If you’d prefer to watch this reflection instead, you can find it on YouTube here.
I was at a recovery meeting recently when a woman shared something that has stayed with me. She was talking about one of her first meetings, when she was new and looking for help. A few women took her into another room and began sharing their stories with her. They told her where they had been, what their lives had looked like, and some of what they had gone through before finding recovery.
She remembered looking at them and thinking, “Wow. They don’t look like their stories.”
I knew exactly what she meant. I’ve had people react with surprise when I share parts of my own story. Usually, they are people who only know me as I am today. They didn’t know me during the years when alcohol was controlling my life. They didn’t see some of the choices I made or the places my life took me. The person they know today doesn’t seem to match some of the stories I tell.
I see the same thing in other people in recovery. I know people today who are living completely different lives than they once were. Then I hear where they’ve been, and sometimes it’s hard to imagine that the person telling the story is the same person who lived it. That’s one of the reasons I think sharing our stories matters so much.
When someone first asks for help, it can feel like nobody could possibly understand. Our circumstances seem different. The things we’ve done can carry so much shame that we can’t imagine saying them out loud, much less hearing someone else say, “I’ve been there too.” And then someone tells their story.
Maybe the details aren’t exactly the same. They rarely are. But somewhere in that story, we recognize something about our own experience. We hear someone describe feelings and circumstances we thought belonged only to us, and we’re hearing it from someone whose life is different now.
Our stories don’t disappear when we recover. They are part of us. They help explain where we’ve been and how we got here. But they don’t have to describe the life we’re living today.
Maybe that’s part of the hope we offer when we’re willing to share them. Someone can hear where we’ve been, look at who we’ve become, and think, “They don’t look like their stories.”
