Bleach, Blood, and Breakthroughs: How I Process True Crime in Recovery

 

A familiar, wailing sound of a siren rings in my ears. It’s not coming from outside my window, but instead from the small speaker of my laptop as I get sucked into yet another true crime documentary. To some people, watching true crime could be a weekend evening activity – a touch of morbid curiosity, an unsolved puzzle while viewing from the couch. For me, watching true crime is a delicate balancing act. On one hand, there is the attraction of the perverse, the ability to get lost in the darkness of humanity; on the other hand, there is the very real possibility of falling into previous thought processes and behaviors that would otherwise leave me staggered.

There are, of course, parallels between my recovery and true crime as well. Recovery is a process that, like a true crime documentary, has its peaks and valleys. Recovery can have shocking plot twists and deep moments of investigation. The best crime shows are the ones that review the evidence over and over again to try to find something new. I believe that you, Sweet & Gritty Gang , can view my recovery process as that same digging and investigation process. You may ask, “Why watch in the first place?” and that’s a fair question, one that I have asked myself more times than I can count. In fact, I could probably dedicate an entire post on the fact that true crime has become a twisted and jarring tool in my recovery process that I never saw coming. This post is not to glorify violence, break down the justice system, or shed light on horrific events. This post is about how to watch true crime while in recovery and why it is an important tool for me.

It’s a balancing act. I don’t mean that figuratively; think tightrope walker. I’m not just watching a show, I’m performing a feat of mental gymnastics every time I hit play. Like that one time I was marathoning this new docuseries about some guy who lived a double life. It was good. Not, like, Hannibal-good, but whatever his secret identity was, it was crazy impressive. He didn’t do drugs or anything like that, but it was wild how coordinated the fraud was: a hidden life with its own bank account, friends, habits. Everything felt like a masterpiece of misdirection, but still—it was a lie. And that’s when it hit me, that sickening, crawling sense of recognition up my spine. I’ve been down that road before. I’ve spent a decade of active addiction getting to know that voice intimately: the quiet seduction of separation, whispering in my ear, “See? This is how you keep safe. Keep the pain private, and no one can harm it.” There was a moment where, wrapped up in that vertiginous isolation, I almost believed my addiction was protection. But then I remembered my work in recovery. I am a master of a particular art form, and you don’t untrain what you know to this degree. I slammed my remote down, the screen still paused on some innocent guy’s mugshot, and I reached for my phone. I sent one of my recovery friends a quick text: “Hey. Watching something triggering tonight.” Even typing it, the incantation of that moment was broken. It was a reminder that secrets keep you sick, and connection is the only cure. That night, the balancing act was as simple as sending a text instead of retreating to silence.

The decision to refuse that secret, to hand it over instead, is entirely a product of my own personal cold case. This is a question I get often: “You’re a recovering addict, but how is that like investigating a cold case?” In short: my past is literally an evidence box I unpack every day. The “items” aren’t the grisly crime-scene photos they show on TV, but rather the pages of a dog-eared journal, scrawled in the panicked, looping handwriting of a girl I barely recognize, or a written question from a therapist I mentally replay like key witness testimony. For years I played the evidence of my freefall, post the murder of my fiancé, over and over in my head, and came to one same, hazy conclusion: that the motive for my self-destruction was just a basic, shameful character flaw. A rotten person does rotten things, and what I did was rotten. But any good detective will tell you: the file is always under re-examination. The best “plot twist” in my recovery was the answer to the question I asked of myself for years: Why? When I asked it again, with true objectivity, I discovered the person of interest wasn’t “addict me,” but “grieving me.” Addiction wasn’t the murder. It was an attempt, a convoluted, misguided attempt, to escape the original crime scene of my own absolute loss. Discovering that wasn’t a free pass for my actions, but it did change the whole context. It shifted my story from character failure to untreated trauma, and that’s when I could finally prosecute the right case.

In many ways, this is why I watch in the first place. Beyond the cognitive dissonance puzzle of trying to figure out, why, the tangible rewards are deeply, intimately part of my “personalized” toolkit for my own “cold case.” For one: the consequence. I sit down to watch a story that is played out to its absolute, tragic, and usually expected end, and I am looking at the ghost of a road I almost traveled. It’s a gut-check, a primal reminder that all the “little white lies” and “just this once” of my past were mile-markers on a highway to pure devastation. Second, as a creative writing major from the beautiful halls of Paseo, I was trained to read, write, and think about stories in a particular way. I watch these films now and I don’t just see “the crime,” I see its construction. I look for the grammar of gaslighting, the little flickers that foreshadow the inevitable implosion. I analyze the performance of the story teller’s, and the eventual breaking of that act. I read and reread transcripts for verbal cues the detective will only point out in their final reflection. Developing this skill set in my recovery was one thing, but watching these stories through that trained lens sharpens my ability to recognize them in real life. Finally, I watch for the survival of the survivors. I watch for parents who channel grief into advocacy and detectives who won’t let the universe leave a case unsolved for two decades. I see in them the same gritty, stubborn hope I know in myself, a hope that gets me out of bed in this Kansas City bedroom every single day.

Hope is my north star in the dark spots. I remember the one-year anniversary of my fiancé’s death a few years back. I had been sober and steady for a while, but the grief was just as raw and gaping as it was when I was 21, and the pull of numbing it was a palpable, physical weight. I felt like I was stuck in my own cold case, a dead end: all your leads go cold, and the path forward is a fog of bleak despair. It’s that point in every cold case documentary where you watch the detective slumped over the evidence board, defeated. But then it happens: the one break in the case. The call you’ve been waiting on the whole damn movie, that you and everyone in the audience know is coming but still can’t believe when it finally rings. The unexpected DNA match, the super old witness you’ve been chasing the whole damn time reappears decades later, alive and kicking to share their secrets. That, that is the high point. My “DNA match” that day was a friend, someone I knew from recovery, calling me out of the blue on a complete whim, not even knowing the anniversary of my fiancé’s death, just to say, “Hey, I was thinking about you.” It was a small pinprick of light in the blinding black of loss. Watching these unsolved cases crack after years and years of stillness instills this cardinal truth of my recovery, this core tenet I will never stop believing: that the case is never cold. A call can come at any time, any moment. You just have to stay in the room, keep the file open, and be ready to answer the phone.