Trouble
(Trouble me) disturb me with all your cares and your worries
(Trouble me) on the days when you feel spent
Why let your shoulders bend
Underneath this burden
When my back is sturdy and strong?
Trouble me
(Speak to me) don't mislead me
The calm I feel means a storm is swelling
(Speak to me) there's no telling where it starts or how it ends
(Speak to me) why are you building this thick brick wall to defend me
(Speak to me) when your silence is my greatest fear?
Why let your shoulders bend
Underneath this burden
When my back is sturdy and strong?
Speak to me
(Let me) have a look inside these eyes while I'm learning
(Let me) please don't hide them just because of tears
(Let me) send you off to sleep with a
"There, there, now stop your turning and tossing"
(Let me) let me know where the hurt is and how to heal
Working in Recovery! It’s this new new new thing in my life.
And, when I can completely compartmentalize the shit-storm that is my marriage right now, it’s making me so so happy.
And I bring fun Legos to do together, and I bring aromatherapy and meditation, to help calm and destress.
Someday soon I will do chair yoga and maybe even bring in massage and acupuncture, if I can get some hours donated.
I bring my authentic self and my story about how bad it got for me and what I did about it. I get to bring all of me, I love that I don’t have to hide that I’m in recovery, like I feel I have to in the corporate world.
Mostly though, I bring my warmth and kindness, I bring hope and strength, and hopefully I bring some healing energy into the otherwise bleak world of addiction and hurt where the participants at this sober “respite” house find themselves.
It’s still so new and new things can sometimes be hard and scary, but I’m feeling encouraged because I seem to be catching on pretty quickly. In fact, I got a huge compliment recently, when a fellow staff member and a few of the participants said it seemed like I’d been doing this type of work a lot longer than my short time so far on the job. Hearing this meant the world to me!
Between my normal full-time job and this new part-time job I haven’t had a day off since I got back from the AA Convention I went to in Costa Rica in early May. And I actually don’t have a day off until several more weeks, when I will take one full precious day off both jobs on my birthday in June, but I don’t care because I feel so driven right now to just get the hours and experience. At this pace, I can probably sit the Certified Recovery Peer Specialist exam to get my provisional certification before the end of the year, and then upgrade to full once I’ve finally finished the required 500 hours in early 2026.
It’s a strange and new experience to be so compelled to do something (other than when I used to compulsively drink and self-destruct) and it may sound strange but I really do feel God is leading me. It’s like something has clicked into alignment and it thrills me to think I may have work I can find interesting and meaningful enough to want to do until I reach my full retirement age at 67.
15 more years of working seemed like a prison sentence if I had to do the same old corporate IT gig, but now I have some hope with this “second career” I’ve already started. Like the very fact of my sobriety, it kind of amazes me! What God and I have been able to do together.
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