RRP 115 — Jeremiah N.: I Didn't Put Recovery in My Life — I Put My Life Into Recovery

From a Tent in Seaside to the Middle of the Program

The night Jeremiah N. walked back to his tent at the Seaside homeless camp, he was praying. He'd been living in that tent, cycling in and out of county jail for years — every cop in the county knowing him by face and name — and something in him finally said enough. He didn't know what enough looked like yet. He just prayed for a way out. By the time he reached his tent, two cops stepped in front of him and two stepped behind him. What happened in the courtroom the next morning is the moment this whole episode turns on, and you need to hear him tell it himself.

We didn't know Jeremiah's full story before he sat down in Studio H with us. We knew him — he's part of a circle of people we love, people who are doing the work — but the story of how he got here is something we weren't fully prepared for. Years of heroin, fentanyl, and meth. An overdose his friends almost couldn't bring him back from. His mom's death unraveling everything he'd built — a custom truck shop, a tow truck, mud bog racing, a life in Spokane that fell apart piece by piece the moment she was gone. He told us he moved to Seaside convinced that a new location would fix things. It didn't. Nothing he tried fixed things, not until he stopped trying to fix things on his own terms.

There's a moment in this episode about a frog necklace sitting on a counter at a methadone clinic — nobody knowing where it came from, no one able to explain it — that stopped us cold. His mom loved frogs her whole life, and when she found out she was dying from cancer, she found an acronym: FROG. Fully Rely On God. We're not going to tell you what Jeremiah did when he saw that necklace, because that's his story to tell. But if you've ever needed a sign that you were in the right place at the right time, you need to hear this one.

What we can tell you is that by the time he found his sponsor, he still wasn't ready to admit he had a problem. His sponsor gave him one suggestion. Just one. And it was the most brilliant piece of sponsorship strategy we've ever heard on this podcast.

More than two years from his sobriety date, Jeremiah is a chapter officer for Oxford House, a graduate of outpatient treatment at Another Chance, and someone who spent nearly two years bringing meetings into City Team every single week — pushing through PTSD and social anxiety he's carried since he was fourteen years old to stand in front of strangers and share his story. He started his own meeting at 4D Recovery. He managed sober houses through Sober Housing of Oregon. He's helped more people get into treatment than he can count. And when four guys at City Team told him he was an inspiration, his response was to laugh and say, "You've got the wrong guy."

He was the right guy. This is the kind of episode we made this podcast to share. Listen at mdcr1.com/115, and if it lands the way it landed for us, send it to someone who needs to hear it.

#RealRecoveryPodcast #Recovery #Sobriety #AddictionRecovery #HopeInRecovery #OregonRecovery #SoberLiving #ServiceWork #KeepMovingForward #AA #AlcoholicsAnonymous #OxfordHouse #AnotherChance #4DRecovery #Portland #Seaside, @realrecoverypodcast @4drecovery @anotherchancerehab @oxfordhouse