More ‘demic prophesying, but this is good:

Love me some podcasts, especially My Favorite Murder. I love how open both hosts - Karen Kilgariff and Georgia Hardstark - are about their substance abuse struggles and mental health struggles.

Georgia Hardstark appeared on In Recovery, hosted by Dr. Nzinga Harrison. It’s great, of course. But what was especially great was Dr. Harrison’s intro. Her statements re: COVID trauma have stuck in my brain on loop.

I go and get vax shot no. 2 this weekend, yet I still feel weird about doing, well, anything at all. It’s been quite a time and it’s important to know we don’t know how to feel about this fully just yet. That was the message I got, anyhow.

Whole podcast is worth a listen, of course. Go Team.

Dr. Nzinga Harrison

Welcome back to IN RECOVERY. I am so excited to be on mic for Season 2. I’m Dr. Nzinga Harrison, I’m a physician, psychiatrist, addiction expert, and your host of this podcast. This season, we’re going to do things a little bit differently. So we started our show, in the midst of a pandemic, that we thought was going to be short lived. And we’ve been in it now for over a year. And we’re starting to see the sun come out of the clouds, we think with vaccinations here and economies and communities opening up. But what I know is that that’s not just like a band aid, like, oh, all of a sudden the sun is out and everything is normal and let’s get back on to our lives. We have been through so much trauma. And so we want to use this season to talk about our own collective recovery with a wider lens than just addiction.

Like, yes, our recovery from an addiction perspective, for sure. From a mental health perspective, for sure. But as people, right? How do our relationships recover? How do our routines recover? How do we get back to feeling either like our pre-pandemic selves, or what I think is probably more likely a new version of our post pandemic selves. So when I think about the people that I’ve talked to over the last year, and even myself, the changes that we’ve gone through, the people that we’ve lost, the relationships we’ve been cut off from, the priorities that I had before the pandemic, that are totally different now, the racial unrest and awakening that the country is undergoing, and how that changes us, what I know is that more than ever, we need to be connected to each other, we need to be listening to each other, we need to be holding each other up.

I think maybe even more importantly, than all of those, we need to be breaking down the stigma of saying, I need more than just myself to deal with whatever I’m dealing with. And so that’s what we hope to do on this season of IN RECOVERY, is bring on a lot of voices of a lot of people who have been through all of a lot that all of us have been through, and how they’re currently recovering so that we can be learning from each other and holding each other up. And so you might hear me say the word trauma and think to yourself, they you don’t have the right to be included in that group. Because maybe you didn’t lose your house, maybe nobody that you know, died of COVID or, and I’m crying because I put myself in this camp, which is that I have been very grateful that my kids did well in school.

And I have a job that I can work from home. And I have a support system. And I have means, even with all of that, the trauma of the last year that you can hear in my tears is a real trauma. So though you may not have lost anyone from COVID, you have lost something, because this last year took a lot from all of us. And it’s being able to connect along a sense of loss, and how we find our resilience without feeling guilt, because maybe your loss doesn’t look the same as somebody else’s loss. And so you’ll hear a collection of different stories on this episode and I think, even if the details of those experiences are different, the experience of those experiences will be something that you’ll be able to connect to.

And that will hopefully be something that will help you even as I feel like it’s going to be helping me so I’m going to be on mic with these folks. I do not promise not to cry every episode even though maybe I’ll set that as a goal. But the goal of Season 2 is for us to be here for each other in ways that we need to be here for each other. After every single one of us has gone through something we never thought we would go through over the last year and how we make it through the upcoming year.