Belonging

“Keep coming back. It works if you work it, and you’re worth it!”

The first recovery meeting I attended ended with a circle of elderly ladies, one middle aged dude, and me, all holding hands and saying that phrase together, with unbridled enthusiasm. It felt pretty tacky and cheesy and cringe. My mind goes into overdrive. Why am I here. I’m too smart and sophisticated for this. Besides, I don’t feel worth it. I feel like a piece of shit. What the hell have I gotten myself into. It did feel kinda nice, though. The hug I got when I got my newcomer chip. When I heard a bit of my own insanity coming out of the mouth of someone who couldn’t be more different from me. Maybe I should keep coming back.

I’ve never felt like I’ve belonged anywhere. I think that’s one of the side effects, or maybe primary effects, of deep rooted shame. I felt like an outcast and weirdo in high school, even though I was well liked and ended up becoming the student council president. It was the same all the way back to childhood and into college and beyond. In film school I felt like such a fraud, a total imposter. In addition to eating to avoid the feelings of insecurity, I started spending myself into oblivion on the misguided notion that if I just had the latest gear, the coolest gadgets, then maybe I’d feel like I was a real filmmaker.

These coping strategies continued into all of my forays into being a creative, visible person on the internet, and trying to build a business from it. The amount of money I plowed into courses and communities and software could easily feed and house a family living in an expensive city for a few years. When I got on twitter and landed myself in a funky subculture called “tpot” I once again sprung into compulsive consumption upon those deep seated feelings of unworthiness, separation, fear of exile. I filled my head with with a panoply of psycho-spiritual concepts and jargon so I could converse fluently with the brainy people I wanted feel a sense of belonging with. But it never worked. None of it.

After that first recovery meeting, there in the annex building of an Episcopalian church on the far east side of Tucson, I made a commitment to myself to keep coming back. To work the steps. To try something different, because all my previous strategies for coping with the hostile voices in my head had only deepened my sense of separation and brokenness. Time for something new.

The middle aged man from that initial OA meeting became my first sponsor. The amount he and I had in common turned out to be staggering, even though he, like those old ladies, was living a drastically different life than I had been. We were made of the same stuff, he and I. We shared the same sense of depravity with food, and both felt alienated and broken at our very core. Yet he had a wife and two lovely kids. He was working his way towards a stable and successful career in the medical world. He was acting like an adult, and taking care of what mattered most. If he can build a life like this, maybe there is hope for me, I started to think.

Over the next two years, I kept coming back. Even when I didn’t want to. Even when things began feeling completely and utterly fucked between my mom and me. Even when my relationship with The Girl was falling apart for the second or third time. Even when I was broke, or when I slipped up and binged, I kept coming back. Even in my darkest hour and most debilitating season of depression, in those final few months of 2025, I still managed to hit a meeting or two a week. To stay plugged in.

In the first week of January, my new sponsor had his 40 year anniversary in AA. To celebrate, upwards of a hundred friends and fellows and family members flooded into the foothills of Tucson. The normal room where we meet wasn’t even remotely big enough for the night where he spoke and shared his story. We had to rent a larger one, and there still weren’t enough seats for everyone. Not to mention all the people dialing in on Zoom. At least a hundred more of them. It became clear just how many lives this man had touched in his forty years of sobriety, and how much love existed between this great web of humans.

At the end of that meeting, he read the promises of AA, in his deep, sonorous voice, and each time he started a new sentence, he emphasized the word “we.” “If WE are painstaking about this phase of our development, we will be amazed before we are halfway through. WE are going to know a new freedom and a new happiness. WE will not regret the past nor wish to shut the door on it. No matter how far down the scales we have fallen, WE will see how our experience can benefit others. Are these extravagant promises? WE think not. They are being fulfilled among us, sometimes quickly, sometimes slowly. They will always materialize if WE work for them.”

I’ve heard this passage hundreds of times at this point, but for some reason, on this night I am in tears by the end of it. I feel part of the WE. Even in my degraded and depressed state, I feel like I belong here, in this room of impressive and accomplished and deeply loving people. In the two months since, I’ve been hitting a meeting every single day. Sometimes two a day. Life is getting better.

Keep coming back. It works if you work it, and you’re worth it.