Recovery Writers: February 2021

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Losing Our Identity

People-pleasing is one way we lose our identity, our True Self. As we conform our conduct to

what we think other people want to see or hear, we ignore our own wants or needs. It’s not

uncommon to begin recovery with no idea of what makes us happy, what our gifts are, or what

our true calling the world might be. As we begin to explore our feelings we can see that even as

children, we had talents and gifts. As a young person before recovery, I was attracted to the

lives of other people that I found in books. Even as a child, I would hide from my father’s anger

with a book behind the drapes on a window seat. I can see that books were my parents for

much of my life.

City Lights, San Francisco

Damp as a sodden bathing suit,

beaches driftwood gray, fog obscured

the Golden Gate, North Beach, Angel Island.

On Broadway, neon lights blessed a strand

of strip joints. The barker at the Condor Club plucked

my coat, urged me to try my luck in the topless contest.

Around the corner, I escaped to City Lights --

a bookstore bathed in shades of black,

home to Ferlinghetti, Ginsburg, Kerouac.

I wandered empty aisles, picked up a stack,

found a threadbare chair, settled into acrid pages,

searched for a plot that I could fall into.

Prompts:

1. Write about any escape you made as a young person or one that you now wish

you had made.You will see I escaped from the barker at the Condor Club. Did you

ever encounter a person who urged you to do something you knew you shouldn’t

do?

2. Think of a place, such as City Lights bookstore in San Francisco, where you could

“be yourself.” Write about that self.

3. Try to use imagery, such as the fog in stanza one or the empty aisles in the

bookstore that reflect something about your identity. Check your words, such as

sodden, obscured, urged, wandered, fall into to make sure they match the tone

you are striving for.

4. Why do you think the neon lights “blessed” the strip joints? Was there something

attractive about them, some alternative to the bookstore as a place to find

identity?

Recovery Writers