I never even ended up with the cool biker like “Slash” or “Killer”
I usually ended up with some looser called “Tater Nut’s” that was just as grateful to have me as I was to have him.
Or worse the loud obnoxious one that everybody hated and he would take his crap out on me.
Biker life was all I ever wanted to be a success at but was a miserable failure from the start.
I always wanted to be the”Cool Chick”that everyone wanted to hang out with but just never knew how.

I lived a life of poor imitations.
As my drinking and addictions grew worse so did my reputation and I started straying further and further away from the family,convinced I could never return.

After several years away I ended up doing in-custody treatment.
Nice way to say JAIL but at least I was in the program unit and it worked.
When released I really thought I had nowhere to return to so I spent my first year feeling isolated but practicing a program of recovery in my fellowship of choice.
That’s when I rediscovered Sober Bikers.

I had known about a group long ago but had heard they had disbanded now I learned they had formed a new group and I searched out their meetings…
It was love from the first one I attended !
For the first time I felt like these were people that knew where I had come from and what I had been through and all they cared about was I no longer partook of the lifestyle they too had left behind.
What I admired most was the fact that they were still bikers in every sense of the word but yet different in so many other ways than I had ever known a biker to be.
They still road hard and fast…
They still cussed and spit.
The men still wore leather and the women wore even more….
And I felt accepted.
I began to see a new life path in front of me.

Now 4 years down the road….
I no longer have to bury my issues.
I have kindred spirits that want to help me with them.
My Sponsor is a member of a Women’s MC and asked me if I would like to Probate with her club and it took me all of 1/8 of a second to say “Hell Yeah” !
Life as I knew it is over yes, but…
A new mile marker is on the horizon for me….
Gonna get my boots outta the closet..
Gonna put back on my leather…
and…
I never did stop cussing and spittin anyway…
Today I am Simply_Sandra and…
I am Gonna ride once again!

They tell us in the beginning “Do not get into a relationship for the first year”
I was told…Get a plant..keep it alive one yr then maybe you might be ready….
The desire to have someone in our lives can override the desire to recover.
We long to have someone to lean on, that will take away the pain and co-sign our crap.
Not a good idea, in fact I have seen first hand just how deadly this desire can be.
We tend to think that it was our drinking and drugging that caused our relationships to fail in the past and now that we are practicing a program and abstaining from those behaviors that somehow we will magically have healthy relationships…NOT !
There is so much more work we have to do inside our minds and hearts and our bodies for them to heal. So many of us never even had a person in our lives that a healthy relationship we could have learned from.
Two “sickies” don’t make a well..neither do one person with some time and a “newbie” either.
Sometimes…but rarely they do make it but in my opinion what recovery They achieve takes longer and is much harder.
I feel as if I would have cheated myself out of the experience of being “just me”.
Of finding out who I am without outside influence.
Time to enjoy the person I have become and life I am building by standing on my own two feet is priceless to me today.
In my past I always made myself into who I thought someone else wanted me to be in order to trap them. I lied,cheated and manipulated my way into countless lives and then proceeded to destroy them or to be destroyed myself by them. I set myself up for failure each and every time, why would I want to do that now ?
Why would I rob myself of this precious time to get to know me ?
One of the best decisions I have made in recovery is to also abstain from the gratuitous sex and shallow behaviors.
I have had sex only once in my 3 1/2 yrs and it left me feeling hollow and
“less than”
It did not make me feel loved or wanted..needed…and that actually freed me to become me.
That encounter..that bad feeling gave me the power to move forward on my own.
It gave me the desire to know myself and any future partners I may have better.
Today I can see what or whom is before me.
I can take the time to identify the predator’s that will try to rob me of “self” That just want to take a piece of me and not the whole package.
And my children are seeing this change in me also and I hope UN-learning the examples I had shown them in the past. I was a bad roll model and I have given myself and them the opportunity to see that it does not always take two halves to make a whole just one whole to make myself happy and perhaps one day…someday I will be ready to give what I have found in me to another human being.
I am still single but I am never alone if I can enjoy my own company

Simply_Sandra

As many in the recovery community already know, September marks National Alcohol and Drug Addiction Recovery month. During the month-long festivities, the recovery community tries to engage addicts, recovering addicts, potential addicts, and families to raise awareness about the realities of addiction and the possibilities of recovery.

Many organizations, nationwide, have planned events that include charitable walks, outdoor concerts, guest speakers, and much more. One such event will take place on September 12, in Miami, Fl; it is the 2009 South Florida Rally for Recovery. The goal is to raise money, through a charitable walk, to be able to gift recovery scholarship to recent recovering addicts.

With only a week left, the 2009 South Florida Rally for Recovery has not yet met its goal, but is calling upon people in the recovery community worldwide to help out and donate anything they can. For more information, please click the following link: Make a Donation.

Lastly, we’d just like to mention that the online social-networking recovery site, IntheRooms.com, is hosting the “Rally for Recovery.” IntheRooms is one of the biggest international sites dedicated to connecting people in recovery worldwide for support. ITR has 45,000 members with more than 131,000 years of combined recovery time.

Starting today, Intherooms.com will now have a Facebook app available for any user looking to personalize their Facebook profile with their recovery time. The ITR Facebook app will display the member’s recovery time for friends to see. It will also show the combined recovery time of the 50,000+ IntheRooms members, which now totals over 100,000 years.

Another feature is that any friend of the ITR/Facbook member who has the app will be able to join the free recovery community anonymously through their friends Facebook page. Addiction can carry a big stigma making getting help more diffucult, but the hope is that the app will reach out and encourage people out there that need help but are still hesitant.

