I'm so glad I went. 

I was really nervous. All in all, I think the time between deciding to try and attend and actually attending a meeting took me about a month-- which sounds about right. I'm slow with these kinds of things. It's hard to motivate myself when it's to do something for myself. I saw the overt spirituality of it and thought it would be like the priest who hung around outside my middle school and shoved pocket bibles into the hands of all the children walking home, telling us they would be our salvation. They were orange. I came across a dead bird later down the path and thought maybe I could do something for the bird with my newly acquired pocket bible. I spent about fifteen minutes squatting over that bird, leafing through the bible, trying to find something to say to honor her life. None of that tiny text meant anything to me. None of it seemed right to send off the bird wherever she was going because it didn't seem like it would mean anything to her either. It felt futile, like a homogenized and overcommercialized spirituality that had lost it's meaning. I struggled a lot with spirituality before and after that, but that moment is always the ones that comes to mind when I ponder those matters. I was worried that CODA might be another one of those situations. That I would become even further disconnected from the spirituality which seems to ground so many others. I was wrong. I am so glad that I was wrong.

I wasn't planning on sharing at the first meeting. Especially since it was decided the topic would be gratitude and I'm not great with those kinds of emotions. Or, really, emotions at all if we're going to be honest. I was planning on just sitting, listening, and trying to find meaning in the words of people who were further along the path to recovery than me and then, one person's story just rang so true to me. It was a little light bulb going off, a new synaptic connection being formed, and suddenly I understood a little more about gratitude. It doesn't have to be grandiose and dramatic, something so powerful it means something to everyone watching, like on the set of a movie. It can just mean something to me. I ended up sharing near the end of the meeting, that I was feeling that gratitude towards some people who had led me to understanding that my problems had a name and that there were ways to work on them, that I was feeling gratitude that there was a program like CODA out there, and that there were people coming to this meeting just like me.

They said you should attend at least 4 meetings to figure out if CODA is right for you. I desperately want to attend again, even if just to listen. When they passed around my first meeting coin, some people held it for so long, trying to imbue it with warmth that I felt that same warmth in my heart long before my coin got to me. The weekly meetings are on mondays. It feels so odd to be looking forward to mondays.