Category Archives: Successful Recovery

Sober City Parks

I Dated Captain Ron for Three Years

Park distractions… does the woman on the right look serious enough to be a Marine? She is out of formation and appears to be giggling… I finally hooked up with a women’s walking group this weekend in Riverside Park (“thanks” Jan, for setting it up). Riverside Park has a wide sidewalk and it runs along a […]

Happy, Happy, Happy Sober

  I work in a women’s addiction treatment center. But I don’t actually work there. You will remember photographs of my office, with the uber-chic Eames plywood side chairs (a double treat for any office because they are beautiful and sculptural but also nothing anyone would want to lounge on and chitchat for long…). I do get […]

When You Wake the Ghost

Let Sleeping Ghosts Lie – Great Lakes National Cemetery – Holly, Michigan I had a conversation last week, with a young woman who had fallen off the wagon. She said, “I feel so horrible. So guilty. I feel like I have to start all over.” I tried to come up with the right words for her. I know […]

Music Therapy

If you look closely, there are coyote decoys on the shore… I stopped by the office yesterday and when I came out (on my way for a walk) there were small balls of ice falling from the sky. I felt like Henny Penny. I promise I am finished with metaphors and misery about the cold, but ice […]

The Serenity Prayer – Extended Version

I was reading Betty Ford’s Betty: A Glad Awakening and the book taught me something (many things) I did not know. You guys probably all know this, but the Serenity Prayer (which truth be told has always seemed a bit basic to me) does not end where I thought it ended – at the part where […]

Remembering to Be Grateful in Recovery

  I was out of sorts yesterday. The weather has taken a turn for the worse here (something I was convinced was going to happen, but still disappointed me when it did). My WordPress training made me anxious.  It was conducted at hyper speed and they kept telling me I was “advanced” when (like Algernon before […]

Eating Disorders + Addiction (How Do You Kill the Hydra?)

That’s me on the left – I’m like, “I am NOT going to eat 4,000 calories of candy in one sitting – burn the head after I cut it off!!!” and the other guy is like, “Wait. Did you say 4,000 calories?” and I’m like “Don’t worry – I took Correctol” and he’s like, “Yuck…” […]

I’ll admit it, I did the Electric Slide recently…

I danced on my super-secret stretch of beach in Guana Reserve.  I was trucking along to my island playlist, thinking great thoughts, when a reggae version of the old classic came on.   It’s important to be drunk when entering an Electric Slide Contest… Kim and I won an Electric Slide contest in Beaver Creek, […]