A Room I Could Belong In
“I felt like I'd found the key to a door I knew I needed to open.”
Finding a recovery community is crucial; if you’re here, if you’re reading this email — chances are you know that. For some, that search is more challenging than for others. Because of course the inequities that structure every aspect of our lives also structure the rooms we seek relief in. Today we’re republishing J Wortham’s essay about the importance — the power — of a room where you belong; where you can be; where you can be transformed.
“It wasn’t as simple or as pat as finding ‘people who looked like me.’ I flinched a bit each time I heard someone recite Tradition 10 (expressing no views on ‘outside issues’). I understood the code of leaving topics of religion, alcohol reform, and general politics at the door in order to focus on a spiritual base. But my body, my person, my spirituality was political, for reasons beyond my control. My humanness was politicized by the broader construct of America. And part of the reason I needed recovery. My past was my greatest asset, and not just the messy parts. Consciousness about my racial, gender and sexuality identity informed my feelings of uselessness and self-pity and they were crucial to understanding my fears and dismantling them.”
J’s essay spoke to many in the TSB family and was the most popular story of 2024. Read it in full below.
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HOW TO FEEL VISIBLE
by J Wortham
Originally published September 10, 2024
One night roughly ten years ago, a massive snowstorm was scheduled to hit New York. The city was whipped up into a frenzy about it and a friend of a friend decided to throw an equally massive party during the middle of it. I got there early to stake out a space. I’d decided to offer free tarot readings (I’ve always liked having a task during social events to settle my nerves). I’d also brought two bottles of wine: One for me and one for everyone else.
There’s a photo of me from the night — in a black velvet dress, hair swept up into an impressive bun, white eyeliner and oversized earrings. I look poised, present, even a bit coy. Unfortunately, it’s the memory I have of the night - I woke up fully dressed in my bed later in the evening, unsure of what had happened and how I’d gotten home. I opened Snapchat and saw videos of myself swanning about the party, looking like I was having the time of my life. The videos unsettled something deep inside. I prided myself on not being a drinker who blacks out — at the time, the fear of what others thought always kept me from getting that intoxicated in the presence of other people.
A few nights later, still drowning in shame, I saw an acquaintance post about their sobriety on social media. I immediately DM’d them and asked if they’d take me to a meeting. They agreed, and a few days later, maybe even the next day, we went.
The meeting was lovely. Everyone was warm and welcoming and extremely patient and kind. I got called on to share, and cried all the way through it. Lots of sweet humans got my phone numbers and checked on me often and supported me as I stayed sober from alcohol and went to meetings for a solid and unbroken thirty days.
Still, it would take me 4 or 5 more years until I found a room I could belong in. That meetings, like all of the in-person ones I’ve attended since then, are largely, if not entirely, white. I kept cycling in and out of drinking and other process addictions I didn’t know I had yet (workaholism, overspending, food, people). I hit a bottom, then I started over again. I convinced myself it wasn’t “that bad.”
Then, for me, like so many others, the onset of the pandemic ran a black light over my life and revealed what I could no longer ignore: Drinking wasn’t ever fun anymore.
I always ended up crying in the tub or in a text fight with my mom or my then girlfriend. I was barely functional. I had the gift of desperation, as we say.
But throughout all those slips and relapses, I’d never stopped thinking about program. The questions of “What if I am?” and “Do I need help?” never stopped reverberating in my head.
Sobriety itself took a while. It didn’t help that many of the pop culture narratives about addiction feature wealthy white protagonists or problematic, oversimplified racialized tropes. It felt luxurious to spend this time on my healing. It was easier to reshare memes about self-love than actually do it. I did a little research and started attending some of the “only” meetings — women-only, non-binary-only, and LGBTQAI+-only. It was easier to attend meetings when I was grounded in one place and unable to bury myself and my anxieties with my schedule and other distractions. In the fall of 2021, I landed in a meeting for Adult Children of Alcoholics that was entirely for people of the African diaspora.
The first time I went to that meeting, I finally fully understood what people were talking about when they talked about The Miracle. I was consumed by it, that feeling of belonging. The transmutation that happens when someone says aloud the words you’ve only ever thought in your head. When the person speaking tells your own story and then says, “It got better.” The feeling of possibility. The possibility of a solution. I heard the stories and felt the spirit of my dead alcoholic father present and my living para alcoholic mother in those rooms. I felt like I’d found the key to a door I knew I needed to open. Here were people, many of them AA old-timers, talking about how much these specific rooms had changed them, too. It was the opposite of being gaslit. I was learning and unlearning in the same breath. I felt relaxed in a way that I hadn’t in the other meetings I’d attended.
