Via Community News Service, in partnership with Vermont State University Castleton for the Rutland Herald.
At 17, during her senior year of high school, Abbie Messier had her wisdom teeth removed and was prescribed narcotics for the pain.
The pills made her nauseous, so a peer at school suggested she try snorting them instead, which she started doing. Because the drugs were prescribed, she felt they were safer and less risky.
Over time, she developed a growing restlessness and began using other substances. She had always vowed to avoid heroin, even ending relationships over it, but after a close friend tried it, and despite initially being angry and begging them to stop, Messier eventually decided to try it herself.
When she did, she immediately liked it.
“I would get a month clean, two months clean, three months clean and then usually right around three months, I would nosedive. And it happened over and over and over again,” Messier said on the “My Heart Still Beats” podcast on Vermont Public.
Messier’s battle with sobriety persisted, but a turning point came in February 2018, when her best friend and partner tragically passed away from an overdose at age 29.
“This was the person who was not just my best friend, but he was the person I thought I was gonna marry, that I thought I was gonna have children with,” Messier said on the podcast.
After he died, Messier said that she pretty much got clean.
In April 2018, Messier attended her first Writers for Recovery workshop after her therapist saw an article in the newspaper about a group being started in Springfield, and cut it out and brought it to her.
In the workshop, Messier detailed her struggle with addiction in one of her most powerful pieces titled “Mornings.”
This tent is crazy hot.
It’s not even six, but the way the sunrise hits this beach, it only takes about 11 seconds before it feels 115° in here.
I cannot breathe through my nose, my head pounds. I have no idea how you’re still sleeping. Then I remember it’s barely been two hours since we went to sleep.
“More?” my brain asks sweetly, a toddler with puppy dog eyes who wants another piece of cake.
I know it will be your first thought.
I start counting the money, pace our riverside beach, smoke a cigarette, swim. Count the money again, begin planning in my head: this much for gas, this much for smokes, this much for more.
If we don’t drive around when it’s gone, forget the gas and get even more.
“More?” it asks again, hungrily. How are you still sleeping? It is a wonder I ever rest these days when I am so filled with all this want.
Another cigarette before I am gently waking you, my desire is a chant now: “More. More. More” One is too many, a thousand is never enough.
Years later, Messier reflected on the workshop where she produced this work.
“That particular group was either eight or 12 weeks, and I don’t think I missed one. If I did, it was only one,” Messier said.
“I think that writers for recovery gave me a really safe space to process that with other people, who some of them had already lost people from addiction,” she said. “I don’t think that I would have had such a complete grieving process, like so well-adjusted as I did, if I hadn’t had Writers for Recovery.”
Messier keeps in touch with her group leader and other members, and she is seven years clean.
The workshop, which is held on Wednesdays at the Turning Point Center in Rutland, is free and open to those in recovery, or anyone who has been impacted by addiction. It helps people discover the power of the written word to process trauma, build self-esteem and support healthy, sustained recovery, as said on the Writers for Recovery website.
Bianca Zanella is a Vermont-based performance poet, artist and advocate. Zanella is the founder of The Paper Poet, which offers poetic medicine healing.
She was invited by co-founders Gary Miller and Bess O’Brien to be one of the Writers for Recovery workshop facilitators in Rutland; she has also done it in Addison County.
Zanella described coming into Writers for Recovery as an almost instant community where you can feel heard, listened to, seen, and witnessed.
When asked about how the workshop has affected her life, Zanella said, “It’s like your heart gets broken open in the best possible way.”
“We’re able to have complex feelings and validate them in this whole human experience,” she said. Zanella talked about how participants realize that I am not better than, I am not worse than, and there’s none of this “othering” that tends to happen in society.
“Personally, for me, I get waves of gratitude. I get waves of appreciation for being able to host this space and come back to it because it’s healing for me as well, and it’s such a privilege to be able to create community in this way,” she said.
When asked about a typical session, Zanella said that there are people coming in from all different walks of life.
“Folks that are two days sober, or 20 years sober coming into a space where we create group agreements and remind ourselves of how we want to show up in this space,” she said.
The sessions have a simple structure.
Zanella likes to start with a mini-meditation followed by an “invitation.”
She doesn’t like to call them writing prompts, but rather invitations. These invitations, she said, could be something as simple as “I am the only one who sees ….”
Then they write for seven minutes.
“I have a bell that I ring at the end, which folks really like,” Zanella said.
Then the group shares and uplifts. But no one is forced to share.
Zanella described it as so simple, but so powerful, describing leading the group as healing for her as well.
“Folks really come out of it much more relaxed, much more able to lean into their vulnerable side, and also able to relieve some things along the way,” Zanella said.
There are usually around six to nine people at the Rutland cohort, but all are free to drop in. These meetings run until the end of April, and are every Wednesday.
Zanella is working on a grant in hopes of offering more workshops, and she wants people to know that they don’t have to already a writer to get something out of the workshop.