Magic Girl

Hey, it's Chris from Cadre, and I was thinking about a video idea. Talking about. I was talking to this kid who happened to be the Comcast guy coming to my house to do a repair. He was about 30, and he was from Ukraine. And so, of course, I asked him. This was a couple weeks ago. I asked him a bunch of questions about what's going on over there. And he talked about his family and everything, and they were safe so far, and kind of the typical stuff and gave me a little bit of his political view. But he found out about the.

That I'm in the recovery world, and he started asking me questions about, what is a sober house? How does it work? How do people actually get sober? So, his experience was, people he knew that were addicted didn't. Didn't get better, that he'd never seen anybody get better. And that's kind of one of my gripes. In the news, all you hear about is people. The horror stories of people dying, and it's horrible, but you don't hear a lot about the people who are having success. And so he asked me, you know, in a nutshell, what is.

Well, where do people actually. Where do. What do they do if they actually do get some sober time? And so I explained to him how the recovery community works, you know, from a 500 foot view about, you know, finding the right group of people to surround yourself with. Live in the right place, work in the right place, live right in the middle of the sober community, and take advantage of every part of it that you can. The people, the activities, the advice. Modeling is a big one after other people.

And, you know, probably the best overall advice you can give anybody is that recovery is messy. It's slow, sometimes slow, sometimes not. And it's a repurposing of your lifestyle so it doesn't happen overnight. And there are a whole bunch of things that go into it. So, I wrote this song about a. About. I actually wrote this song, what I thought was about a girl, and then I played it for a fellow sober person in our world, a very accomplished songwriter named Mary Gaucher. And she said very lovingly, Chris, that song ain't about no girl.

That song is about heroin. Now go write that song. So, anyway, it's called Magic Girl. I'm going to play a little bit of it for you now. She took my blood I never felt the sting cause I was known now I feel everything I saw her disappear? You know, she liked to steal away in the middle of the night on the brightest day she's a magic girl steal my world magic girl steal my world she told me to fly? Never leaving the ground? I felt like a king when she was around? She taught me to sing, not saying a word.

I could sing anything when I was with her. She's a magic girl steal my world magic girl steal my world anyway, I'm not really in love with a lot of recovery songs, but that one sort of came at it sideways. I thought I was writing about a girl, but apparently I was writing about heroin, and a fellow junkie recognized that it's one of the coolest moments ever. So, anyway, the point of the story in the video here is that recovery is about having a life. It's not about not drinking or not using. And once you open up that perspective to why am I here?

What am I doing? Why am I getting sober? It's so much more intuitive. It's just like it doesn't feel like you're in the margins of the world or of society. It feels like you are your own captain and you are your own boss, and you are. You know, they say in aa, a lot of stuff, you hear this and in treatment about. About you're not in control. You have to let go of control. You have to, you know, driving down the highway at 70 miles an hour, get in the backseat and just, you know, let the car go. Where it's gonna go is sort of nuts, but creative control, and I liken that to, like going into the studio and you hear those old stories about producers making musicians sound a certain way just so they'll sell records.

And creative control being, I want to play the songs. I wrote them, and I want it to sound like me. And if you like it, you like it, and if you don't, you don't. And there's a big part of recovery that is you still own creative control. You never lose that. So this whole giving up control thing can get a little bit outsized and over stated. So take my advice, and if you're looking to put some years together, go find a sober community. Put yourself right in the middle of it. Get up on top of a ladder or a building and scream, I'm new, and I'm in recovery, and I need help.

And trust me, the sober people are going to show up, and they're going to help you figure it out. Thanks.