“I don’t know if I’m supposed to be here,” I said. I was in a meeting room at the Turning Point, a peer-run addiction recovery center in White River Junction, and I was there to learn about the center’s Writers for Recovery program. Writing workshops designed to help process trauma, build self-esteem, and promote a healthy image of people in recovery have been gaining steady recognition.
It can be healing to process experiences by putting them into words. Arranging those words into sentences and then into paragraphs, gives a writer both structure and a story. By sharing it with others, the writer gains a voice.
But now I was in a room with 15 strangers, and apart from our instructor, the documentarian Bess O’Brien, all the other participants were men who’d struggled with addiction, and all of them had wandered mightily on their proverbial “walks of life.”
I was the last in the circle called upon to introduce myself. I told the group I was a writer, that I worked in substance misuse prevention, and that I had many family members who struggled with addiction. I added that since I wasn’t in recovery myself, if anyone felt uncomfortable with my presence, they should just speak up, and I’d leave.
“It’s okay,” said one of the men. “We’re trying to work on our openness.” The others nodded, and Bess added, “we’re all recovering from something.”
The workshop format was based on prompts like “this is when you know you have a problem,” and “the text I never sent.” Bess would read a sentence and give us seven minutes to compose anything it brought to mind. Then we took turns reading what we’d drafted and offering feedback.
My stories were from the perspective of a child and sister of addiction; others took the viewpoint of an addicted family member. The exchange was healing, and suggested that it was easier to finally tell these stories to someone we barely knew, as opposed to someone we knew well. And maybe that was a start.
Writers for Recovery was a powerful experience, with people in recovery who can be striking in their openness as they learn that truth is the way to health.
Writers know this, too. And in this workshop, we were all writers.
We were also all in recovery.
And clearly, I belonged.
