Letters for in recovery
Letters in this theme are for anyone choosing not to use today, whatever that means for them — someone whose first morning sober is right now, someone counting hours after a slip, someone with decades of recovery, or anywhere in between. The substance does not matter; the wanting does. They are written by people who have been through it, and the through-line is honesty about how hard the next hour can be when the wanting is loud and nothing yet feels worth it. Hopepost is not a sponsor, is not a meeting, and is not a substitute for a programme — whether that is Twelve Step, SMART Recovery, Recovery Dharma, or your own quiet thing. But the letters here come from the same kind of place a good one might. Pick a letter, read it slowly, save it for the afternoon that gets long.
I want to tell you something nobody warned me about.
A few years into being sober, I am still — sometimes — completely useless in a room. The small talk does not come. The thing other people do, where they hold a conversation about nothing for ten minutes and seem to enjoy it, is a skill I apparently did not develop, because for a long time the way I did social occasions was with a drink in my hand, and the drink was doing the work I now have to learn from scratch.
Conversations with people I am attracted to are even worse. There is a version of me, somewhere, that knows how to be charming. I have not met her. The sober me, in those moments, is about fourteen years old and has just been asked a question by a teacher, and is blinking at the wall trying to remember her own name.
If this is you — if you are years into this and still feel like you are missing the manual everyone else got — you are not behind. You are doing the thing of learning skills in your thirties or forties that other people learned in their twenties without noticing. The drink was a shortcut, and you don't have it anymore, and that means you are doing the long way around. The long way around is real and it counts.
It gets a little easier. Not all at once. The way most things in recovery get easier — you look up one day and realise you handled a thing that would have been impossible two years ago, and you don't even celebrate it because it has become normal. That's the shape it takes.
— from a stranger who is also still working it out