It was really strange to feel like I belonged to a group of people since I never had in my life. That’s how I felt when I joined recovery, AA in my case.
Growing up, I secretly felt like I didn’t fit in anywhere. I would hang out with various groups in school, acting different around each one. I settled into a small pack of friends, but never had much in common with them.
It was the same way in the military. Deep down I wanted to be a loner, but I fit in perfectly with the drunks! Of course, on one level it was hard to not feel like I belonged. We all did the same job, worked towards the same missions, talked the same, and partied together.
Beneath the surface I still had that feeling of being an outsider. It made me drink more, desperate to be entertaining, joking all the time. I was playing a role yet again. That sense of being a fraud had carried into the military.
The deep seated outcast feeling really screwed me when I got out. After a couple of Iraq tours and being a hopeless drunk for years, I felt like an alien in a civilian world. My isolation was absolute since I taught myself to build websites and lived alone after I got out.
It was ten more years of drunken pothead insanity before I was broken enough to walk into an AA room. That decision saved my life and continues to years later.
My first AA meeting was a speaker meeting. An older lady with 30 years of sobriety was sharing her story. Through my nervousness and shaky brain fog, I was amazed to hear my own thoughts, resentments, and assumptions come out of her mouth.
She talked about feeling traumatized for a long time, being suicidal, and not fitting in herself. I left in tears, knowing for the first time in my life I had found a group of people that understood me. That realization kept me going back every day.
It turns out, I was always an alcoholic as my core identity! It took me walking into a room full of recovering drunks to learn that truth.
So, the moral of the story is that if you are a veteran or military member that drinks a ton or uses a lot of drugs and feels like an outcast, we have a club for you! There’s tens of millions of us around the world.
Start learning about recovery. Read some AA or NA literature and look up meetings around you. Listen to the similarities which apply to your life. It might save you and show you a group of people where you belong like me.
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