Our Stories
Share the power of long-term recovery. If you are in recovery, a family member, friend or ally of someone in recovery, we want to hear your recovery story!
Learn more...
Faces & Voices of Recovery's book page
has information on many of the growing number of recovery-related publications. It’s a work in progress, so please let us know of other books that you think we should include. Check it out!
|
Recovery in the News
Ruben Rosario: A drama in 12 steps
Ruben Rosario
Pioneer Press
January 17, 2011
For Twin Cities teenagers in recovery, a play about the founding of AA is deeply felt.
The three of them came down and took seats on the stage after the play "Bill W. & Dr. Bob" wrapped up its Wednesday morning performance at the Illusion Theater in downtown Minneapolis.
The brave trinity of teens did not have to do this. It's not an easy thing to face a theater-packing audience of peers, many you don't know, as well as a group of adults.
But James, Will and Mike — no last names needed here — were warmly greeted by perhaps the toughest critics you will find anywhere for a 1930s-era play about the founders of Alcoholics Anonymous.
And so, with supportive cast members seated alongside them, the three teens mustered the courage to briefly speak about hitting rock-bottom and their roads to recovery.
Now this is the point where I'm supposed to interject something profound or newsworthy about this event. Sure, I have people in my own family struggling or dead or dying on the installment plan from this stuff.
But I defer to those struggling with this right now who came to see the play. Frankly, I can't do any better than what these kids, as well as Dustin Thompson, 20, of St. Paul, a recovering alcoholic/addict who also saw the performance, had to say.
Collectively, the insights were every bit as deep, moving and street-level profound as the play's dialogue.
"The drugs, this disease has gotten me into jails and institutions," said Will, who confessed he had never been to a play until Wednesday. "I was focused on my own desires and did not care about anyone except myself. By the grace of God, I got sent to jail and found the 12-step fellowship."
Mike, sober now two years, listed the numerous schools and treatment programs he went into and got kicked out of until he latched onto Harmony Learning Center, a Maplewood-based alternative school.
"My life was just (messed) up," he said. "I did not know how to live life." He described the play as "really inspirational."
Then came James, who proudly announced his sobriety date: "11/18 of '09."
"Every time I went to jail, I told myself I wanted to stop," he said. "I gave myself two options — either I quit or I end my life, because of the way I was living." But "every time I got out of jail, the first thing I would do is get high. I never understood why."
THE PROBLEM
Thousands of Minnesota youths attend recovery schools or programs such as AA or Narcotics Anonymous, according to David Ettesvold, a 16-year instructor in the North St. Paul-Maplewood-Oakdale school district. The district was well represented at Wednesday's performance, along with kids from Burnsville, Waconia and other Twin Cities communities.
"For every dollar spent in such preventive programs, $10 is saved in public expenses," said Ettesvold. The savings come in the form of preventive health care, incarceration or loss of productivity or lost wages.
Investment in such efforts, however, is on the chopping block because of projected budget cuts and low public awareness.
So Ettesvold is bracing for more funerals of young addicts.
"Not sure why, but I carry all the obituaries of these people in my briefcase every day," he wrote in a recent letter to his school district. "Maybe out of guilt or maybe to remind myself just how powerful this addiction is."
Wednesday's Illusion Theater performance for teens in recovery was a gift from an anonymous Twin Cities donor, according to Bonnie Morris, the theater's producing director.
She looks upon the play, which runs through March 13, as more than art or entertainment. It's "about the power of the play to create community and create change."
THE SOLUTION
Thompson, who is expecting his first child in August, recently obtained his GED from Harmony. A habitual school dropout, he had left the school two years earlier and embraced, one too many times, the comfort of the destructive low of the "high" life.
"The play was pretty amazing," said Thompson, who is 38 days sober and confessed that his love of weed and booze "took over my life."
"That's all I cared about," Thompson said after the play. He started smoking marijuana and hitting the bottle in fifth grade because "I just wanted to be cool."
Something clicked recently. He went to Harmony. He got his GED. He attends daily AA meetings, sometimes two or three over the weekend.
As an expectant parent, he is adamant about what legacy he wants to give his offspring. It's a centuries-old mantra voiced by those who sobered up as well as those who eventually did not and passed on the baton of dependency.
"It's not going to happen to my child or children," he told me. "My child is never going to see me with a drink. My child is never going to see me with a joint or drugs."
Then he underlined for me the crux of this disease, one we as a community will continue to battle.
"I never said I had a drinking problem," Thompson noted. "I could drink pretty good. What I had was a stopping problem."
Now it's up to us to do right by giving this most perennial of social issues the most righteous attention.
I am proud to say that I am in spirit a friend of Bill W. and Dr. Bob. So should we all.