Finding Your Purpose in Recovery

April 5, 2017 - Uncategorized - 0 Comments

Finding your purpose in recovery

For some people early recovery is a time full of pink clouds, self-discovery, and visions of the promises.  For others, myself included, early recovery is a time of anxiety, depression, loss, and fear.  When one correlates early recover with such negative feelings and emotions how are they supposed to stay sober and clean?  In my experience the most important thing one can do in their recovery is to find, and then live, their purpose.  This is simultaneously the easiest and hardest thing one can do in their life.  Easy because no one knows you better than you do, hard because no one is as hard on you as you are.  I struggled through my first year of my recover trudging along, feeling as though I was existing rather than living.  It wasn’t until I started going back to school at New Creation College, working the steps with my sponsor, and doing some real work on myself that I started to understand and truly live my purpose.

Coming into recovery, I have seen many clients frustrated because they feel a lack of purpose once they get clean and sober.  So often newcomers have such high expectations for early recovery that when reality hits they can’t help but ask themselves, “I got clean and sober for this?!”  In my experience our purpose changes as we go.  It is a lot to expect of someone to be able to ask them to figure out their entire life’s purpose in the first thirty days of their recovery.  In those first thirty days your purpose might simply be to learn; to learn as much as you can about everything that you can (I personally believe that this is our purpose our entire life, for once we stop learning we stop living).  Later your purpose might be to share, to teach, to create, to mentor, to inspire…the list could go on and on.  The point being is that as we evolve and change so does our purpose in life.  Coming into recovery we are broken and fragile and possibly don’t have much to give the world.  In that case our purpose is to put ourselves back together once again and figure out who we are.  Once we have done that, once we have evolved into the person we were meant to be, our purpose can evolve into what it is supposed to be as well.  Rather than feeling like just existing on this earth, we can feel like we’re living, and experiencing, and contributing.

Purpose is defined as “the reason for which something is done or created or for which something exists.”  How perfectly simple and completely overwhelming all at the same time. The moment we find our purpose in recovery is the exact moment that we begin to fully start living. It’s a wonderfully exhausting process that is worth every second of the work.