Addiction is expensive in ways that go far beyond the price of the substance. There are the lost jobs and missed promotions, the legal fees, the late charges, the credit cards that paid for things you'd rather not remember. For many people, one of the hardest parts of early recovery is opening the envelopes that piled up while they were using.
Avoidance is the natural response, and it's costly. Not knowing feels safer than knowing, but the vague dread of an unexamined bank balance is its own kind of stress, and stress is fuel for relapse. The number, once you look at it, is almost always finite. It might be bad. But it's a problem with edges, and problems with edges can be worked on.
Start small. Make a list of what you owe and to whom, without trying to solve it yet. Then write down what comes in and what goes out each month. That's it for the first pass. Many people find there's real money coming back simply from not buying the substance anymore. Seeing it add up month after month is one of the most concrete forms of evidence recovery can give you.
✦ Quote
"Annual income twenty pounds, annual expenditure nineteen nineteen and six, result happiness. Annual income twenty pounds, annual expenditure twenty pounds ought and six, result misery."
— Charles Dickens, David Copperfield (1850)
◎ Prompt
Estimate what you used to spend on your substance in a typical month. Open a separate savings account, or just a note on your phone, and start tracking that amount as money recovered.
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