Recovering Community and Creativity: One Year Later
By Joan Paulette Dudley
When the governor announced the statewide shutdown on March 12, 2020, a chill ran through my body. Just two days before, I celebrated my 18th birthday in my 12-step program and now all the meetings I attended every week would be canceled indefinitely. I would be separated from the routine and the people I depended on to stay sober.
Addiction is a disease of shame and isolation. Our close contact with one another is essential for our survival. Lucky for me, I have a friend in our fellowship who is not only charismatic but an excellent organizer. Within days, she had a Zoom meeting set up that met every day of the week at 5:30 pm. She recruited her sponsor who had just moved to Arizona, her home group members in Henderson, her friends from early sobriety in Hawaii, California, and Utah. In those early days, we saw an unfamiliar face, but we welcomed her anyway. It turned out this woman lived in New Zealand and had accidentally transposed two numbers in her group's Zoom meeting ID. After that little bit of divine intervention, she’s been with us ever since. We now have two members from Auckland, and it is always fun to engage in a bit of time travel with them as they sit in the noonday sun in their tank tops under their rotary fans. As the weeks turned to months, friends invited friends. Eventually, through serendipity and circumstance, we added members in Colorado, Maryland, Alaska, and British Columbia.
Day after day, week after week, I tuned in and listened to their stories. I watched their faces. They greeted newcomers with smiles of welcome. They celebrated as one young member celebrated 30 days sober, then 60, then six months, and finally a year of sobriety. She quit drinking just days before the lockdown and has stuck close to us ever since. She told us when she discovered she was pregnant. She called us from bed rest, from the hospital, and then we got to wave and smile at her beautiful baby boy as he rested in her arms. We actually had four babies born during this year—two boys and two girls. Their mothers tuned in day after day, exhausted, joyful, fearful, exasperated, no matter what.
We also shared difficult times with each other. One woman shared her grief over the overdose death of a young person close to her. Another called us from the hospital room where her newborn son struggled for life as he waited for a liver transplant. Some women struggled to stay sober, but they kept showing up, relapse after relapse.
Although I have attended meetings for a long time, I have never experienced this level of intimacy with a group of sober women. They cooked dinner, folded laundry, and wrestled sticky children. They called from the beach, the car, the backyard. When they spoke, I switched to speaker view so I could watch their expressions, and also maybe snoop at the books on the bookshelf behind them. I saw inside their hearts as they shared their hopes and fears and their daily frustrations.
Our struggles as sober women take on new meaning when they are shared with one another. Our close contact with one another is essential to our recovery, and none of us had ever done it this way before. We weren't certain we could stay sober online, but most of us did. Soon, we realized that we had created an online environment that allowed us a kind of intimacy that we probably never could have achieved in an in-person meeting. Never have I heard sharing so raw and honest as in those meetings. I saw those women stay sober no matter what life threw at them. Every day I checked in with them for an hour, and I knew I could keep going too.
This women’s recovery group inspired me to create a group of my own. When I realized that lockdown wasn’t going away any time soon, I invited some friends, both “normies” and those in recovery, all genders welcome, to work through Julia Cameron’s The Artist’s Way together over 12 weeks. Cameron’s approach springs from the same principles as 12-step recovery programs and applies them to recovering and nurturing one’s creativity. Each week I was delighted to see the faces of my friends who had moved to various corners of the country and share in the joy of creativity and recovery combined in this way.
The online format created a sense of intimacy and energy in a period where many of us felt adrift. The Artist’s Way group inspired one participant to finally record his music, and another woman to audition for a television song contest. I started a new novel, and several others either started new projects or found new energy to engage with ongoing ones. One friend stated sheepishly that she was "not an artist" at the beginning of our workshop. By the end of our time together, she was painting watercolors and experimenting with cooking and interior decorating. Another, an accomplished artist and arts administrator, had suffered a stroke a few years before. The program requires daily writing called “morning pages.” She persevered even though her handwriting was crabbed, and her thoughts scattered. Today, she reported to me that her handwriting now looks almost normal and she enjoys taking photographs on her daily walks with her small dog.
Here we are over a later, and I celebrated my 19th birthday online with my Zoom friends and a rousing, off-key chorus of Happy Birthday. Even better, the woman who wasn’t certain she could stay sober celebrated her first birthday just a few days before mine. As much as I miss giving my friends hugs and visiting with them in person, I am so humbled and grateful for this pandemic experience, which has taught me once again that creativity, like recovery, is not a solitary pursuit. We need each other.
Photo/Joan Paulette Dudley.
Joan Paulette Dudley teaches writing at the College of Southern Nevada and creates programming events for Boulder City Library. Her work has appeared in various anthologies and journals including Sandstone and Silver: An Anthology of Nevada Poets, Clark: Poetry from Clark County, Nevada, Legs of Tumbleweed, Wings of Lace: Nevada Women Poets, Helen, 300 Days of Sun, Fox Adoption, Blacktop Passages, and Interim. When not writing poetry and fiction, she enjoys hiking and kayaking with her husband in the deserts, mountains, and rivers near her home on traditional Chemehuevi and Southern Paiute land in Boulder City, Nevada.
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