Despite being in recovery for over a decade, some friends and family still ask why I continue to identify as an alcoholic and addict in some recovery spaces. I always have the same answer: so that I remember. My addiction to alcohol and other drugs that started long before my fourteenth birthday, took me down some dark and winding roads. Many of these roads I would like, most days, to forget. It is precisely this journey I’ve traveled that leads me to call myself by certain names in certain places. But importantly, this is not the whole of who I am. My identity is more than just an alcoholic or addict or as I like to say in all spaces: a person in addiction recovery. Finding my true identity in recovery was and still is an enriching experience.
Addiction is just a small part of me.
It has taken me time to digest, and a couple of years in recovery, to understand that I am more than just a person in recovery. While it is a part of my story, it’s not the only chapter. For me, identifying as an alcoholic and addict with my recovery family does help me to remember where I’ve come from. When I share in meetings, whether those are in-person or virtual, there is an instant familiarity that is expressed when those words are uttered. It doesn’t matter if I live in another zip code, time zone, or all the way across the globe. Those simple identifiers open up a shared space where we can say, regardless of the particulars: “Me, too.”
Alcoholic and addict—two simple words that carry so much hurt, heartache and struggle. Yet, they also carry with them the important, humbling, reminder that I am not that far from returning to a dark place. “Resting on my laurels” causes the darkness to look like an attractive option again. I’ve tried it and not surprisingly have woken up in some of those same dark places. In strange alleyways and driving down highways not remembering how I got there, and spending the last of my money on a small baggie worth of hurt. I’ve let go of family relationships that I should have held close and shared my bed with people who never deserved to be there. I have been neck-deep in the dumpster (literally and figuratively) and somehow, indeed miraculously, made it out to the other side alive. The side where there is light and sunshine and hope.
I am a whole being.
This new place, the one on the other side of the hard times, is where I also identify as so many other things. I am a mother, wife, sister, builder, wannabe comedian (ask my husband) and writer. I’m a baker and destroyer, runner, novice meditator, shower singer, neighbor-lover, Christian—and person in recovery. All of who I am and who I am becoming was born after some pretty intense struggle. Identifying as an “alcoholic and addict” helped me see the other parts of me. Thankfully, I have not stayed confined to just the label “alcoholic and addict.” I have allowed all of myself to move and grow and breath as my Higher Power, my God, designs.
Recovery has given me an opportunity at more than a new life. It has given me the gift of a new identity. One that I can wear humbly (on the good days) but always in recognition of where I have come from. I also have hopeful expectation of where I am going. Thank you for helping me get there, one day at a time.
Caroline Beidler, MSW is a grateful woman in recovery and the Director of Creative Consultation Services, LLC., a business focused on creating sustainable addiction recovery support services at the local, state, and federal level. She is also the Founder and Managing Editor of the story-telling platform: Bright Story Shine, a new online story-telling platform that celebrates stories of recovery and resilience, a team writer for the Grit and Grace Project and a regular contributor of In the Rooms.
