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Over the course of the Recovery Dharma Global Summit, I found myself in conversation after conversation with people I’d never met before. Sometimes it happened over a meal. Sometimes between sessions. Sometimes while walking through the hotel or waiting for the next presentation to begin. None of it was planned. It was simply the kind of community that naturally develops when people gather with a shared intention.
What stayed with me wasn’t how many conversations there were. It was who they were with.
Some of the people I met were more than half my age. Others had decades of recovery. Some had experiences that looked nothing like mine. They hadn’t been pastors. They hadn’t experienced a church fire. They hadn’t walked the same road through addiction or recovery.
And yet our conversations kept returning to many of the same places. We talked about identity, purpose, and learning to stay present instead of always looking for another way to escape. We talked about what it feels like when the roles we’ve built our lives around begin to fall away, leaving us to wonder who we really are without them.
As the weekend unfolded, I realized something I hadn’t expected. I had spent more than two hours telling my story during the keynote, but by the end of the Summit, it no longer felt like my story.
The details were different. The humanity underneath them wasn’t.
Near the end of my presentation, I shared a sentence that has stayed with me ever since.
Recovery didn’t help me recover my old identity. It helped me stop chasing it.
As people shared pieces of their own stories over the next couple of days, I realized that sentence wasn’t just about addiction or recovery. It was about being human.
So many of us spend years trying to become someone we think we need to be. We measure ourselves by our work, our accomplishments, our relationships, our failures, or the roles we’ve been given. We keep believing that peace is waiting somewhere just beyond the next achievement, the next promotion, the next relationship, or the next version of ourselves.
Maybe that’s why those conversations felt so familiar, even when our lives looked nothing alike.
We weren’t connecting because our stories matched. We were connecting because the longing underneath them did.
After I returned home, another thought quietly surfaced. Almost exactly one year earlier, I had published the very first Awakening With Don post on Facebook.
I smiled when I realized that the anniversary itself wasn’t what mattered. What mattered was what had quietly grown out of one small, ordinary decision. Not a website. Not a year’s worth of reflections. Not speaking opportunities.
Connection.
Real conversations where people feel safe enough to tell the truth about their lives.
Looking back, I think that’s what Awakening With Don has been about from the very beginning, even though I couldn’t have named it at the time. It was never about telling my story. It was about creating enough space for someone else to recognize a little of their own.
I came home from Charlotte deeply grateful, but not because I had the opportunity to deliver a keynote. I came home grateful for the reminder that beneath all of our different stories, backgrounds, and experiences, we’re not nearly as different as we sometimes believe.
When we’re willing to tell the truth about our own lives, we often discover that someone else has been quietly waiting to hear it. Maybe that’s where healing begins. Not because our stories are the same, but because they remind us that none of us has ever been as alone as we imagined.
After all…
The Circle Is Never Closed.™
