- Alcohol
- Drugs
My name is Dana, and I’ve been sober now for 22 years. I got sober before I could legally take a drink so it would be fair to say that I’ve grown up in the rooms of 12-step meetings. I got to those meeting rooms through a long -term treatment center and was blessed to have a counselor who was in the program. I was scared, resentful and really, really angry.
I started drinking when I was 13 years old and never looked back. It was the solution I had always been looking for. It made me pretty, courageous and smart. Most importantly, I felt like I finally fit in somewhere. Not long after I started drinking I was introduced to drugs by a boyfriend. Over the course of my drinking “career,” I never really cared what the drug was (liquid, powder or pill), as long as it changed the way I felt and offered an escape.
The irony is that, as little as I thought of myself before I started drinking, I truly despised the person I had become by the time I got to treatment. I had become a manipulative, lying, cheating and dishonest shell of a person. I weighed less than 100 pounds and was sick pretty much all the time. My life had become a daily cycle of going through the motions. It actually wasn’t even what I would now consider to be living. It was survival on a daily basis.
When I went to treatment, I really had no clue what I was in store for me. I was so delusional that I actually believed I was going to be able to learn some form of “controlled drinking!” As I said, I was blessed to have a counselor who was in recovery, and she didn’t hesitate to get me right into the literature and the steps. I stayed there for nine months and was again blessed to have had the opportunity to build a 12-step support group of women while I was still in treatment. I got a sponsor, and we started going out to dinner every week before our Tuesday night meeting. That’s a tradition that we still participate in to this day.
I have received more blessings because of my sobriety than I ever dreamed possible for my entire life. I have been sober for more than half of my life now, and literally everything I have learned about life has been through the people who came before me and freely shared their experiences, strength and hope with me.
After treatment, I went to college and when I completed my education I landed what I thought at the time was my dream job. I was working with teenagers for a non -profit organization. It was fulfilling, the pay was good and I was traveling, which I loved! I worked there for a period of eight years and during this time I had some life experiences that changed me and my sobriety forever. The first is that my husband and I were blessed with two sons. The second is that, while I was pregnant with our second son, my father passed away suddenly. I always think of my father’s funeral when I need a dose of gratitude. I realize this sounds odd, but here’s the reason why: when people spoke of my father to me after he passed, they never talked about the house he lived in, the clothes he wore or the kind of car he drove. They talked about the kind of man he was, the integrity he had in his business, the way he always beamed when he spoke of his children and grandson, how he did so much community service work for those less fortunate and how very, very much he loved my mom.
It was then that I understood what it meant to have a legacy in life and in recovery. That is what keeps me trudging down that road of happy destiny. It’s the knowledge that, without a doubt, sobriety has given me the gift to pass on the blessings and love that was so freely given to me. It was at this time when I decided that, with all the traveling and time away from my family, I had spent too much time making a living and not enough time making a life. My husband asked me, “If I could have any job, what would I do?” Without hesitation, I told him that I would love to work in a treatment center as a counselor. With his encouragement and a giant leap of faith, I went to work at the very same treatment center where I had been a resident so many years ago. That was six years ago, and I have never once considered my career to be work.
Being sober isn’t always easy and it’s not always fun, but I would not trade my life today for anything. I always hear people in meetings say that, if they had written a script for their lives when they were first getting sober, they would have sold themselves short multiple times over. I whole heartily agree. When I get tired, frustrated with the kids, the laundry is piling up or I’m just overwhelmed by life’s lessons, I always remind myself that THIS is why I got sober: to actually have a life.