Growing Pains: Sober Girls Edition

Finding Our Way

Hello my friends!

Welcome to another week of Growing Pains: Sober Girls Edition :)

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If you’d like to read this on the website or you can listen, too: Sober Girls - Finding Our Way

I’ve missed you guys since Monday! Since I last wrote to you, I have been nothing but stressed….I paused for a long time before I chose the word stressed because what I'm feeling is really a combination of overwhelmed, exhausted and lost.

Work has been exceptionally busy as of late (yay quarter four) and I feel like I've just been moving and moving and moving with no time to just pause and breathe. Which is scaring me because these emotions are reminding me of the days when I was drinking. When my whole world revolved around work and the bars.

I personally need my life to revolve around sobriety, those antidotes I wrote about last week and helping other people stay sober but lately…I've just been feeling so disconnected - from myself and others.

Which is a perfect time for God to enter the chat - To make my long story short (for real this time) my day on Wednesday started with a leak in my bathroom and maintenance peeling off the ceiling resulting in the ceiling being on the floor :) Happy Wednesday!

I sublet my apartment from a friend in AA so he was with me in the apartment as all of this is happening reminding me to stay calm. Once the dust settled (literally) I walked with him up First Avenue and we passed by a church that he has frequented many of times prior to, and following him entering the rooms of AA.

Now I hadn't been in a church in a very long time with the exception of church basements. But something inside of me decided to follow him up the steps into the holy place with all too familiar stained glass windows and wooden pews.

There was a table with a little basket right when we walked in. He explained to me that if you write on a piece of paper a prayer and put it in the basket, someone else will pull out the paper during mass and read aloud your prayer.

So I pulled out a little piece of paper and asked for help, I asked for the reminder that “Thy will be done,” I asked for guidance and for clarity. I folded up my desperate prayer, placed it in the basket and my first thought was “Maybe the person who reads this out loud feels the same way too, and we both receive the help we need.”

We then took two candles and went to separate sides of the church - these candles are often placed in front of Saints and the point of lighting one and praying before it is to seek help from that Saint and to pray to a loved one that has passed away. That’s what I was taught at least and to be honest, I have literally no idea which Saint I prayed in front of I just really wanted to talk to my grandpa.

It's the gift of desperation people talk about sometimes - that desperate feeling for me that often leads me to really seeing and hearing and understanding that my Higher Power is in fact there for me.

So we left and I still don’t have a plan, I know I need to do a better job of fitting in AA during a busy day and I’m really scared of what life will look like in a few months. But I left that church knowing that my Higher Power did not bring me this far to let me down now.

So it will all be okay, one way or another. If any of you feel lost today too, I hope you know that we will all find our way together.

With so much love always,

Jane