My journey through service in CoDA has been bumpy but one of the greatest spiritual learning experiences of my life.

I fell into a committee, attended a convention, and met people just like me from all around the world. I laughed and laughed and laughed, and inwardly cried and cried and cried, that I had come home to a family of wildly sensitive, intelligent, spiritual, wounded, suffering codependents, just like me.

I spent a year serving on a committee without realizing that at the same time I had had a major breakdown and was a little crazy and didn't know it. That is all right, the committee didn't know it either, I think. I wanted to leave the committee but decided to stay until someone else arrived whose brain was in good repair.

At the same time, someone in CoDA introduced me to music that I had never heard before because it was forbidden in my life in the cult. It broke my heart, wounded me, and healed me and is still healing me. If this music did not need to be forbidden, then what else in my life had I forbidden that I did not need to? I listened over and over again to the most famous songs of my generation that I had never opened my life to. I listen to new music that is decades old every day now and it comforts me.

It is not the service but the willingness to serve that has stayed with me. The biggest turning point in my life happened through joining a committee, and not leaving. I realized belatedly that I had been a bit crazy as I began to get well. But I am entirely grateful to the politeness of others in CoDA who did not mention my unwellness, maybe because they were equally unwell, and to my Higher Power who despite my unbelief still seemed to exist.

I am at peace now; my existential crisis that happened at the same time as joining a committee is over. I no longer want to spit every time someone mentions a Higher Power. I can mention my Higher Power too and it is all right, because I have one, a bit different from everyone else's but perfect for me.

Thank you, CoDA for letting anyone serve, even me.

Maria S - 5/30/20

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