Hearing people connect their experiences of addiction to their experiences as BIPOC and people of the global majority (yes, these are clunky terms, but people wiser than me use them, and so will I) and how living in a culture that equates human and normal to white, male and cisgender contributed to the conditions of inadequacies that made some of us desperate enough to escape the body and mind and rely on addictive substances to forget and numb and ignore. Hearing those connections made me feel like I belonged — like I could keep coming back. I’m also a Black biracial person, so it’s not like I couldn’t relate to other meetings. But I felt like I was muting a part of myself, censoring my identity and erasing key parts of myself without even realizing it — the same way I did in the outside world, which resulted in a feeling that my raw, entire self needed to be altered to be accepted. I wasn’t really being vulnerable or fully shedding my armor to let others and their wisdom in. I also wasn’t letting any of mine get out. It was reassuring to talk about race and gender as instigators of our addictions and support systems for our recovery. How learning to love the self meant learning to love your gender expression and your complexion and all the other elements of selfhood.
It wasn’t as simple or as pat as finding “people who looked like me.” I flinched a bit each time I heard someone recite Tradition 10 (expressing no views on “outside issues”). I understood the code of leaving topics of religion, alcohol reform, and general politics at the door in order to focus on a spiritual base. But my body, my person, my spirituality was political, for reasons beyond my control. My humanness was politicized by the broader construct of America. And part of the reason I needed recovery. My past was my greatest asset, and not just the messy parts. Consciousness about my racial, gender and sexuality identity informed my feelings of uselessness and self-pity and they were crucial to understanding my fears and dismantling them.
One meeting I attended early on took ten minutes at the end for racial sobriety practices that included kind self-affirmations and pledges to connect with our ancestry. It also acknowledged the links between oppression and white supremacy and targeted campaigns to push addictive substances on our communities. The AA Big Book is not neutral (take the excellent but outdated chapter on “For the Wives,” for example), nor should it be. It’s a product of its time, which doesn’t make it less valuable. One of the groups I’m in has gently amended the 12-step workbook that we use to be more inclusive and it actually feels amazing to see this evolution of Bill’s vision and clarity.
I feel a freedom in those rooms that I cherish and work hard to protect by doing service. I’ve made friends, many of whom I am still in touch with today and talk to regularly. I’ve met up with a handful: We seek each other out when we’re in each other's cities.
I’ve been sober now for nearly three years, both emotionally and from substances, though I do have to start over almost every single day. But I wouldn’t have any of it if I hadn’t heard people speaking on the lens of being raised by Black parents who drank to deal with racism and closeted queer people who used to dampen the feeling of otherness. And I suppose that's what I'm hoping to see more of here.
I’ve been a devoted reader of TSB and finally a paid subscriber after getting out of vagueness about my media habits, thanks to DA accountability!
But I’d love to hear more from TSB readers about their experiences navigating BIPOC and queer recovery. Triumphs, setbacks, what you’re learning and unlearning. All are welcome.
Here’s a great example of one we received the last time.
When you said you noticed drinking just wasn’t fun anymore I felt so seen. I find my drinking isn’t like what’s on tv, I am not a white guy hiding bottles at home and drinking all night at bars or hiding it from a wife and kids at home. Each period I have gone sober, has been triggered by a bad night out where I feel emotionally responsible for others and feel burdened by my own bad feelings bubbling up the second I get drunk. I usually wake up the next day in a depressive haze, crying and moping and heart aching all day. I just ended my most recent period of sobriety and keep facing this internal battle. Sometimes it can be fun. And most times, it is not. It leaves this blankness within me and makes me the projection screen for all my trauma at once.
I see hope in this piece you wrote because you have gone to find communities who relate to you, that there are support groups for queer people and people of color and more. I feel like oh maybe I can live a life sober. Maybe life can be even more enjoyable.
Send yours to tsbcheckins@thesmallbow.com SUBJECT: THIS IS ME
*****
Jenna (J) Wortham is a staff writer for the New York Times Magazine, host of the podcast “Still Processing” as well as the co-editor of the anthology Black Futures. They are currently working on a book about dissociation called Work of Body for Penguin Press. They can be found on Substack here.
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*****
If you don't feel comfortable calling yourself an "alcoholic," that's fine. If you have issues with sex, food, drugs, codependency, love, loneliness, and/or depression, come on in. Newcomers are especially welcome.
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This is The Small Bow newsletter. It is mainly written and edited by A.J. Daulerio. And Edith Zimmerman always illustrates it. We send it out every Tuesday and Friday.
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A POEM ON THE WAY OUT:
The Enchantment
by Sharon Olds
*********
When I say, to my mother, What was a good
thing about me as a child?, my mother’s
face seems to unfurl from the center,
hibiscus in fast motion, the anthers
and flounces spring out with joy. Oh you were
enchanting, she breathes. What do you mean—
crazy? No sense of reality?
No-no, she laughs, with many little notes—
half a scale, plus grace notes—I don’t
know how to say it, you were just . . .
enchanting. Possessed? I ask. Brain-damaged?
No . . . she smiles. There was something about you—
the way you looked at things. I think I get it:
that stunned look on my face, in photos,
that dumbstruck look, gaze of someone
who doesn’t understand anything.
But a week later, I decide it was a look
of wonder, it was bemused pleasure.
Days later, I see it—that light
on my mother’s face—she loved me. And today
I hear her, she did not say enchanted.
The woman in whose thrall I am
is in my thrall, I came into being
within her silks and masses, and after we are
gone would she caper here, my first
love, would she do me the honor of continued ensorcelling?
— From Poetry, August 2001
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