By Mariam Mezgeb
My faith has never lived in just one room.
In my first year of recovery, I was struggling. The gift of desperation, that jolt of pain sharp enough to make you finally ask for help, had carried me into my first meeting, and it had faded. I was desperate to get it back. “How do I find that again?” I kept asking. No one had an answer for me, other than “stay.”
One afternoon, I was in my third recovery meeting of the day. I took that advice quite literally. I knew that if I left that clubhouse, I’d return to drinking, so I stayed in the room. That’s when I came to understand what it means not to leave before the miracle happens.
I finally opened my mouth in that meeting. I don’t remember what I said, but there was some relief afterward. The pain had ebbed. I remember clumsily praying that no one would approach me, because what were they going to do, magically materialize my gift of desperation?
After we said the closing prayer, I noticed a woman with a cane making a beeline in my direction. She was feeling her way through the chairs, somehow masterfully, weaving through the room from the opposite end to where I was sitting.
Her name was Sara. She had a cane because she’d gone blind at twenty-two. I remember being immediately struck by her courage to approach a total stranger simply following a voice she’d heard half an hour earlier. She asked how I was doing, and something about her vulnerability made me answer honestly. We spoke for a bit, then she asked me to lunch. That simple act of kindness was a faint light in the darkened room I’d been walking through.
I didn’t realize it at the time, but by letting a stranger’s love get past my armor, I was cultivating hope. A faith that good things could happen to me. That people could be reliable. My first sponsor always reminded me that when we show up in rooms where it feels warm, allow others to truly see us, and make the effort to give back to this world in gratitude, the universe conspires in our favor.
Sara had cracked something open in me, some willingness to be found. So, when another friend invited me to church not long after, I said yes. The priest there was the funniest man of the cloth I’d ever encountered, and I kept going, even when that meant going alone. One Sunday, my father, sister, and brother all joined me. (I haven’t been able to get the three of them to show up together again since.)
At that point, I was struggling to explain to my parents that I had a drinking problem. They didn’t believe me or support my going to meetings. I was wrestling with stigma.
That morning at church, with my father standing beside me, the priest preached a sermon called “Making It Stick.” The theme was small, daily changes that led to larger transformations. Partway through, he spoke about an organization with a blueprint for making it stick, one that had drastically changed millions of lives all over the world. In big bold letters across the screen, I read “Alcoholics Anonymous.”
Sitting there, with my father beside me and the priest naming the very program I’d been quietly, uncertainly leaning on, I felt something settle. I was in the right rooms, on an inspired path — meant to belong to both communities.
AA taught me that whatever concept of a higher power works for you, grab onto it. Don’t compare it to anyone else’s. My first higher power was Mother Earth, based on a drawing by a Brooklyn artist I adored. Her arms were made of branches, her hair of vines, her eyes of sunflowers. She talked smack while I brushed my teeth in the morning and giggled with me over reruns of The Good Place. She was love, a confidant, a foundation.
She was exactly what I needed then, small and playful enough to fit in a bathroom mirror. But long-term recovery taught me that my sense of peace and surrender is connected to how deeply the solution is rooted in my soul. As life got bigger, as I took on new challenges and more risks, I needed faith with deeper roots than the ones Mother Earth had planted, something that could hold more weight and reach further down. I lifted out of her, gently, and poured myself into my church instead. It was gradual, small synchronicities piling on one another.
I was grateful to be guided to a faith community that was everything I needed but didn’t even know I wanted. We met in living rooms, discussing our aspirations to be better friends, sisters, sons, and pillars of community service. AA had already taught me that your people rarely materialize for you; you must seek them out, moving from room to room, showing up open-hearted again and again until you find them.
That’s how I found Recovery Dharma and the meditation and mindfulness community, which became just as integral to my first few years of sobriety. I met my first meditation teacher at an AA meeting in Boston, and they invited me to their meditation class. I was three months sober and way out of my depth. The first time I sat in silence for 45 minutes was excruciatingly painful, but I was so inspired by this teacher’s sense of calm and wisdom that I decided to continue.
Eventually I started an in-person Recovery Dharma meeting, creating the community I sought. Suddenly, I started to notice that a passion for mindfulness practices was emanating from me. People began to ask me more about it, then sent others to ask me too. I hadn’t set out to become someone people looked to. It just happened, without my meaning to, the way faith always seemed to happen to me: sideways, through other people, one room at a time.
Years later, meditation and mindfulness have so transformed my life that I’m about to graduate from a two-year teacher training program. This Buddhist community taught me the discipline of sitting with myself and the deep, rooted compassion that grows out of doing so.
I don’t know that I could tell you anymore where the program ends and my faith begins. They’ve grown into each other. What I do know is that neither one happened because I figured it out alone.
A blind woman crossed a room toward my voice. A priest named the very thing I was too scared to say out loud. My father sat beside me before he understood any of it. Mother Earth embodied love and taught me how to. A meditation teacher invited a stranger three months sober into a room she had no business being in.
We don’t recover in isolation. For me, that meant showing up in more than one room, saying more than one kind of prayer, and letting people find me before I was ready to be found.