In These Rooms Blog

We are all spiritual beings having a human experience. Every person I meet In These Rooms has a Cast of Characters (C of C’s) and every character is a potential leader with In Spite of Dreams and a Heroic BadAss. The people might not see themselves that way but I do because the wound is where the light enters.

This is in the front of my mind today as I enter the room. I’m confronted with the sharing of a young lady I will call Paula. Paula is a 34-year-old white woman. Widowed mother of 4 children between ages 7 and 14, she lost her husband 5 years ago to a mine blast in Iraq. Currently in counseling for severe depression. Paula’s had 4 DWI in the last 3 years, lost a six-figure job due to alcohol and drugs. She says she hung out with people at clubs while she tried to fake it and make the pain go away. Her brother killed her other brother in a drunken rage. As she speaks, she has a look on her face of loss and lostness. She seems lonely even in this room full of people.
Paula says of herself, “…You could say the wreckage of alcohol runs in my family. I am suicidal so if this shit doesn’t work, I’m doing it…Working these steps of recovery is religion for me…I had to deal with physical abuse, emotional abuse homelessness with a child… I’m a drug addict that must go work and be a mom even if I’ve been diagnosed with a rare bone disease and loss of some of my essential bodily functions and ended up reducing myself to drunken coma as the way out… I’m passed the moment of asking for help… There are times when I find myself yelling at God while running around in my slip high on crack. I just knew God was my enemy…”

Paula says she needs this 12 Step Recovery Program to be the best thing that has happened for her in a long time. She has used alcohol to numb the pain. She is ashamed of losing her job, mistakes she has made, not being a better mother to her children, the joy of her life, but this is just where she is right now in life. “…I feel my life is like a frog in boiling water; its slow but it just keeps getting hotter…Where I am right now, I gotta get sober, get clean or die...” More to come on Paula next time. The Struggle Continues…

“…Stories heal because we become whole through them. In the process of…discovering our story, we restore those parts of ourselves that have been scattered, hidden, suppressed, denied, distorted, forbidden…”

Deena Metzger

I am a 61-year-old African American Male who was raised in the small mid-western town of Kalamazoo, Michigan. I have a Master of Divinity Degree from Yale University and I am an ordained priest. I also have a rap sheet as long as your arm. Obviously, something went wrong somewhere. Or did it?

I’ve done more crime in my 61 years on this earth than most brothers who are doing a 5 to 10 stretch right now but have never been sentenced for my felonious behaviors nor done any time for my many crimes. Is not something wrong with this picture? Or, is this where the story starts getting good?

In the midst of the recent Covid 19 Pandemic, I chose not to shelter in place but to instead start a recovery cooperative with a message of hope for people caught in addiction while simultaneously providing professional services support at no cost to one of the Heroic Companies serving the Houston Community. I like to say “…you can’t make this shit up…”

Follow me as I journey into rooms where people share these and similar stories of their lived truth. I call this blog ‘In These Rooms’. ‘In These Rooms’ is your guided journey thru 12 Step Recovery Rooms. I will introduce you to the characters, their stories and the occasional BadAss that embodies a special Story Magic Power or, like me, a “Better for having Been Broken’ mindset.

‘In These Rooms’ is a blog about people who celebrate the power of storytelling, embrace the gifts of their faults, and want to share the wisdom of their lived truth with the world. But, ‘In These Rooms’ is also a blog about people, their personal demons and their struggles to get the better of their personal addictions. I will share stories from my own struggles with addiction, for I am also one of these people. I have lived with the problems of sexual addiction, alcohol abuse and, no doubt, a problem with leaving other people’s shit alone (lol).

But, “In These Rooms’ is more than a Blog. ‘In These Rooms’ is the story of my search to find and share the most powerful and authentic stories, journeys and struggles of people dealing with their past, their hurts and pains, their haunting memories and experiences and their shame. ‘In These Rooms’ is the untold truths about addiction and recovery.

“…When you live in the land of death, sometimes your mind and soul get lost on the way home…”

The Professor

‘In These Rooms’ is the story of my search for the latent powerful characters that reside in all of us. This is the story of how these characters navigate this thing called life and tackle the everyday issues and struggles. Perfectly flawed, the characters I seek to uncover here come from the soul of truth and are flawed and fallible BadAsses. In all cases, identities have been kept hidden to protect the guilty (smile).

I hope ‘In These Rooms’ will be a source of empowerment for you, the audience. I share these stories and characters for neither academic nor entertainment purposes. ‘In These Rooms’ is about the journeys and struggles of people in recovery. But truth is truth. We are all haunted by memories and ghosts from our past. We all hear our own inner voices and we all wrestle with our own inner demons. Some of us are more adept or skilled at this than others. Some of us just don’t give a damn and keep rolling. My hope is you will come to give a damn as you read this blog. Maybe for the first time you will come to accept, appreciate, and truly love the man or woman in the mirror despite the past. Join me in this journey. I hope you will come to know personally the meaning of Better for having Been Broken. Welcome Aboard!

…The real difference between telling what happened and telling a story about what happened is that instead of being a victim of our past, we become a master of it….We can’t change our past, but we can change where we stand when we look at it…

Donald Davis

To hear some of these stories, listen to our podcast interviews with the Hunter in Wrecked America.