Once a week I go to group therapy. Friends ask, what do you do in group? How is it different than individual sessions? I'd never trust opening up with other people around! What do you s-a-y?
Group is an amazing and powerful tool for -- excuse the buzzword -- recovery. Buzzwords aside, I can say it has been an essential ingredient in helping me get more well than I've been in my previous 42 years. Without the work I've done in group, I probably wouldn't have been ready or willing to give up smoking. It's not that I talked about smoking in group. It's that, when you work as hard as I work in group, you know when you're not making progress, when there's some kind of block, when you're stuck. Usually it's an addiction. Pick your poison.
I didn't put this together before I went tonight--the whole smoking and group thing. I just went. Like I always do. But like I always don't, I cried through my work. All of it. Never mind cried; I sobbed.
I wept for the family I had and lost, the family I thought I had, the father who evaporated one day when I got off the bus from kindergarten, the battles with stepfamilies and alcohol and panic and rage and so many many other things. I wept for what was and for what was missing. I wept for him and for her and for us.
And finally, I wept for me.
It was the first time I realized, really realized, why I smoked, what I was holding down with cigarettes, why I so desperately needed to escape. Even though I've worked for a year to sort through issues I never thought I could, I've held onto so much more--more that I needed to run from every 20 minutes.
I've grieved plenty over the last two years, believe me when I say this. I am the one who never cried over my father's death. I am the one who carried a 4.0 GPA in the face of an emotional meltdown. I know a thing or two about holding up, and I know a thing or two about breaking down.
What both amazes and terrifies me is knowing that there's so much more to go. That I've really only begun. That some of what I've run the farthest from has been buried so deep under so many layers of smoke and spaghetti, of jokes and cokes, that it's going to take me a long time to get it up, and out. Out is the ultimate goal.
I never thought when I started this journey it would feel this way. I guess if I had known I might have decided not to take it.
For the first time tonight, though, I don't want to smoke.
I don't want a cigarette.
I just want to breathe and rest, to dream, to float.
