It’s been a while since my last update. I’ve had some big life changes which have made me think long and hard recently about both myself and my recovery journey.
I’ve been in recovery for almost eleven months having come into the rooms in January 2020. While this year has been a huge challenge for most people with the global pandemic, my own personal 2020 has been fairly good. I feel like I’ve been living in my own bubble of personal growth, going from strength-to-strength on a journey of positivity and spiritual growth while the world has been either standing still or falling apart.
Since coming into recovery, I’ve averaged a meeting a day and held three service positions at home groups (one is on hold as it was a position at a physical meeting). I’ve worked the steps aggressively with my sponsor and have recently started working through the steps with my first sponsee. I’ve also started this blog as a way of doing service and strengthening my own understanding of recovery and I’ve also been designing an app for people in twelve step recovery which is being released in early January.
In short, recovery has been my life this year, and while it has been hugely rewarding in many ways I feel like the recovery I have been doing lately has become more about quantity than quality and as a result I’m feeling a sense of ‘recovery fatigue’ as I near a year in the programme.
My attention and presence in meetings is a perfect example. While most of my recovery has been on Zoom, I now feel myself further from true connection with each meeting. I feel myself distracted, not paying attention or resentful at the same meeting schedule week-in, week-out. Having spoken to other fellows this is something that many other people are also experiencing the longer we go without regular physical meetings and fellowship.
Meetings aside, I feel like other parts of my programme are going on auto-pilot. I’ll reach out to the same people on whatsapp instead of truly showing concern around how someone is doing. My gratitude list starts to look like itself on shuffle. My inventory is either missed completely or becomes a quick box-ticking exercise, and my morning routine might slip or become something I do for the sake of it rather than truly something coming from a place of connection.
It might just be that it’s been a long, hard year. It might just be that I have lots of emotions coming up now that I’ve moved from London to a new city, away from my friends, fellows and recovery network. It might be that It’s coming up to Christmas, which is a hard time of year for our family for other reasons. It might be that I’ve done a lot of recovery this year, and actually now is the time for me to focus on doing slightly less, but putting more care, attention and focus into the programme work that I do each day. It could be a mix of all of the above.
It feels good to get all of this down onto paper. It feels good to write again and reconnect with this part of my recovery. It feels good to know that tomorrow I can start again and focus my attention on the twenty four hours ahead.
/ J
