Recovery is possible, and at Workit Health we’re here to celebrate people’s positive changes. Find stories of recovery to inspire your own journey.
Gaining weight when we get sober is a rite of passage for many of us. Why do we gain weight in early addiction recovery, and how can we accept weight gain, and find solutions?
The good news is that finding recovery and working hard are worth it. It’s more than making up for lost time; parenting in recovery realigns the parental instincts a person naturally should embody. For me, recovery made me the parent I was meant to be. The benefits far outweigh the damage I did in the past, and I’ve moved on. It still takes work though.
Six years ago, a cyst in my brain ruptured, hemorrhaging blood and protein into the center of my brain, behind my pituitary. Learning how to stay sober while also taking what felt like a metric shit ton of opioids brought me to my knees.
To date in early addiction recovery, or not to date? That is the question.
In recovery, I’ve had the opportunity to look at my past through a new lens, and do my best to clean up the wreckage left behind. Much of that wreckage was scattered through the relationships I’d taken part in, and I’ve had to own up to a lot of things.
I won’t sugarcoat it – if you decide to stop drinking, it will likely affect some of the relationships in your life. You’ll realize there were certain people you thought you were friends with, but they were actually just a drinking buddies. It’s never fun to move on from people, but in sobriety it’s sometimes necessary.
Before I quit drinking, I mean really quit drinking, I wasn’t convinced I needed to quit drinking. I thought maybe, possibly, there was a slight chance I should but I wasn’t convinced. So I found myself looking online at quizzes or lists of warning signs that could help me determine if I was truly an alcoholic or if maybe I was just drinking a little too much due to stress and didn’t need to quit entirely.
I am, in fact, a heroin user in long term recovery from addiction. Nineteen years, 34 abscesses, and eleven arrests ago, I had my last shot of heroin. I had been using opioids for ten years, heavily for eight of those. Like many users, my journey to recovery began in handcuffs
Dealing with chronic pain as a person in recovery is a controversial topic. Staunch 12 Steppers may take the hardline approach that you should not take anything stronger than Tylenol for pain. Others take a more pragmatic approach and listen to what their doctor considers to be the best treatment option.
Tracey Helton Mitchell, author of The Big Fix, explains why relapse shouldn't be treated as a dead end: "There were many relapses that I turned into learning experiences. Recovery is a marathon not a sprint. While not welcomed, relapses shouldn’t be treated as a dead end."
Quitting drugs is like any breakup. You’ve got to have your friends sit you down and tell you why that asshole wasn’t good for you, even when you can’t stop thinking about that one time you kissed in the rain and it felt like everything. You’ve got to have constant reminders, in those early times, of why something that became all you could think about moment to moment wasn’t good for you. I’m here to give you those reminders, or at least the ones that worked for me when I quit.
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