A Daily Meditation for Spiritual Alignment in Recovery

Today marks another year of sobriety, and this date will never be just a date to me. It is the anniversary of the night I nearly did not survive—shackled to a hospital bed behind the walls of a jail, my body barely holding on, while my family was told to come say their goodbyes because the doctors did not expect me to make it until morning. I do not share that to shock anyone. I share it because it is the truest possible picture of exactly how dark it can get before the light finally breaks through.

I did not know, lying in that bed, that I was standing at the edge of the rest of my life instead of the end of it. I only knew the darkness, the fear, the sense that everything I had built and destroyed was finally catching up to me all at once. But it really is darkest right before the light. I came out of that night into a different existence entirely, one I could not have imagined for myself while I was still living inside the wreckage.

Every year on this day, I remember that woman shackled to a bed, given up on by doctors, and I marvel at the distance between her and the woman writing this reflection now—present for her family, building a marriage and a home and a life beyond anything she could have dreamed of from that hospital room.

If I can survive that night and build the life I have now, I believe anyone can. I am not special. I was simply willing, eventually, to accept the help that was being offered, and to keep showing up, one day at a time, for everything that came after.