For those unfamiliar with ITR (intheroom.coom), it is one of the premiere recovery communities on the web. Like Facebook, ITR is also a social networking site; however, its focus is recovery. The goal of IntheRooms.com can be summed up with its mantra, which is the word H.I.T.C.H. and stands for Help, Inform, Touch, Connect and Heal. At ITR, anyone can join for free and connect with tens of thousands of other members, across fellowship lines, who are also in recovery.

Want to know at exactly what location and when the next Alcoholics Anonymous meeting is in your area? Now you can very easily. IntheRooms.com has just launched their listing for Alcoholics Anonymous Meetings across the US and the rest of the globe.

One InTheRooms.com member, ScottWDavenport, described the database in the following way: “It’s great to know that InTheRooms.com is working on a Alcoholics Anonymous database that’ll not only benefit its members, but anyone in recovery whether they’ve heard of IntheRooms or not.”

Please follow the link to visit the AA listings: http://meetings.intherooms.com/wiki/AA_Meetings.
Also, be sure to click through the main listings page, Meetings.InTheRooms.com to find similar listings for other fellowships’ meetings, like: Gamblers Anonymous, Narcotics Anonymous, and Overeaters Anonymous.

Reality TV show star, Khloe Kardashian, from the hit series, “Keeping Up with the Kardashians,” will be hosting “Khloe After Dark” on Miami’s radio station Y100, every Friday between 11pm – 2am, starting May 29th through June 19th. “Khloe After Dark” is a radio talk show that will be geared towards covering the latest and hottest music, and entertainment news and feature interviews with some of Hollywood’s most talked about stars.

For those unfamiliar with IntheRooms.com, it is the premier recovery, social networking site on the net. Similar to MySpace or FaceBook, InTheRooms.com lets members post photos, chat online, and meet other members in recovery across the globe. Currently, InTheRooms.com has more than 30,000 members with over 100,000 combined years of recovery time.

Just this week, the social networking site especially dedicated to people in addiction recovery, In the Rooms (intherooms.com) announced that on September 12th of 2009 they will be hosting the South Florida Rally For Recovery in honor of the 20th Annual National Alcohol and Drug Addiction Recovery Month (Sept). The official In the Rooms Rally for Recovery charity walk logo is located above in black.

Thus far, In the Rooms (ITR) has announced that the recovery rally will take place around Biscayne Bay in the Downtown area of Miami, FL and will consist of the following segments (the following is quoted directly from intherooms.com):

1) The Walk – Show your support for recovery and stand up for what you believe in! Be an advocate and walk with us to show what recovery is, that today we are healthy and productive members of society!

2) The Festival – All day in Bicentennial Park, we will have wonderful food, great speakers, recovery music, exhibits, special guests and surprises.

3) The Concert – At the end of the day, we will be having Richie Supa perform his PRISM Award winning song, In The Rooms; in addition we are also having a special surprise guest, so stay tuned!
For further updates on South Florida Rally For Recovery, please check back often.

The new social networking website IntheRooms.com, which dedicates itself specifically as a support network for those in recovery, now has a channel on youtube.com that is filled with all kinds of pertinent recovery videos.  To be specific, there are exactly 37 videos currently, which range from an NBC 6 interview with the founders of In the Rooms, Kenny Pomerance and Ron Tannenbuam, to several videos that feature Father Martin.

For those unfamiliar with Father Joseph Martin, he was an ordained priest based out of Baltimore Maryland, who was an alcoholic that made a full recovery and spent the rest of his life advocating animatedly for the Alcoholics and Narcotic Anonymous fellowships.  Unfortunately, Father Joseph Martin passed away earlier this year (2009).  He is most famous for his “Chalk Board” talks that helped champion addiction recovery for so many individuals who sought to overcome the disease of addiction.

A Global Recovery (aglobalrecovery.com) invites everyone around the globe, who may be reading this article (as well as everyone who isn’t), to visit the In the Rooms Youtube Channel at: http://www.youtube.com/intherooms.  We also invite everyone to get as much support as possible by joining the online community of InTheRooms.com.  There, you can get in contact with plenty of support from the over 30,000 fellow recovering members from all around the world.

For those unfamiliar, IntheRooms.com is the number one trafficked recovery social networking site on the web. Presently, InTheRooms has more than 40,000 members with a combined recovery time of over 100,000 years. Every day, members at IntheRooms.com share that wealth of knowledge across fellowship lines and international borders. It is common for an NA member to befriend a AA member and share recovery experiences and support the other 23 hours a day between official fellowship meetings. IntheRooms’ mantra is H.I.T.C.H. which stands for Help, Inform, Touch, Connect and Heal. The message applies to those already in recovery, those seeking Recovery and family, friends and allies who support recovery around the globe.

InTheRooms.com was created using the latest in web-technology in order to build the most comprehensive online social networking site on the net. In the Rooms members can post photos, chat online, and befriend other members in recovery worldwide. Additionally, IntheRooms lets members choose particular fellowships to join, offers virtual meetings, speaker libraries, daily meditations and affinity groups that make IntheRooms.com the leading innovator of online recovery networking.

As an organization, IntheRooms.com strives to stay active in the recovery community. Just recently, InTheRooms teamed with A & E’s Interventionists from the hit show, “Intervention,” to create a resource for families and friends of those with the disease of alcoholism and addiction. The new website offers personal advice and regular informative articles from A & E Interventionist Ken Seeley, Jeff VanVonderen, and Candy Finnigan. You can check it out at: http://intervention.intherooms.com.

Lastly, the In the Rooms foundation does its best to organize and present charitable recovery events for the public. Most recently announced was the First Annual IntheRooms.com “South Florida Rally for Recovery.” It will be held Sep. 12th, 2009 on Biscayne Bay in Downtown Miami, FL as part of National Alcohol and Addiction Recovery Month.