Hello, my name is Karen and among many other more fun and interesting things (wife, mother, employee, coffee connoseiur) I also am an alcoholic in recovery. I have been sober since April 11, 2004. I decided to start this blog because I think, hope, know that there are many other women like me who are either in recovery themselves, know someone who is in recovery, or are curious about what recovery is. I titled my blog recovering k because my recovery has been the process of finding myself again. It is a bit cheesy, I admit, but it makes sense to me and I am going for it. I feel compelled to start my first entry by saying that my recovery from alcoholism and to some extent marijuana has been amazing, scary, hard, beautiful but most of all it has been work. Plain and simple hard work. I have been known to say at 12-step meetings that I am not a hard working kind of girl and so working hard has been hard for me. In the first few years of my recovery I went to lots of 12-step meetings, I made coffee, I gave people rides--I guess from an AA perspective I followed suggestions. Here I should say that I realize that there might be some who take issue w/ my mentioning of AA in my blog as there is this whole thing about not talking about AA in press or something. While I understand the inclination to protect AA from bad press I really believe that not talking about recovery, addiction and how to get help from it is part of being in the problem and that being open about our problems and how we got better is part of being in the solution. Sorry Bill W and anyone else this might offend but my hope is that by mentioning how AA has helped me that perhaps someone else might be more likely to give it a go. So suffice to say that I go to AA meetings, I try to follow suggestions, I read about recovery and I try to do the right thing as soon as I figure out what it is.
That boring stuff said, here I am. Tonite it is December 8, 2009. My sister has just announced her engagement and I am perusing locations in NYC for possible shower when I hit on the website of a bar that I used to go to fairly frequently when I was drinking. This was not your average bar but a beautiful, glamourous, expensive warm fire place kind of spot. This was the spot where I drank martinis and enjoyed them. This was the first place I drank really good red wine--albeit 5 glasses but still. The memory is there. Deep. Embedded. Stuck. I am not going to drink over this website or this memory but it hurts in this sort of aching way that only someone who has given up one of their great loves and sees them again and their totally and completely unattainable. Painful. I guess upon further reflection if alcohol was a great love then it was a pretty abusive relationship. I gave it so much and it gave me, epic hangovers, shame, guilt, credit card debt and low self esteem. That is not even getting into the alcohol fueled relationships which always seemed to self destruct right around the time that the buzz wore off. The alcohol infused relationship is a whole other post or million posts. Well, I guess my point here is that it is hard to be in recovery but totally doable and completel worth it. Baby crying. Must go. More later.
K
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