Always Messy

Stories of serenity and the road getting there

We convene a group in our town for recovering addicts (Shalvah) and another devoted to raising the awareness curtain on mental illness-mental health (No Shande). We have been secret with our stories. Confidentiality does not mean secrecy. Secrecy is part of the problem. It’s time to tell the stories.

Always Messy

The Serenity Journals (Shalvah means serenity)

part 1

It’s happened a few times but always de-stabilizing. Someone comes to the meeting drunk, smelling like drink anyway and acting strange, I assume drunk. As does half a dozen others around the table. We are all authorities on drunkenness, as it were.

Still we say it out loud and clearly in our opening: the only desire for participation is willingness. If they are present, we assume willingness. Generally no one says anything, unless there’s a disturbance.

Generally there is a disturbance. It’s alcoholism or addiction or substance abuse or mental illness, whatever it’s called it’s messy. So someone came that night smelling of alcohol. She cried, teary through the lead, and punctuating the speaker’s words with her own grunts and acknowledgments. It was uncomfortable but no one said anything. The woman sitting next to her passed her some Kleenex.

She was, of course, one of the first to speak in the sharing. She gave a lecture. Entirely theoretical against defining a human being in any way other than beautiful, I am not my problem, etc. We all get this, of course, but we let her go on with the theoretical part of the meeting.

There is no theoretical part of the meeting. We are always speaking about our own experience, strength, and hope and what we have learned from the poetry of our own lives. We never talk theory. We are not theologians. We stay with what we know.