My name is Ashley and I’m an addict. I found Cocaine Anonymous itself on the 4th of October 2022. It was a 24-hour meeting and I had just been detoxed.
I had heard of Cocaine Anonymous, a really good friend of mine had developed a glow and a twinkle in his eye after attending face-to-face meetings for two to three weeks. He gave me the brief rundown, the 90 and 90, try and attend as many meetings as possible and straight away I had this panic because I have a seven-year-old autistic son, I have a teenage daughter and I hadn’t really been around very many people for a long, long time and I was like, oh no, I can’t traipse up and down. Traipse means strut up and down Scotland to meetings because my son is really challenging.
I can’t take him to meetings, I can’t take him a lot of places and my teenage daughter, I certainly couldn’t, she was only 14 at the time, I couldn’t take her around meetings every day, completely impossible. And he said to me, there’s an online network and I said, well, I’ll just go there and straight away he was like, I said, Stephen, I’ll need to go there. Right, okay, so I was detoxed and on the 4th of October I logged into, I think it was called Last House on the Block back then, it was a 24-hour meeting and I stayed on there.
I didn’t understand what people were talking about because my head was still pretty much fried after 27 years of using and my using was bad. I used from the age of 12 to the age of 40 every single day, every single day from probably the age of 17. And I used crack and I used all different things and I used men, older men, you know, I’ve got complex post-traumatic stress disorder and I was guilty of very transactional behaviour.
So, I basically was on a meeting consistently and constantly, kids running about in the background, but my camera was off for the most part at first. And people started talking to me and what I found was, if I was uncomfortable through my paranoia that still lived with me from my first year of sobriety, I could just leave that situation, I could just log out, say goodbye or not say goodbye and just log out and say, right, I’ve had enough for a minute because I didn’t know anything about a recovery network existing at all, physical or online. So, it let me kind of just dip my toe in, but I was dipping my toe in very frequently and before I knew it I was staying at, I was completing the meetings and I was feeling more comfortable around people.
It took me a while to get to grips with the workings of Zoom, I mean, I’m on the daily reprieve every single day and I have been for over three years, but early days I was coming into that meeting and I was muting and I was unmuting and I was muting and I was unmuting and I was turning my camera off and I was turning it on, which was more to do with my ADHD and my kind of hyperactivity and not being able to work Zoom. And they said to me one day, can you, can you please stop, you’re disrupting the meeting and I was, and I logged out. And see, when I logged back in about two weeks later, everybody remembered me, it was people with 40 years clean and like, hi, have you learned how to work your phone yet? And I thought, you know, by this point I’m maybe about 40 days, 30, 40 days and I could feel myself getting more comfortable on my own terms and the comfort of my own home, knowing my kids were asleep.
And I really enjoyed it. My first sponsor was face-to-face because I was listening to people saying, oh, you need that physical contact, you need that. My experience is you absolutely don’t.
And while I learned really well from that lady, I learned really well from I’m on sponsor number seven, who is a wonderful man. They’ve all been wonderful people, but the six sponsors that followed her have all been online because it can take me an hour to get to Glasgow. I’m in a town outside Glasgow.
It can take me an hour to get to Glasgow and maybe meet a potential sponsor. I can literally just log on and be there and have that hour to two hours of book work without having to get a babysitter, without having to brave the Scottish elements, without having to have the money to put in the petrol tank to get there and also maybe feed myself or coffee myself or whatever when I’m there. Although in recovery, things have got financially a bit easier, definitely.
That’s not the only gift I’ve received. I’m able to care far greater for my autistic son and learn more strategies to deal with my 17-year-old daughter. And I use the word strategies very seriously.
But what I’ve also met in recovery, and I’m going off on a little bit of a tangent, is I’ve met other parents of autistic children who have had the same hurdles as I’ve had. Yeah, you can bring your children to most meetings, but we can’t take hours because they would be wrecking the place and they need to be kept safe. And at best, you wouldn’t be able to concentrate on the meeting.
I’ve met other autistic parents. I’ve met others from all around the world. So what I’ve found is you’re not just getting the local recovery sobriety experience, you’re getting the global recovery sobriety experience.
And you’re meeting people with more clean time, more experience, more knowledge from all around the world, from the comfort of your own home. I haven’t used since I got here on the 4th of October 2022. I do attend, we set up a local meeting and I do attend that on a Monday night.
I love it and I have an ongoing amends to my local area. I don’t love it as much as just curling up in the corner of my kitchen, pressing a button on my phone and just seeing what everybody in all the wee tiles all around the world or all around Scotland has to say. I enjoy this far more.
And I feel that they’ve actually got to know me, from my experience, they’ve got to know me much better because when you go to a face-to-face you’re all, that’s my experience, you know. I don’t know about anybody else but I tend to put on a bit of a mask at a face-to-face, not as much as I did but I do still do it. I watch how I’m presenting myself.
Just as you would do in any public place in sobriety, whereas I’m invited into people’s homes via Zoom and they’re invited into mine but we do have that safe distance but we do get to experience each other at home in our own environment and I just think that’s, it’s absolute gold, it’s absolute gold. I’m definitely less able to wear a mask with my kids running around in the background and I do, the people, and as I say, I keep mentioning Daily Reprieve, they know my children, my children know them. Not very well, not as well as I know them but if somebody’s kind of floating about in the background it’s, oh hi Cain, hi Carmen and my daughter, my son’s non-verbal but my daughter will say, oh hi X, Y and Z, you know.
It’s just a lovely experience. I thank God for Zoom because I wouldn’t have been able to do the face-to-face thing, I just wouldn’t have been able to and this has gave me a real good clean shot at sobriety. It’s saved my life, the Zoom platform, the online service area has absolutely saved my life.
My honest experience is I wouldn’t have been able to access CA anywhere near, maybe not at all, but anywhere near the way I have without the wonders of Zoom.