Recover Out Loud

Thursday, I attended the lunch and learn session of the Georgia Addiction Recovery Awareness Day activities with friends from Navigate Recovery Gwinnett and hundreds of others. It was awesome to hear views and good news from state legislators, a Gwinnett County judge and advocacy group members that spoke. The key points were about positive messaging, eliminating the stigma+shame, and reaching out.

One of the speakers suggested to reach out to five people: friends, community, local officials, state legislators, and federal legislators. Because there are so may people in active addiction or who have a loved one in active addiction, simply recovering out loud may draw someone to you seeking help. The emphasis was on not necessarily sharing about the ugliness that happened during active addiction, or the support groups that you are involved in, but on sharing the positiveness of life in recovery. Sharing the hope that recovery is possible.

So I proudly wore the free button/pin given out and later attached it to my backpack that I take to work. And I posted on Facebook that I was present for the event. And guess what? Within an hour or so of posting on Facebook an acquaintance sent me a private message asking for advice on how to help a loved one struggling with sobriety. I am grateful that I could take time off from work to attend this event, which helped me drop the guilt and shame in order to be of service to others.

Recovery definitely doesn't suck!

15 minutes

Work in progress

My last post alluded to creativity as the topic for this post. I've now learned my lesson about forecasting where my mind will take me with this blog. Although my mind is in a different direction, I drafted a post about creativity to stick with what I outwardly committed to. However I am waiting on a photo from a relative to complete that post, so stay tuned..

So.. This post is going to be about where my mind took me today.. 15-minute increments.

Over the past year plus, the phrase "one day/step at a time" has been my mantra for recovery. Early on in my recovery it was one-minute/literal step at a time. And sometimes still that is the case. Now I generally focus on 15-minute segments, thanks to Fly Lady who advocates 15 minute segments for cleaning/decluttering.

Now onto today's topic of 15 minute increments. One of my hangovers from active addiction is looking at mail. Prior to addiction I processed mail weekly. During active addiction and early recovery I simply let it stack up for months/years; the most important bills came via email or direct withdrawal from my bank account. I routinely set aside mail to my daughter, but the rest got placed in a pile. Yesterday I started processing it. Tonight I devoted 15 minutes to mail processing. This bin was full to the top and 15 minutes later this is what is left of this stack. The majority was junk mail quickly recycled with contents shredded.

I removed the important mail from envelopes and placed it in my priority pile. There is still a larger pile than pictured to go through, but this gives me hope that with 15-minutes per day I can work my way through years of accumulated clutter. It took more than a day to pile up; it will take more than a day to declutter. But honestly it took seconds to minutes to stack stuff, so 15 minutes per day should result in a clutter-free home by the end of the year :)