Walking out of the revolving door into a brighter future: reclaiming narratives for Black History Month 2024
October is Black History Month and this year’s theme is ‘Reclaiming Narratives’. We spoke to lived experience member A about her reflections on breaking free of the preconceptions, stereotypes and marginalisation she has faced as a Black woman with experience of the revolving door.
I’m a recovering addict. On 3 November – two weeks on Sunday – I’m going to be four years clean. Elephant and Castle where we’re sat now was where I first did my detox, and now I’m sitting here in South Bank University with Revolving Doors delivering change.
But from going into recovery, I was the only Black person in my treatment centre. More men seem to recover more than women too. At the recovery events that I’ve gone to there haven’t been many Black women, and we all say the same thing when we meet each other – why is there only us?
There are thousands of people we can connect to through being former addicts, but in the town that I live in there’s only about a handful of Black women in recovery.
I don’t know what holds us back from recovering. What I do know is that there is a lot of fear, but that’s the same within any individual. Being in recovery, coming out of your comfort zone, moving out of a city place to a new area, those old core beliefs from when you were in active addiction can come back.
What I’ve had to do is constantly push forward and put fresh layers on top and do enough work on myself that I can go out there into the world. I come to back to places like London and can be around twenty, thirty, forty, Black women that are also years into recovery, listening to them share their stories and feeling that we felt exactly the same. They paved the way for me.
I’m a humanitarian, and I feel the same towards anyone in recovery. But still, it’s a poignant point that when you meet another black woman in recovery, we all can sit and say the same things about how we think and how we feel. It could feel like generalising but being in recovery you really see that there’s not many of us. It’s the conditioning of the mind which I’ve been through as a Black woman, which is generational, which is historical.
I just want to be able to look back today and say: do you know what? We can recover. And I feel that now I brighten up my town.
