I never much liked the word “recovery.” Recover from what, exactly?
You could recover from an illness, from getting knocked out in a fight. Or you could recover a lost item, like a pair of gloves you left on a train. And, of course, you could recover from a hangover.
But what, exactly, was it that people who were “in recovery” had in mind when they defined their lives in this way? If they were recovering from their lifestyle of drinking and/or drug-taking, did this mean that they were seeking to get back to the place they’d been at before they started using?
This last question was, to me, the really important one. Because if there was one thing I knew about drinking and drugs, it was that the last thing in the world I wanted was to get back to where I was before I started using them. If I’d wanted to be there, I wouldn’t have started drinking and taking drugs in the first place.
Not, of course, that there weren’t plenty of good things about my life before alcohol and drugs came along. But the fact remained that despite all the bad things they’d wrought, alcohol and drugs were a discovery. For good and for ill, they opened new doors in my life, revealed new worlds to me. I could never go back to a time before I knew about them, and even if I could, I wouldn’t want to.
Fortunately, I eventually figured out that there was another way of looking at the word “recovery” – at least to my mind. People have spent a lot of time and energy trying to recover all kinds of things over the course of history. But an argument could be made that the single item they’ve spent more time and energy trying to recover than any other is… the state of innocence. There isn’t a religion in the world that doesn’t have some version of the fall myth -- some story of a time when all things were perfect and all people and all creatures were happy.
In the version of this story that our culture is most familiar with, the fall occurred in Eden, and as everyone knows, the gates leading back to Eden are decidedly closed. The only direction to move, for those who hanker for its environs, is forward.
So it is with the “Eden” of drugs and alcohol. There is, for me, no getting back to the state I enjoyed during my most successful days as a drug-and-alcohol user. And there is also no getting back to the person I was before I ever discovered mind-altering substances.
But there IS – at least for myself I have to believe there is – a place BEYOND those things. Drugs and alcohol were a door I walked through, a piece of fruit that, advisedly or otherwise, I chose to eat. And if I choose to recover from what those substances ultimately did to me, I have to take to heart the lesson that every faith teaches in one manner or other, and that the novelist Herman Hesse described in these famous lines from his novel Damien:
“The way to innocence, to the uncreated and to God leads on, not back, not back to the wolf or to the child, but ever further into sin, ever deeper into human life.”
For me, “recovery” ultimately became a word that wasn’t about moving back at all. It’s about moving forward.