500 Sober Sisters in NYC: a recap
July 2017
I've been putting off writing about the SheRecovers weekend in NYC for a few reasons, not the least of which is that I don't know how to distill the pure power of those 3 days of feminine grace, beauty, and strength into one little blog post. The task of capturing the raw emotion of a weekend with 500 other women who are all at different points in their own recovery (from a myriad of things including addiction, mental illness, eating disorders, codependency, etc, etc.--many of us, myself included, are recovering from all of these) process seemed way too big a task for me. It feels like one of those events where you don't know what to say except, "you just had to be there."
But. I'm going to put my pen to the page, or finger to the keyboard, as it is, and see what flows out from my individual perspective about this 1st annual women's recovery weekend conference in NYC by SheRecovers.
I arrived to NYC from DC on Thursday and solo airbnb'ed in Central Park West. Planning it this way so that I could wake up fresh on Friday, the first day of the conference, and not have to spend the entire day traveling. But the buzz & anticipation of the event had me losing sleep all week and Thursday night in my lovely little Airbnb was no exception. On Friday I uber'ed to The Conrad Hotel in Lower Manhattan and spent an hour and a half in rainy traffic, a trip that was only supposed to take 30 minutes. I sustained a mini panic attack in the uber worrying about how I was going to be late for the Sober Bloggers Meet and Greet, as I was one of the ten sober bloggers being featured (shoutout to my fellows Kelly, Veronica, Laura S., Laura M., Holly, Jen, Julie, and Jean) and I hate being late.
I arrived to the Conrad disheveled, but with enough time to freshen up before the Meet & Greet at 5pm. I met up with my roomies--Annelise, Emma, and Lara. We laughed and swapped comments about how bizarre it was to finally be meeting IRL (in real life). I already knew Annelise and Emma, but this was my first time meeting Lara IRL. These three are all truly beautiful badass women with unique gifts--Annelise and her wild intuition and worldliness, Emma and her deep reflection & humor, Lara and her social grace and generosity.
I made my way down to the Meet & Greet where I met lots more people for the first time ever IRL. I can't tell you how cool/overwhelming/utterly weird it is to hug dozens of friends in the flesh with whom I've been conversing with for at least a year via online. Nothing could have prepared me to meet 500 sober women in person, especially when I am the introverted type who gets overstimulated by going to the mall on Saturday or hanging out with more than 1 friend at a time. I felt awkward, nervous, shy, confident, happy. All the mixed things. I know others felt all these things too. I got to meet coaching clients of mine who I've seen only via Skype. It was magical. Connections everywhere. There's no telling how many tiny miracles occurred from the get-go, how many seeds were planted for positive change from these 1:1 and group interactions between new and old soul sisters.
After 2 hours of laughing and chatting with women from all walks of life and all parts of the world, we herded upstairs to see Glennon Doyle give the first keynote speech Friday night. She was captivating, endearingly funny, and absolutely bursting with life with her new love, Abby Wambach, by her side. Glennon has this uncanny ability to make light of the heaviest subjects, including mental hospitals, antidepressants, God, alcoholism, infidelity and divorce, and bulimia.
By 10pm, I was totally zonked and hadn't eaten dinner yet so my roomies and I ordered sushi to our room and it was delivered in proper NY time. We stayed up way too late, chatting and having girltalk. I ironically felt a little bit like I was on drugs because of all the stimulation and excitement that had occurred in the previous 5 hours but I could feel a crash coming on.
By Saturday morning I felt like I had been hit by a bus. My sensitive system was on overdrive and it was starting to act like a machine that was simply malfunctioning. I was exhausted and emotional, totally off-kilter, and couldn't think clearly. And as a result of this, felt extreme guilt that I couldn't manage to "put my best foot forward" at an event that we'd been highly anticipating for a year plus.
On Saturday afternoon, I had a full-blown panic attack in the middle of Elizabeth Vargas' keynote speech and got up to leave and take a break back in my hotel room just after my angel Ellen from The Suburban Monk extended the human loving kindness I was in deep need of by consoling me- "Sasha, it's okay to be human, it is O. KAY." She gave me tissues and her number and texted me immediately with more moral support. I was sobbing so hard I couldn't be quiet and the tears were blurring my vision.
For some reason it just didn't feel okay. No no no. It wasn't supposed to go like this. I didn't want to be human. I was supposed to be full of joy and positive first impressions, and instead I was in the middle of my own personal hell of inconvenient feelings and breaking down to breakthrough. The timing was shit.
Saturday night was a beautiful coursed sit-down dinner with our third keynote speaker--Gabrielle Bernstein. This was my second time seeing her speak and she blew me away telling the story of how she grew more authentic in her recovery by getting more honest about it. How she had her own huge breakthrough & revelation at 11.5 years into her recovery, after her workaholism and addiction to success got so severe that her life felt unmanageable again. And as a result of going in and honoring her wound, she healed on a deeper level and felt like a new person again, with even more gratitude for her recovery.
Later Saturday night, my friend Nancy Carr offered me the extra bed in her hotel room so that I could get a good night's rest and so she basically became my savior. Thank you again, sweet Nancy. Unfortunately, I didn't make it to any of the morning yoga with the fierce pixie Taryn Strong, because sleep. Sunday was the final day of the conference and the day I would get to see Marianne Williamson speak. Her "Sunday Sermon" came to me with impeccable timing and it was such a very special way to wrap up the three days.
Marianne talked about when Rilke said, "Let me not squander the hour of my pain." She said that crying hysterically and experiencing grief does not indicate a mental illness. That the pain, the overwhelming feelings-- they hold the key to our freedom, the key to our growth. Pain comes to teach us. And it was coming to teach me at what I felt was an inopportune time, yet there was nothing I could do about it. Except accept it.
Somehow Marianne's speech was salve to my soul on Sunday morning because I forgot all these truths about pain and I needed to hear them, to be reminded of them, to be led back home toward the pain and not away from it, arguing with it for it's imperfect timing in my life.
So I sat down with my pain, and finally, after kicking and screaming and denying, just allowed it to be there. I got the growth once I felt the pain. I spent the rest of the month of May recovering from the recovery conference and growing my tush off. This NYC weekend recovery conference organized by the ever-wonderful fairy godmother Dawn Nickel and her team (Dara, Annie, Taryn, Payton, and Jean) was initiating me into the next level of my life, and just so happened to be the catalyst for one of the biggest growth spurts in my life all while reaffirming a universal truth that I've learned about recovery, and about life--that there's no joy without pain, suffering without strength, or rainbows without rain.
Thank you, sisters.