Redemption or Recovery?

Oh how we love a before and after story. And I can fall into the seductive trap of telling my journey that way in order to excuse my past and justify my present. That version of the story involves the fall and then the redemption. Where I did terrible things, hit rock bottom, saw the light, and emerged on the other side as someone worthy of respect. Someone ‘cleaned up’ and redeemed.

And it's a valid story in many ways. It has a clear plot with a satisfying resolution, and it can excuse some of the person I was. It allows me to make some sense of all the loss and fallouts. But in that there is also a risk that the messy, complicated, deeply human truth of what actually happened gets flattened into something palatable enough to share. And that is in danger of overlooking the stark fact that the chaos also created something important.

The redemption snare

Redemption is attractive. It gives structure to the pain and it says that everything I went through and put the people I loved through had a purpose and the purpose is this cleaned up version of me standing here now, having learned my lesson. But buried inside that redemption story is a condition, that I am required to say that I was I was bad and then made good.

Redemption doesn’t just ask me to change, I feel it tempts me to disown the past me and look at myself now and say: “I was a problem. I was broken but then I overcame”.

And I kinda did that at first. I told my story with humility and gratitude and distance, (which I needed at the time). But I also unwittingly put the old self in a box and labelled it rock bottom and spoke about her as though she were someone from another life who did bad.

But true recovery - recovery that has shaped and grown over the years is different from redemption. It gives me compassion for the struggling desperate me of the past.

In recovery there absolutely is accountability and humility , but also compassion.

A deeper understanding that my destruction was not malice and it wasn’t meaningless acts of self sabotage carried out by a person who didn’t give a toss.. My chaos was a response and it was using the only tools available to me when I was confused and in pain and didn't yet have any better tools.

The drinking, the chaos, the hurt I caused, the choices I made it was all a desperate attempt to survive and to numb something. It also allowed me to feel something and escape emotions that felt too much. It wasn’t evidence of my failure as a human being but rather the inadequacy of the resources I'd been given to carry it.

It doesn’t make them consequence free and it doesn’t mean they didn’t cause damage that I had to amend for. But I can now appreciate that there is a vast difference between saying those choices had a cost and saying those choices proved I was broken.

One is accountability. The other is shame dressed up as wisdom.

The straight line you can't see from the inside

The path that looks chaotic from the outside often looks remarkably logical from the inside. Not at the time of course, because at the time it felt like drowning. But looking back, with the distance and the clarity that only comes from having survived it, something becomes visible that wasn't visible before.

The line that connects is all over the place, it's not straight but it connects everything. The impulsive decisions, the spectacular failures, the moments I thought were destroying me were also rearranging me if I chose and had the chance to recover. It all gave me a depth of understanding that I would most likely not have acquired in any other way.

My empathy has grown from that mess. The ability I have to sit with someone else's pain without flinching came from having to sit in my own despair.

So not a before and after story, but a becoming.

i don't think life works in befores and afters. It works in layers. The person I am now is not a replacement for the person I was then. Every part of who I am today, the strength, the insight, the hard won compassion, has its roots in the person I have thought I had to be ashamed of. I’m not fully proud of her, but she is part of me and she was screaming for help.

The before and after narrative is the version of my story that makes things neat. But I can be simultaneously chaotic and brilliant, destructive and deeply alive, making terrible choices and becoming exactly who I needed to be.

It’s all complex because we're complex.

I have without a doubt changed, I have made amends and I've learnt and loved from the person I was  - but I also don’t have to keep apologising for the person I was in order to earn the right to be who I am now.