Leave the Light On by Jennifer Storm

Author:Jennifer Storm
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: ebook, book
ISBN: 9781936290406
Publisher: Central Recovery Press
Published: 2010-10-11T16:00:00+00:00

PART

11

MORE WILL BE

REVEALED

I used the Serenity Prayer

in every aspect of my life

and believed strongly in the part that says

“the courage to change the things I can.”

19

APPLYING MYSELF

I’D MADE IT TO MY ONE-YEAR RECOVERY ANNIVERSARY, but I still faced many challenges. I hadn’t found a job and my money was running out, so I had to make some sort of decision regarding my future. My therapist introduced the idea of college to me during one of our sessions. I had begun to think that going to school might be a good next step for me, although I wasn’t sure I would be able to go because of finances and my past horrible grades. My former grade point average was a 1.5; a scholarly asset I was not.

My therapist introduced me to a guy from the Office of Rehabilitation Vocation. He told me that I could apply to Pennsylvania State University as a provisional student, which basically meant they would accept me as a student, but I would be placed on probation for the first year. I filled out the application and wrote an essay explaining why I wanted to attend college. I wrote about my past drinking and drug use and about why my grades were so bad. I wrote about my mom and how losing her was my breaking point. I finished the essay by telling them how I went to a rehabilitation program, then moved to State College to start a new life, and that I had been in recovery for more than a year.

In many ways, I gave Penn State an abbreviated version of my fourth step. A fourth step in recovery is a moral inventory of your past, or, in other words, a written depiction of all the things you did in your addiction that you need to make amends for—whether those amends are with yourself, your higher power, or other people in your life. It is usually done within the first year, but it can vary depending upon a person’s willingness and emotional and spiritual growth. Many people dread this step and avoid it like the plague. It requires you to take a painstakingly hard look at yourself and your actions. Being the big old nerd that I had become in early recovery, I didn’t shy away from this task at all; in fact, I was excited about it. One of the things that really clicked with me early on when I was in the rehabilitation center was that I had to revisit everything in my past and dig up all my issues and deal with them if I didn’t want to relapse. The fourth step to me was to be a huge scooping out of myself all the crap I had allowed drugs and alcohol to do to me. I sat down one night and began typing. I used a recovery book to help guide me in format, and just began to write. It was then that I fell back in love with the art of writing and realized how much I had missed it.

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