#2 Moment of Surrender

Four years later its coming into focus

I am many things. A person in recovery is simply one of them. This is part of that story.

I was bone tired. All the energy had been sucked out and squeezed dry, leaving me but a shadow of myself.

I was tired because my body was sick. And I was tired from carrying the mask of ‘it’s ok’ for far too long.

I no longer wanted to pretend all was well. It wasn’t. I wasn’t. And hadn’t been for a long time.

The moment of surrender came when a whisper of better days proved stronger than the tantalizing taunt of alcohol’s broken promises.

Surrender was admitting I was scared and choosing to stand in that fear.

Not knowing what would come next might not sound like a big deal to some, but for a control-loving, type A personality like me, it was as if I was admitting defeat. That I could no longer think my way out of this. I had to feel my way through.

“When will you come back to work?” my boss asked on the phone before I walked into treatment. I don’t know.

“How long will you be there?” my husband asked with three kids jostling for attention in the background. I don’t know.

“What do you need?” my parents would ask the next day. I don’t know.

All I knew was this is where I needed to be in this moment. At a place where all my immediate needs were taken care of so I could focus on getting better.

I didn’t have the answers, despite five years of learning — from AA (Alcoholics Anonymous), IOPs (Intensive Outpatient Programs), women in recovery who held me when I cried, and countless memoirs I’d read late into the night (favorites include We Are The Luckiest by

Laura McKowen

, Quit Like A Woman by

Holly Whitaker

, Drinking: A Love Story by Caroline Knapp, and Untamed by Glennon Doyle).

I tried to find myself in the stories of others. I’d read or listen to each word as if there was a secret code to decipher. If I just read a little bit farther, attended one more meeting, then I’d find the answer. Then, I’d understand ‘why me?’

But as I waited for the answer to come, I sank deeper into a shadow of myself.

And every time I failed to stop drinking the floor became the ceiling.

It was like traveling through Dante’s Inferno, every circle a different truth I had to admit before I could heal. I wanted to jump to the end. To bypass heartache and humility. To skip trudging through the muck and mire of blurry, painful memories.

But I’d tried that the first two times I got sober. It didn’t work.

Surrender meant admitting it was going to take time. A lot of time, and that shortcuts didn’t exist. And it was a journey I’d have to walk alone.

I’d have support along the way, but I had to dig my way out because no two recovery journeys are the same. Even when many adhere to similar principals (eg. 12 Steps), why I’m here, how I got here and what it was going to take to climb out was unique to me.

Plus, in recovery you inevitably discover drinking is merely a symptom of a deeper, ill-defined struggle. Quitting drinking is step one. Staying sober is step two. But healing from a lifetime of memories and learning how to respond when triggered? That’s a lifelong journey.

But all this wisdom would come later — after my five day in-patient stay, after my second IOP, and after years of listening to women learning how to make it through life’s greatest challenges (although not in AA, but that’s a story for a different day).

For now, I stood in a bustling hallway with patients, doctors and nurses whizzing by despite the 10 o’clock nighttime hour. I was a deer in headlights. I couldn’t catch my breath. Tears streamed down my face. I didn’t know where to go or what to do.

“It’s all going to be ok,” a nurse said. And it would be.