RRP 113 — Katherine L.: Is It Odd or Is It God? Recovery, Spirituality, and the Long Road to Portland

From the Bathroom Floor to Everything

That's Katherine L. — coming up on fifteen years sober — and she means every word of it. Not as a cautionary tale. Not as a rock-bottom speech. As a daily choice to remember where she started so she never stops appreciating where she is.

Katherine grew up south of Boston in a house where alcohol was as ordinary as furniture — a stocked liquor cabinet, homemade sambuca her father made from scratch, parties of a hundred people with pig roasts and kegs of beer. She took her first sip young and felt something she'd spend years chasing. By middle school she was sneaking pints of Southern Comfort into her backpack. Her senior superlative was "most dedicated to social life," and she wore it like a badge of honor. What followed were decades of blackout drinking, tumultuous relationships, a brief marriage that ended almost as soon as it began, the sudden death of her mother at 25, and a father who told her a week later to get over it.

She tried AA in 2008. Nine months in, she drank again. Spent three more years, as she puts it, drinking like it was her job. And then July 29, 2011 — the bathroom floor.

What happened after that is the part we don't want to give away. There's a women's meeting her therapist sent her to, a sponsor named Rita whose own son had just died from this disease, and a program that eventually took Katherine from someone who had never spoken in public to someone presenting to city councils and superintendents across Massachusetts. There's a career she walked away from and a minimum-wage job she was happier doing. And then there's the cross-country drive — eleven days from Boston to Portland in a beat-up Honda, everything she owned in the back seat, and a realization somewhere in the middle of the country that stopped her cold.

She's been in Portland for three years now, building a life she credits almost entirely to recovery. She wears the FROG sweatshirt — Forever Rely On God — to work. She starts every day before sunrise with prayer, journaling, and a stack of daily reads. And she moves through her days asking one question that has become her compass: is it odd, or is it God?

We can't tell you about the pancake breakfast in Troutdale, or what happened the night two of the most important people in her recovery ended up at the same dinner table for the first time. Those are hers to tell. Listen to Episode 113 at https://mdcr1.com/113, and read more at https://mdcr1.com/113b.

#RealRecovery #RecoveryPodcast #SoberLife #AARecovery #TwelveSteps #RecoveryIsPossible #Sobriety #IsItOddOrIsItGod #Portland #RecoveryCommunity @realrecoverypodcast