A New Paradigm

September was National Recovery Month.

I saw nothing about it on social media. No ads. No posts. Nada.

If you had heard something about it, would you have paid attention?

There’s a love-hate relationship with the word recovery. People who have found sobriety will proudly share their milestone (rightly so). For those who have lived around another’s addiction, recovery is thought of as for the other person.

Yet there’s trauma and pain experienced, and healing, for all parties involved.

In my recent eight months of travel, I didn’t meet anyone who wasn’t dealing with something or carrying an old burden. Not one person.

My experience is one of living around active alcoholism for many years, as well as numbing myself via multiple means to avoid dealing with old trauma and what I didn’t want to see that was right in front of me.

There’s a certain shame associated with the word recovery. It’s almost like it’s not OK to fall down sometimes. Some of us fall further than others. But all of us fall in one way or another. It’s part of life, learning, loving, growing.

What if we’re all on the same road?

When we give ourselves permission to not be perfect and accept the dips and bumps in the road, we can see that we’re all on this journey called life. We can give ourselves some grace in the process.

We can play with the statistics about who has what and how many are affected, but all that does is put us into categories. Create labels for us. Put boxes around us and cause separation. And the numbers are scary.

I don’t know if the various government agencies would have known how to classify me. Probably a good thing as I’ve never liked being put into a box or wanted to be called a diagnosis.

Rather than calling it recovery, we can instead look at life as the alchemy of our evolution. Transmuting what no longer serves us, healing body, mind and spirit, and moving forward as the collective we call humanity. Like the spiral on a shell.

A collective where we have open conversations. Letting go of dogma that formed ways we’ve thought and reacted.

Connecting via what makes us human, not based on how we’ve been classified. Connecting with others and most importantly connecting back to ourselves.

Where we claim victory for the obstacles we’ve overcome, removing the mask to see the truth and wisdom in our own spiral. No longer reacting to the past but rather moving forward with a new set of eyes and a new perspective. In a new paradigm of healing for us all.