While I continued my 30-day journey at the Cove, I found myself spending most of my time alone, mostly by choice. I had developed this longing and yearning to reconnect with the person I used to be. Or better yet, the soul I used to be. My life has been nothing but chaos for most of my life, especially through my adolescent years into my late teens. Those years were nothing by trauma, anger, sadness, pain and chaos. But before all of that there was a time where I was so in tune with the Spirit and Nature that I was virtually inseparable from the woods and wilderness. While at the Cove, it too, was surrounded by beautiful woods and an abundance of wildlife from a cool breeze and starry twilight that you could never catch near or in a city, to wildlife such as deer, turtles, birds, apple trees, streams and fields. And so any free moment I had I’d take a notebook and a walk. I continued to write letters to my “dad” and then also began to write letters to my younger self. I wrote things that tried to explain away the pain to comfort my soul and to heal that small girl that was corrupted and robbed of her innocence.
While at the Cove there were Christian services for church on Sundays and a spirituality group on Wednesdays. I extremely enjoyed the spirituality group as it was more often than not a Bible study. Another great healer I had that we were allowed was the option to have our own headset or radio. With me living in a house full of 15 other women who were also in recovery, I, of course, chose the headset. Many of the women had regular radios and would play precisely the same music that I heard non-stop during my addiction, or flat out rapped about addiction and/or all the negative things surrounding it.
It was at that point I realized that every time I would listen to music like many of the women were playing, it would mentally take me back to my addiction, running the streets and the other shady things of my past. So, I made the commitment and oath to myself and to God that I would keep myself away from those “places” forever, even if it were just mentally.