Well, you can’t have your cake and eat it too, right? Wrong. You can. If you build your very own bakery from the ground up. This is what recovery has looked like for me, a native of Kansas City, Missouri, and a Black woman. It’s not always sunshine and rainbows, this is for sure, but it is possible to make something of yourself. Recovery has taken me from being a child in Kansas City’s redlined community to substance use following the loss of my fiancé. I took the necessary steps and found recovery on November 5, 2020. In this post, I will be telling "The Sweet and Gritty Gang" how I am baking this brand new life of mine.
Wanna know a secret? Since becoming a student again comes the ability to write how I want, when I want. Recovery is allowing me to finally write about myself. For the longest time, my writing was about loss and what came with that, or the hazy feelings in between. Recovery is helping me find the time and the freedom to tell my story —the story of an introverted Kansas City-raised girl, the life I had before, and the person I am trying to become.
The First Stirrings of a New Recipe
My skin felt like when your foot falls asleep, except it was all over my body. Sweating like greasy pizza that has just been reheated in a microwave, with little bubbles crackling on the surface with the moisture. November 5th, 2020, was the start of something new, even if it felt like trying to assemble IKEA furniture hungover – promising but wobbly and probably missing significant screws. The initial challenges of early recovery felt like the first steps of baking an unfamiliar recipe. Where you accidentally use salt instead of sugar, or have thrown the box away, but have to dig it back up out of the trash to read them again. Digging up my past was like trying to figure out how the recipe of the past years led me to treatment, raw and overflowing with emotions. Sometimes the instructions felt like they were written in another language... not quite Spanish... Italian maybe.
The small victory in those initial days amounted to me cooking something other than Ramen Noodles– not popping off due to irritability, or perhaps the monumental achievement of successfully brewing a pot of coffee (without incident!). Laughter through those moments with the other women in my same position made navigating that winter of peak COVID bearable and sweet. It was not without conflict. If any of you in the Sweet and Gritty Gang are familiar with me, feel free to expose the thinly veiled hostility I'm capable of below. Having to relearn how to "human" was like building a whole new bakery from scratch. The foundations were laid with a whole lot of "winging it" and maybe a few minor explosions.
Essential Ingredients from the Past
Assets like my writing and artistic background from Paseo had become a valuable tool in my recovery. Initially, I used journaling to write dramatic, disjointed poems about my cravings. My early attempts at storytelling in recovery meetings sounded more like a soap opera. Having to do this, burn my "toast" in front of others, made 30-year-old me feel like that pizza again. Vulnerable and left out of the fridge overnight, slowly growing bacteria, probably not safe. Working steps was the only way to get this bakery up and running, or I was just going to be shut down by the health inspectors.
Staying in Kansas City during my early days of recovery was an essential ingredient to my success. We were often told that others would change locations to escape addiction, thinking the problem was with the dishes being used. A nasty recipe is still disgusting even if it's presented in a China Bowl. In Kansas City, I was surprised to discover that the recovery community was thriving and vibrant, with over 60 meetings held across the city in a single week. Soon, I got to celebrate my first New Year's clean and sober, my New Year's resolution?- To pass a drug screen with my own urine. I was slowly gathering the fresh ingredients to do so.
What to Expect from This Bakery
Welcome to Bleach and Sugar Cookies, The place where my oven is always on and I always have a true crime doc playing. So what can you expect?
You can expect a generous helping of personal stories – Some will be sweet and sincere, straight from my personal life. Some will be so ridiculous, you will have to wonder if they actually happened to me (they did, I swear, the real world is more insane than fiction). Usually with a side of sass because sometimes you have to laugh to keep from crying. And of course, given the "bakery" theme, it may involve some soggy bread or maybe even a crime scene level burnt cake because we’ve all been there. But this isn't just about mixing metaphors. We also have the “bleach” to balance things out. I am a true crime junkie and over the years have learned that true crime is more than just a dark and twisted escape from my own reality; it is a tool in my toolbox. A fine grade steel wool that along with all the laughs, fights, farts and messes I’ll share, is the bleach I use to scrub clean those residue pieces of my past that pop up and remind me of how not to play the games those monsters did in real life. How to spot the red flags in a psychopath, con artist and how to see what kind of warning signs pop up in others around us and within us. We will dive into some well-known cases as well as some I have uncovered in my own hometown of Kansas City, with its wealth of crime lore and history, to show us just how being a good detective in our lives keeps us on the path to recovery.
But mostly what I am hoping is to not be the only one. That you are out there. That you get it. So if a story, or a joke, or even a soggy loaf of bread or a sickening insight into a disturbed mind can brighten your day and give you a laugh or a head nod then I have succeeded in my mission. I want to offer a space where we can share our experiences and perhaps a little wisdom. Mostly, I'm here to document my ongoing adventure, raw and real, with a healthy dose of self-awareness. Showing up when my cakes don’t rise or my oven explodes and sometimes having to clean up some real bleach worthy “crime scenes.”
So in the meantime, what are some of your funniest baking fails or worst recovery days? Is there a true crime case or true crime star that weirdly resonates with you? Share your delicious disasters or your perfectly risen triumphs in the comments below. Let’s make sure we are all remembering to use a little bleach and keep on laughing our way through life. Because while we might all need bleach to keep the shit show of real life sparkling clean in the end, we will all agree that the best part of the “bakery” of life was baking this new life in the first place.
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