Recovery is never owned. It is always rented; And the rent is due everyday.

I speak from experience and of a place where recovery in each of these aspects were bleak for some time. Hopeless.

Recovery from anything is badass. Try, try again, if we must, but let’s not stop trying. Eventually the pain lessons. I’m not speaking of physical pain as that isn’t always possible. Many illnesses, progress. The mental pain, anguish, depression and despair that often comes with, can.

I can hardly describe the level of “worn” I had become.

I kept on keeping on though. Trying.

The many years of being a pain patient advocate helped restore purpose from prior years of being bed bound. My Spinal Cord Stimulator permanent implant in 2006 gave me extra life to do so. It may not have been a lot, but it was a lot to me and I was grateful.

The last couple of years I’ve been learning to live without it. I had its benefit for a decade.

Imagine suddenly revising the bit of life it offered to no more or very little once more. That was an ouch on my mental health and I had to recover myself from that loss. I think I’ve mentioned a few times before its still implanted, non working. This year will be 15 years since it first became apart of my body.

For the longest time I found myself adjusting my body to the stimulation that wasn’t on. Habit. I was mindful that it was time to charge my internal battery, yet it wasn’t.

These things may seem odd, but it had been routine for so long.

I’m currently attempting to recover from weight gain. I was doing low carbs in late 2019 when my ankle broke. I fell off that as I was laid up from it for a time being. CoVid emerged and when people were buying and hoarding toilet paper, our only staple became rice. Anything goes with rice. We didn’t have stocked cupboards or pantries full of backup food items. We had rice! The carbohydrates flourished.

I’ve been back on low carbs for about 11 weeks.

Addictions and habits come in many forms. Not all are alcohol or drug related. I know a lot of people with severe sugar addiction. They can’t give it up. In comparison to booze or substances its the same, differently. It creates diabetes and heart disease.

Have you ever heard someone say “at least they’re not on drugs? At least they’re not a alcoholic? I have! Numerous times.

My husband can’t give up his sugar and he has both. He’s had a quadruple open heart surgery and 4 heart attacks. First heart attack at 37 years old and his 4th in 2018 at 51.

Each time he tried and fell back into unhealthy habits.

Is an alcoholic or drug addiction worse than a sugar addiction? I don’t believe so anymore. It’s easy to toss on the stigma for certain groups and minimize the same problem in others, yet sugar kills too. Any bad habit is harmful.

I’m also recovering from his choice to have his snacks. I didn’t want him to. I want him to live. In my own healing, I realized I can’t make him choose better. Only he can do that.

We all, every one of us, has something we do to cope. We all vary. Even Workaholics are consumed by an addiction. I could go on and on.

We have to find our road to recovery within ourselves.

The only person who could help me, or make me stop consuming alcohol was me. You can’t guilt shame people into stopping a bad habit. You know what you really do for them with shaming? Nudge them toward another shot of booze or into reaching for their problem of choice, perhaps a cookie binge.

I use to feel, like many patient advocates had and still do, that drug addicts were the reason that I, an incurable non opioid addict, was denied pain care. That’s not true to me anymore, and it hasn’t been for a few years now.

These people didn’t do this to me. It’s the politics, anti opioid crusaders, PROP, physicians running scared, illicit narcotics, and so forth.

I am still bothered by lack of personal responsibility though. Becoming an addict, misusing, or abusing, isn’t solely everyone else’s fault.

Choice and consequence.

Pain is pain and it’s all semantics anyway.

If you’re sober today, I’m proud of you. If you’re not, I’m praying for you.

Forward in faith,

Journey on.