My life's work

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“Your life’s work is using your word and your life to heal others.”

A former teacher wrote this to me. This teacher—one of the best teachers I’ve ever had—told me this recently.

To which I say, Amen.

I am re-reading the Purpose Driven Life. And at this point, in middle age, with no children and very little family or spouse, contemplating a career change—

I often find myself wondering—

What IS my purpose in this life?

I want to be of service and do good with my life.

I found these words that he wrote to me and I’ve been thinking on them.

My life’s work IS using words and helping to heal others.

However, before that could happen, I have needed to heal myself first.

It’s not a complete or finished work, for sure, as a dear friend told me—who also lost immediate family members to suicide—told me— “I think we’ll be healing until we’re toes up.”

I also am in recovery and on a journey of sobriety, and anyone who knows anything about twelve-step programs knows and centers this—

We’ll also be in recovery, never cured—

Never entirely healed.

But, rather than taking that as an excuse to wallow or retreat, instead—

I want to say this: that’s where the magic lies.

I am amazed at the ways in which God/my Higher Power uses my own mess and dysfunction for good, to help me grow, and where I can be used to help others.

I have heard it said in my home group of AA—

“Being an alcoholic is your greatest asset.”

That’s the biggest message that I wish I would have known or heard much much before my rock bottom, because—

I didn’t realize that. From my father and his alcoholism, I only knew it to be a detriment or deficit. I think many people do. But what many people I think also don’t realize is this—

We all have the propensity for addiction. Many of us are simply able to hide theirs or they’re seen as more positive and acceptable ones.

And certainly, on the surface, it seems that there are better ones—

However, what I’ve come to learn is this—addiction is really the opportunity to confront your biggest shadow self, the ways in which your hurt and pain and trauma has come to an ugly head, like a pimple. But for many others, they don’t have to do so that—

So, instead, they can continue to repress their feelings because they don’t try to drink them away. They can instead shove them down through shopping or buying, judgment, hidden addictions that seem more beneficial like workaholism or exercise-ism or diet-ism.

Anything to the extreme, an addiction, is dangerous;

And the roots of why we do them are often the same—pain. Trauma. Inner child. Fear.

Addiction is you, it’s me, amplified. Manifested in different ways.

The addict and the alcoholic has had to face theirs, their rock bottom. And if they take that opportunity, it begins healing—

That we all need. Such is the human condition.

It has taken a long time to admit my alcoholism and to tend to it—

But, unlike many others who judge it as simply weakness, I think it’s because they see themselves in it. But have managed to mask more. But the truth is—as trauma experts and addiction expert Mate writes, we all have addictions and propensity for pain and trauma to manifest that way. To deal with the suffering of this world and the human condition—

I am glad that I was made to confront that in myself.

Some of my greatest healing as been made possible through that.

Truly, being an alcoholic is my biggest asset—

To this human condition.

I am sober. I am grateful.

I am in recovery and I am healing—my own trauma and addiction, and my generational line.

I am no longer ashamed.

And it is my prayer that I may be used in service to others.

Because, as I read today in my AA daily reflections—

I solidify my sobriety by sharing what I have received freely.

God acts through me.

I am only His instrument.

Amen—let it be so.