loud because I spent a long time not being allowed to be proud of myself for anything.

The Rebuild

I go back to work in one week. I haven't worked in two years.

I am nervous in a way that is hard to articulate. It isn't the job itself — it is the people. I haven't been around a group of new people in quite some time. I have gotten comfortable in my quiet. My small world. The controlled radius of my days.

I am also looking for a place to rent within an hour of work, and I haven't found anything yet. I am taking my time, which is new for me. I am a rash-judgment thinker by nature — I make decisions too fast, pull the trigger before I've aimed, and then live with the consequences. I have done that my whole life. With apartments. With jobs. With men.

This time I am doing it differently. I am not going to make a mistake because I am in a hurry. I am not going to settle because I am scared. I am going to wait until something feels right, and I am going to trust that feeling — which is also new for me, because for a long time I didn't trust my own instincts about anything.

I met a new friend at the meeting tonight. I am shy at these things in a way that surprises people who knew me before. I used to be good with strangers. Years behind a bar will do that — you learn to talk to anyone, to fill silence, to make people feel comfortable. But that version of me was also drinking. That ease was borrowed. What I have now is quieter, more careful, less automatic.

I don't like small talk anymore. I am not interested in the surface. I want to know what someone actually thinks, what they are actually afraid of, what they are actually working on. That is what recovery does to you. It makes you impatient with pretending.

Focused on the Rebuild

I am going to look at homes today. I am going to focus on the positive.

That sentence is something I have been saying to myself a lot lately. Because it is easy, when you are in early recovery, to spend all your energy cataloguing the damage. The years lost. The relationships broken. The versions of yourself you can't get back. The grief of it is real and it deserves space.

But at some point, you have to turn around and face the other direction.

I am sixty days sober. I am going back to work. I am looking for a home. I am sitting in rooms with people who understand, holding a chip that fits in my palm and means everything.

The teardown is behind me.

The rebuild has already begun.