Progress Report

Toni Morrison once said, “If there’s a book that you want to read, but it hasn’t been written yet, then you must write it.”  I was thinking today that I’d like to read a memoir written by a woman who struggled with addiction.  The title would be “Just Chillin’: One Woman’s Very Easy, Completely Unbelievable Life.”  And the blurb on the back cover would be:  “The story of one woman’s recovery and how it happened overnight in one miraculous 12-step seminar.”

Unfortunately, recovery doesn’t work that way; neither does life.  You don’t recover overnight and skip through the rest of your days, with your issues behind you.  No one does.  Life is hard, and it requires hard work.  This was difficult for me to realize when I first began my recovery journey.   I wanted overnight solutions and easy answers.  There aren’t any.  I, like everybody else, have to fight for solutions and answers.  One of the main places I get my strength to fight is in my recovery group.  There are actually twelve steps down into our meeting room—and in that room, a lot of hard work happens.  But that’s just the beginning of it.  After the meeting, we all have to climb back up those twelve steps and fight another day.

For me, fighting means working the twelve steps of recovery every day of my life.  And it means incorporating other basic recovery and life principles into those steps.  So often, I read about steps to take and principles to live by, but I don’t always incorporate them into my life.  Why?  It’s hard.  It’s part of the daily fight.  And many times, I just don’t feel like fighting anymore.   But then I think about the long-term results:  if I don’t do the work, I will have nothing to show for myself a year from now.  And I will regret letting myself grow stagnant and stop making progress.  On the other hand, a year from now, if I do the work, I will be leaps and bounds ahead of where I am today.  And I want that—badly.  So I fight for it—and the following are some of the most important principles in my daily fight:

Progress, not perfection.  This one has been difficult for me because I want to see immediate results from the work I’m doing.  And many times, if I measure my results on a daily basis, I feel like I’m failing.  But if I look back over weeks and months, I see progress.  Today, I’m doing better by far than I was even three months ago.  Each day within those months was certainly not perfect, and if I’d been expecting that, I would have quit.  But my mental progress report tells me that I’m moving in the right direction.

One step at a time.  I’m making progress at learning to live one day at a time.  But moving one step at a time?  Much harder for me—because I realize that if I can take one step, I can take another, and another, and before long, my life will change.  And that scares me.  I’m doing just fine here in my comfort zone, thank you.  Except. . . I hear God telling me, always, that there’s more.  And I’ll never find it if I just sit here complacently enjoying how far I’ve come and not requiring myself to go further.  So I take the tiniest step, put one foot in front of the other, and I make progress.  I reach goals.  I go places I never thought I would.  And I do things I never thought I could.  Just by taking that next step and putting one foot in front of the other.

Are you done?  At my first recovery meeting, the man who would become my sponsor looked me straight in the eyes and asked me this question.  Are you done?  Are you finally finished with the relapses, the short term recoveries, the withdrawal, the whole game of dipping one toe into sobriety, then running away again?  He told me to think about it and tell him at the next meeting—if I came back.  I did come back—and I told him that I had thought about it, written about it, and made my decision.  I’m done.  And as of that moment, I was done—with drugs and alcohol.  But I still ask myself that question about thought patterns I’m trying to break and behaviors I want to stop—Renee, are you done?  How about if we say that that is the last time you did that or thought that or acted like that?  It’s time to be done.

What’s your why?  I read this in a book about addiction several years ago—and it was life-changing.  I immediately asked myself, why am I choosing sobriety?  And I wrote down pages and pages of reasons.  I still refer to those pages sometimes.  And I ask myself that question daily: what’s your why?  Why are you making that choice or not making it?  Why did you choose this behavior?  Why did you get out of bed today?  The question may be a little different every time I ask it, but usually the answer is the same:  Why?  Because this is the life God has so generously and graciously given me, and I want to live every minute of it to its fullest—for Monty, for my family, and yes, for me.  That’s my why.

Look up.  When I change my focus from my immediate problems and surroundings, and look up, I gain a completely different perspective.  I look into the loving face of God.  He makes my present circumstances joyful, grace-filled, and beautiful.  He is busy making my past into a story of redemption.  And He’s promised to give me hope and a future.  So I remind myself, day after day, to look up—to take my eyes off of the stuff I’m mired down in and put my focus on Him.

None of these principles are the overnight, quick fixes that I wanted when I started the journey into recovery over five years ago.  I’ve had to fight hard for every single bit of progress I’ve made.  And I know the rest of my life, like everyone else’s, will continue to be a fight; I also know that the fight will be so worth it.  If I ever did write a book about it, per Toni Morrison’s suggestion, I think I’d call it “Fighting for the Beautiful:  A Memoir of Recovery.”  And the blurb on the back cover would say, “No part of recovery, or life, for that matter, is easy.  But the journey is filled with joy, grace, and moments of staggering beauty.  The fight is worth it.  A million times over, it’s worth it.”

I’m not kidding when I say these lyrics are profound: