Redemption or Recovery?

There is a before and after story I can fall prey to telling in order to excuse my past and justify my present. It involves the fall and then the redemption. The version 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.

It’s a valid story. It has a clear arc, 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 a risk that the messy, complicated, deeply human truth of what actually happened got flattened into something palatable enough to share and might overlook the stark fact that the chaos also created something. It was also a becoming.

The redemption snare

Redemption has a seductive plot. 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 the redemption story I am required to own 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 did 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. It wasn’t meaningless acts of self sabotage carried out by a person who didn’t give a toss.. My chaos was a response. It was 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 something. To numb something. To feel something. To escape something that was otherwise inescapable. It wasn’t evidence of my failure as a human being but rather the inadequacy of the resources I had been given to carry it.

It doesn’t make them consequence free. 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 cannot see from the inside

The path that looks chaotic from the outside often looks remarkably logical from the inside. Not at the time. 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 was not visible before.

The line is not a straight, but it’s a line that 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. Some of the gold I carry was forged from my experiences.

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

Life doesn’t work 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 complex because we are complex. The destruction was also transformation, even if it didn’t look like it at the time.

I have without a doubt changed, I have made amends and I have 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.