Ali’s Recovery Story

Ali is telling her recovery story when her daughter walks in asking for a Fun Dip. No, not before ten in the morning, but a fruit roll-up is fine. Ali negotiates the terms mid-sentence, then picks her story back up like it never paused.

What might seem like a break in the story is the crux of it: making healthier choices day by day.

A horse named Rebel

Ali grew up in Alaska from ages three to eighteen, and her struggles with alcohol and other substances continued into adulthood. In middle school, after leaving a residential treatment center, she visited a horse named Rebel as often as she could. His owner recognized their bond and, for Ali’s birthday, signed him over to her.

Rebel stayed on the owner’s property, but his daily care became Ali’s responsibility. She’d always been the horse-crazy kid. Now she had a horse of her own.

She still calls it a privilege.

Rebel became her higher power. She put everything into him. A few years later a moose broke into his pen and scattered the horses, and Rebel ended up on the road one January morning and was hit by a car. Ali lost her higher power, and at the time, didn’t know anything else.

A few rock bottoms later, she was unhoused in Spokane, Washington, in an unhealthy relationship and using. Someone once brought her to a 6 a.m. men’s meeting. None of the men asked her to leave. She sat in the back with her head resting on the table, sober for one more hour, and she has never forgotten what it felt like to be allowed to stay.

Then she found out she was pregnant. She called her mother, not knowing who else to call. Her mother flew out and detoxed her in a hotel room for a couple of days, after the local detox program turned her away for overusing its services. A probation officer told her plainly: Leave treatment now, and she’d be delivering her daughter in a prison cell. She stayed.

The interstate compact

An interstate compact moved Ali from Washington to Maine, to live with her mother and have a healthy, sober pregnancy, as COVID shut the world down. Nobody was going anywhere, which gave her the distance from substances she needed at first. Her outpatient program went virtual, and someone introduced her to a 24-hour online meeting that had started the day everything locked down. Ali didn’t know the 12 steps yet. But she found connection there and kept showing up.

After her daughter was born, postpartum depression and fear set in, and Ali came close to going back to the relationship she’d left. Her mother called the probation office after an argument, and the officer mentioned a recovery home for mothers. Ali doubted that she would qualify, because of her involvement with the justice system, but the officer told her she was her own best advocate. Ali called, thought it over, and called back to take the bed. In August 2020, with her daughter a couple of months old, she moved in.

Still growing

The 12 steps were at the heart of the program. Living alongside other women in recovery, Ali began to recognize her own strength. She had privately given herself six months, unsure she would make it that long. Before those six months were up, she began to believe she could.

When the baby developed health needs requiring more isolated living, staff moved them to a suitable location without Ali leaving the program. She finished her associate’s degree in human services and, shortly before graduating, took an apartment nearby. She’s been there four years this month.

Someone further along helped Ali into her first service role, welcoming newcomers. From there she took on marking milestones for others. She’s had more than one mentor since, and calls the patience of the women who sat with her a gift she wouldn’t find anywhere else.

Recovery isn’t a straight line, she says. It’s a big ball of yarn, tangled up, and you gently pull on a thread to loosen it. She remembers her rock bottom clearly: screaming into traffic, hollow and disconnected, not wanting to live.

Today Ali works in the mental health field, with adults who have co-occurring mental health and substance use conditions. She still goes to meetings, though it ebbs and flows, and still calls her sponsor.

Her seventh anniversary is November 15, higher power willing.

As told to Carolyn Delaney.