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⬅️ Previous capture (2021-12-04)
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This week I tried to go to a SMART meeting. The meeting is held at Salem Hospital. I really like the meeting, and have been going since I first got sober and serious about recovery in 2017. Was it then? I tried to stop drinking as early as 2015, I think. I vaguely remember my first visit. It may have been after I went to my first AA meeting in Cambridge. That was an open speaker meeting. I sat in the back, listened to the speaker, and the conversations that followed. I wasn't exactly blown away by what she was saying. It was mostly about how her life had improved since she became sober. I was too scared to talk to anybody at the meeting, and too emberassed to go back a second time. As if any random person by the Harvard train station would have any judgement about seeing some random person walking around a church at night time. A very irrational belief I held at the time.
I really like the SMART meeting at Salem, I know the moderators and it is a small group, and always felt like an appropriate place to discuss how I was feeling. I would mostly go after I had stopped drinking after another relapse, or after I had stopped drinking following a long period of using. I was going on a somewhat regular basis prior to the corona virus pandemic. I was in a fairly comfortable spot then, around a year and a half of sobriety, and didn't really feel the need to go to meetings at that point. The shutdown and pandemic really became an excuse to stop participating in my own recovery. I felt as if I had control over the abstinence from alcohol, but I sort of fell into a routine between my job and my apartment which was very close by.
I don't feel like drinking again. The idea is repulsive. The thought of drinking hard liquor on an empty stomach makes me gag, as it did before my tolerance would increase when I was drinking habitually.
I had forgotten that the room they used for the Salem meeting had changed recently, before I stopped going all together, and found that the main door to that building was now locked and for physicians only. Then I realized that they had probably changed the location completely. I walked around the campus, which is under construction, to the main entrance to ask the front desk. They didn't know what I was talking about at first, then found a memo that had the location, and provided me with directions to that part of the building, after sanitizing my hands and putting on a new mask that they provided.
Walking through the hospital at night reminded me of the last time I had actually been in one, which was either from my last spin dry detox or ER visit due to alcohol intoxication. I've been in maybe three or four different hospitals for this. Each visit got progressively worse. From my first detox in an actual medical wing to a detox / psych ward, to a dedicated detox center in a hospital, and eventually a state run program in prison.
Each time I was in detox I just wanted to leave, and was always looking to check out as early as possible, leaving a day or more before the day the staff recommended I stay.
Salem hospital was quiet, and sterile, like all hospitals. There were no screaming patients, or security staff that I noticed. As I got deeper into the labrinth I remembered the small details of some of the previous facilities. The tile floors, the door handles, windows with a view to other nondescript medical offices and labs, the silence of the after hours environment and shadows present in the hallways between elevators.
That had to have been nearly three years ago. I could go on about other details, encounters, conversations and personalities, and I will at a later time. I eventually found the familiar part of the hospital, the day treatment wing on the top floor in a building farthest away from the main entrance, but the door was locked. I think the meeting may be on haitus right now, like so many others. I feel like something is still missing. I don't really think I have left the cycle of addiction, and probably never will. SMART recovery talks about exiting the spiral, but I am not sure if this could ever really apply to me, or anyone, for as long as I can remember the details of my last visits under very different circumstances only a few short years ago. I think will try to find another meeting for now.