I’ll have eight years in recovery in November. The last eight years have been the eight most significant years of my life. They have led me to today, where I live inside a love so big, that it colors everything around me. The gift of recovery is the gift of compassion. I learned a lot from my daughter, just a newborn when I went into a coma, now my continued greatest inspiration, and a representation of all the joy and love in the world.
What I learned early on is you cannot do it alone. Connection is important. Connection is the opposite of addiction. Even when people were around in addiction, it was like being alone. It’s still that way, when I disassociate, when I deal with the traumas that caused my addiction in the first place. There is still this swelling anxiety that moves over me like a dark cloud on the hard days. Now there is also a sun break, a light coming through. A new faith in romantic and creative possibilities.
I would go and sit by the water. That’s what my recovery looks like. Meditating on a beach. Usually alone. Searching for some answer that is already in me but I need some earthly power to bring it out of me fully. I would go every day for a while and think, just lead me to what I need, and now, it has.
Love is also the opposite of addiction. Self love. Our capacity to love others. The ability to love love and live inside our love. That’s recovery. That’s real life. Life on life’s terms does not have to be endless drudgery. Sometimes, life’s terms give us what we have always wanted. Hope. Renewed action and investment within ourselves.
Every journey looks different. That’s what’s so hard about bringing recovery to the screen. It’s such a personal journey. The recovery texts say we should have anonymity at the level of press, radio, and film, and that last factor often precludes cinema from getting authentic recovery stories.
The movies can give us more reality anyway. That’s the way with Nora Fingscheidt’s moving new film The Outrun, starring Saoirse Ronan, whose character is living hard in London and returns home to Scotland’s Orkney Islands in a series of events where she must face her own recovery. You can go home again.
The deep empathy of the movie is spirited from the surrounding Atlantic Ocean and the North Sea. When we divine our recovery from the water, it is a symbolic movement: we are all interconnected by this great force that gives life and can take it away. There is no movement greater than that of the waves, the undulating current forever changing, pulling us in and out, the tides drawn by the moon. The Ocean is all of the love in the world. When we get to recovery and are told to find our God, natural forces can be powerful tokens of a higher power.
There is such a nuanced understanding of addiction required to tell a good recovery story. The Outrun does it. It handles it so expertly, drawn from the memoir of the same name by co-writer Amy Liptrot, this is a clear act of dedication to recovery and the process of healing.
A movie about recovery is also always a movie about healing. We heal together. We cannot do it alone. You do not get to meet many people in a lifetime who enable your healing fully. You can only be so lucky to come across them naturally. The beautiful thing about recovery is that it provides you with rooms of people who are ready to take this journey and walk alongside you.
The spiritual draw of The Outrun feels so honest and true about recovery. It’s so close to the healing journey so many of us go through. It is a work of elegant beauty, conveying through pretty visuals a deeply human text about reformation and getting well again.
There are simply not enough great recovery movies. Every now and then, one comes and sweeps us away. The Outrun is the latest great recovery story. It means so much, living inside a world of recovery, to see it reflected back to us on a screen. If movies are about empathy, then the journey of recovery is built for the movies. When a movie gets it exactly right you know that’s true.
Recovery is about love. Always stay in love. When you give enough of it, it will come to you. Over and over. Stay in love and stay in the good work of healing your soul. You’re worth it and many of us are right here next to you, looking out over the water.