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Robert - Member

1/31/2021

 
by Kate Willette
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This is a long story. It spans, roughly, the half-century between the mid-1960s and 2008. Think, Kennedy assassination to Obama inauguration. Think, three channels of black and white television plugged into the wall, to video streaming around the clock to smartphones all over the earth.

​At the center of this story, in the center of that time, is Robert Komishane. It’s 1987. He’s a bright and gentle man in his 30s, a poet/philosopher. An intellectual who finds himself with a single option.
 “If I stay with my parents the rest of my life or as long as they live, and live like a child, don’t go out, just be with them, it won’t be much of a life, but at least I won’t have to go through the other things.”

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Kat - Advisory Committee Member

5/11/2020

 
by Kate Willette

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I had a whole huge plan of what my life was going to be like. I was going to go to school, I was going to be in a Corpsman school, then maybe go into Officer training. 

And I just--my whole life went crash.


When young Kat joined the Coast Guard in 1980, she was following a well-traveled path. Like millions of others, she had multiple motives for going into the service. First, she was looking forward to a long career, one that would involve leadership and responsibility. But also, she’d already developed a problem with alcohol, and she saw the military as an organization where she could learn discipline and clean up her life. She was prepared to step up, work hard, and make her way. What happened instead was brutal.


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Michael - Recovery Circle Facilitator

4/20/2020

 
by Kate Willette
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When I decided I wanted to stop I had 37 years of using--and I was sick all the time.

He didn’t know how to stop, though. He was functioning, sort of. He had some relationships in the community, including one with a doctor who knew him better than he’d imagined.

I went to the doctor and told him about how I had back pain. One day he said, "Michael, we need to deal with your addiction." And I was like, "Ah."

I didn't know anybody else knew about it. I didn't tell him. I panicked.



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Dave - Recovery Circle Facilitator

4/13/2020

 
by Kate Willette
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I became clinically depressed for a period of time, and was not able to leave my room without getting sick to my stomach. I had a sort of crippling anxiety. I started asking myself as a seventeen-yr-old, “Who even am I?” And that question sent me off the deep end.

There’s a grave, gentle quality to the way Dave describes his young self--as if, in middle age, he’d like to put a hand on the shoulder of the desperate young person he once was and tell him it will, somehow, be okay. What he’s describing in that quote is how it was in his first year of college, a time that would turn out to be the launching point of three decades of addiction and loss. By the time he was eighteen, he’d transferred to a different college and begun to use marijuana to manage his anxiety; pot was everywhere at the American University (AU) in Washington, DC. It was 1978, and he’d chosen to go there partly because it was known then as a “party school.” Maybe there would be less pressure.


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Janice - Recovery Circle Facilitator

4/2/2020

 
by Kate Willette

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I want to see things change, especially for the people that went before us and they never got it. My family never got it. They never got it.

When Janice talks about her life, a sort of portrait emerges. It’s a landscape of wide, rough territory with masses of dark clouds and a figure in the foreground: Janice, steady and upright. She’s a self-reliant, self-educated woman whose sharp mind has seen her through and allowed her to prosper--even to forge a kind of truce with the world. She didn’t grow up with support from the usual places, because the people she might have depended on for nurturance often just didn’t have it to give.


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