As we head into our third year as a print magazine, I was reflecting recently on how Journey first started; and how today, advancements in technology enable us to share information at the speed of light.
That wasn’t always true.
The year is 1991, I’m typing on a new computer called a MacIntosh and I’m creating galley’s for a local newspaper called Journey as a typesetter.
The publisher, Bob Hall, was just a guy whose life was saved by going to AA. He wanted to share informative articles about recovery so that his fellow humans didn’t feel so alone and maybe could fi nd the love, support and tribe that they needed.
At that point in my life, I was drunk most of the time. I was “couch surfing,” which in those days meant that if I was able to fi nd a party after the bar closed, I would be able to sleep on a couch instead of an alley off State Street that I had come to call “home.”
The only thing Bob ever said to me was, “When you’re sick and tired of being sick and tired, I know a place you can go.”
Fast forward a few years and thanks to an intervention, I was lucky enough to get into a long term treatment program for alcoholism.
Fast forward 25 years and I’ve had a life that I never could have imagined.
Using my love of technology, I’ve worked in corporate IT most of my career, leading people, building systems and getting my geek on.
In 2017, I had a dream — like a dream when I was sleeping. I saw Bob Hall’s face and the banner from his newspaper and when I woke up I thought “well, that was weird” and reached out to Facebook land to see if any old timers had a copy of that newspaper … and someone did.
A year later, when a night of despair over another overdose death led to anger about the fact that recovery from addiction isn’t as visible as active addiction, I started to wonder what could be done about it.
I started talking to friends about putting out a message of hope, shining a light on the fact that there are MILLIONS of people in recovery and that there are many different paths. That life in recovery is expansive and really unknown to us until we spend a little time in a different life than we were living.
Many friends wanted to help and we talked about putting in print personal recovery stories celebrating freedom from addiction along with articles about spirituality, wellness and fi nancial recovery, along with shining a light on the good things being done by many for the recovery community.
Twenty of us met on November 1, 2018 to create a magazine that amplifies hope and on March 1, 2019 we had 10,000 copies of our new magazine. Over the past two years we’ve printed 12 issues and have distributed over 100,000 copies in over 500 locations.
We bring the hope by distributing to prisons, jails, addiction treatment centers and sober living houses, in addition to grocery stores and coffee shops.
Using advancements in technology to share information widely, we are an amplifier to help change the narrative about addiction.
Thanks to Bob Hall for planting a seed for hope.
The solutions for addiction need to be more visible than the problem and that’s what our Journey team of people, some in recovery, some allies, are doing every day – because we believe that visible recovery saves lives and our job — is to make recovery visible.
With immense gratitude,
Carolyn
