Nice Recovery by Susan Juby

Author:Susan Juby [Susan Juby]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780670069170
Publisher: Penguin Canada

16

Higher Power

ANOTHER THING I felt free to ignore at my first meetings were all those suggestions about staying out of relationships for the first year. I mean, get real! I figured that advice was probably meant for the old people. For a twenty-year-old, a year is a long time. Waiting a year to get into a relationship was not part of my recovery plan.

I’ve met other people who had similar reactions to the suggestion. Their response was to get into relationships as soon as possible. Some of those relationships worked out. Other ones, not so much. It’s notable that the young people I know who did wait the recommended year (and such people are approximately as rare as Andean cats) seemed better prepared when they finally did get involved. They’d taken the time to focus on themselves and their recovery and hadn’t been distracted by someone else. However, I wasn’t about to allow the experience and suggestions of others to get in the way of what I wanted to do.

When I was about sixteen it had become evident, even to me, that I was a slave to alcohol and, to a lesser extent, drugs. Sure, getting loaded was fun sometimes and allowed me (at least for short increments) to be the person I wanted to be, but I knew that what looked like teen spirit in my teens was going to look like pathetic sot in my thirties. If there was one thing the beer commercials taught me, it was that hot girls didn’t projectile-vomit into crowds, as well as out the windows of moving vehicles. I was eventually going to have to quit drinking and taking drugs, but not until I was ready, which meant not before I was about to settle down with a nice man.

I ended up in recovery ten years ahead of schedule. I was twenty but after a binge looked thirty and felt a hard-up fifty. I had no romantic prospects and was a disaster, spiritually, financially, emotionally, and physically. So much for my plan.

Then I decided that even if I was going to be forced into premature recovery, I could still start working on the fiancé thing ASAP. Being sober would allow me to have a new kind of relationship, one based on mutual admiration, respect, and shared interest rather than one based on the fact that we both liked to get loaded.

After my initial bad experiences with the barf guy and Hank, I’d had a few semi-serious boyfriends when I was in grades eleven and twelve and during the year when I was waiting to go off to college, also known as the “year of my perpetual blackout.” I liked older guys who drank a lot and who didn’t object to me doing so. They were good guys, but it wasn’t like I wanted to be anyone’s Number One. I was already in a committed relationship with beer and wine coolers and, on special occasions, Crown Royal and cocaine. Anyone I dated had to be prepared to take the back seat to those true loves.

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