Recovery has gifted me so many things, but the gift that overwhelms me the most is the love it has enabled me to bear. It’s a beautiful thing, really, but oh, my Lord, can it be overwhelming. I’m blessed with so much love and connection that I haven’t learned how to carry it all.
Staying in touch with everyone I care about feels like an impossible task -not because I don’t want to but because I miss them so damn much. It’s the ironic and antithetical truth: that I miss people too much to give them a call.
Let’s take the ladies from New Lane Senior Center, for example. During my time with NY Project Hope (a FEMA-funded program responding to the COVID crisis), I visited New Lane every Thursday. Tina, Gale, Yolanda, Rosemarie, and Doña Julia made those visits unforgettable -as well as my awesome colleagues. They were all sharp, funny, and endlessly kind.
When my fiancé and I were on a cruise ship leaving New York Harbor, waving during the sail away, heading under the Verrazzano Bridge, we held up a sign that said, “We love you, New Lane!” Tina and Gale actually caught a picture of us, which was unsurprising considering they were the star members of the photography club. It was a small moment, but it meant everything to me. These and so many other beautiful memories were shared in our short time together, and I still have the pleasure of enjoying Tina’s photography on Facebook. Their support, humor, and presence made those months a whole lot brighter.
I care deeply about them and think about them often, but I haven’t contacted them in a long time.
I think about picking up the phone to send a text, and I hesitate with a memory heavy on my heart…
When I was around 12, I volunteered at the nursing home where my mom worked and became close friends with a resident named Elvira. She was the best thing since sliced bread, which is inaccurate because she was probably older than that. She was funny, bright, and one of the few adults -senior or otherwise- who could hold the attention and admiration of a young boy who just wanted to go home and play video games. I remember her hands; I remember how, one day, she used her limited funds to buy me a chicken pot pie for lunch in the cafeteria. I remember that pot pie. That’s the kind of person Elvira was: giving, even when she had very little to give.
Life got busy, and I stopped visiting as often. One day, my mom came home and told me Elvira had passed away. I wasn’t ready for that loss, and my heart was stunned into silence. You see, it’s fascinating to me because I had already lost my grandmother (and several father figures,) so it’s not like loss was a stranger. Her loss was… her loss cut me deeply because I had never considered that losing her could be a possibility. I didn’t know how to process it and still don’t think I’ve fully processed it.
That experience shaped me in ways I’m still doing my best to understand. It taught me how much it hurts to lose someone you love, and it taught me how deeply you could come to love someone you don’t see every day. My life is a story of loss that damned me to carry fear, a story that all of my brothers, sisters, and others in recovery have written and read. That fear holds me back from reaching out to the people I love, not because I don’t care, but because I care so much that I’m afraid of what happened since the last time they picked up the phone.
I tell myself it’s easier this way, and who knows, maybe it is. Perhaps I don’t give myself enough grace when I move to save myself from pain. Excluding a message on any of Meta’s products, I always try to respond when people reach out to me, perhaps because it gives me some sense of balance or probably because, in my mind, it absolves me of the responsibility to stay in touch unless they stay in touch first. Maybe it’s because humans weren’t designed to know as many people as I know, and perhaps our hearts aren’t big enough to handle the love that flows into and out of them from so many sources. Speaking for myself, I know those lovely ladies at the senior center are the tip of the iceberg.
I wonder if Tina, Gale, Yolanda, Rosemarie, and Doña Julia know how much they mean to me. I wonder if I know how much I mean to others in my same situation: missing me too much to shoot me a meme. I hope I do; I hope they do. I think about them, love them, and hope they feel it.
And now this article ends the same way it began: with recovery. As recovery transformed me inside and out, I know that without the healing and introspection that it brings, this beautiful problem would just be a ghost in the back of my mind.
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