Read the full introduction to Black Recovery, a memoir by Anneca Peoples, in the following excerpt. Now available on Amazon books.
The Black Recovery Memoir Introduction
I grew up in a culture where there’s a common saying: “There’s a liquor store on every corner in the hood and a Starbucks on every corner in the suburbs.” Take a drive, look around and this saying will become truth for you, if it hasn’t already.
Alcoholism, drug addiction, emotional suffering, and mental health suffering are disproportionately impacting marginalized communities and are often the symptoms of a greater, underlying Spiritual malady.
Although commonly gone unrecognized, the Spiritual malady is an ailment that affects many, if not most, living in today’s societies. With generally acknowledged symptoms like uncontrollable compulsions, hopelessness, paralyzing fears, anxiety, and panic attacks, you’ve probably experienced at least one, and I suffered from them all. I have found this malady to have especially fatal effects on my Spirit as an African American, which is what this book is all about: Sharing my Spiritual suffering along with the Spiritual Solution that worked for me and countless more who suffered hopelessly.
Black Recovery, the title, is not indicative of who can benefit from the solutions shared in this book, but rather who my experience is about. If you identify as a human being and can relate to my story and my suffering in any way, then what worked for me can and will work for you, and you, too, can Recover.
“I speak to the black experience, but I am always talking about the human condition – about what we can endure, dream, fail at, and still survive.”
My life’s experience is that of a Black woman whose Spiritual neglect, and consequent suffering, dragged me down from walking fashion runways around the world to staring down the bottom of a vodka bottle in order to drown out the pain of living. I first thought social and financial success was going to be the solution to finding the freedom my Spirit desired, but more than 15 years of a successful modeling career coated in the social recognition and financial freedom I pined after proved to me that these accomplishments, along with everything else on my list, did not equate to freedom. Any relief I did enjoy was fleeting.
“I never thought that a lot of money or fine clothes – the finer things of life – would make you happy. My concept of happiness is to be fulfilled in a spiritual sense.”
I spent years worshiping what I did and what I had, but when my accomplishments failed to fulfill their intended purpose in my life, my emotional and mental suffering grew progressively worse. Unbeknownst to me I was experiencing an internal Spiritual warfare between who I was and who I was struggling to be; between the actual needs and desires of my Spirit and the social, biological, and economic demands I chased. This resistance to Self in order to conform to the world around me caused an underlying pain that no success, money, fame, alcohol, medication, or therapy was able to solve.
I had little self-worth left by the time I faced judgment from legal systems and other institutions who came to determine me hopeless. So, when I was court-ordered to get sober and sentenced to AA, I accepted that this is where I was going to find the solution I had been looking for. But once again, even my sober accomplishments did not solve the problems that alcohol became a solution for.
Years into physical sobriety, and deep amid my surrender to the predominantly white fellowship of AA, I thought I had solved my problems and was living in the solution. Instead, life happened and I crashed into a sober bottom that proved to me that my alcoholic suffering was, in fact, a symptom of a much greater problem; a problem that began to plague me long before I ever hit a joint or picked up a drink to solve it.
With several years of sobriety, no desire to drink again, and little will left to live, I was suffering from an immense emotional and mental pain that led me to Dr. Gloria Montgomery and The Hollywood & Vine Recovery Center. God used this seemingly insurmountable pain to guide me to Gloria whose Spiritual journey, which began more than five decades prior, showed me what a Spiritually recovered life looked like from someone living in the same beautiful brown skin as mine. A recovered life lived reliant on a God more powerful than the laws of man, which I found myself to be powerless over. A life where God could and always would, no matter what.
What worked for Gloria worked for me not because of me and my efforts but despite them, and the Spiritual Solution that worked for me can and will work for you, too. In the hopes of sharing my experience, my surrender, and my Recovery – this is Black Recovery.
“There is a spirit and a need and a man at the beginning of every great human advance. Each of these must be right for that particular moment of history, or nothing happens.”
To read more, order your copy of Black Recovery here.