Zoom it ‘til you can room it!

How many times have you heard statements like this ‘I can’t do the online thing, I am a people person I need the connection’ over the last year? Covid 19 has challenged us to grow in a different way. In a different direction and meet different people. No one could have predicted that we would be here supporting each other a year later. The building of relationships online have become a mainstay in our lives.

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Rich robust relationships that have come to mean as much to us as those we were reliant on and met face to face a year ago. They zoom in while they are on the bus, in their sitting rooms, sitting on their stairways, in their gardens (when the weather was good enough to sit outside). We have even chatted to people while they were driving (on hands free), cooking their dinners and kept them company while out walking. All of things that we could have not have done if we were sitting in a room at a meeting.

New language

We have been enriched by zooming in and out of time zones and continents all from the comfort of our own homes (cars and gardens). It has been great hearing all the different accents and increasing our familiarity with new lingo from the four corners of the earth. Words we may never have heard had we not done zoom meetings.

My friend T say’s Covid 19 brought to her life ‘a year of magical thinking’. We not only explored the spider web of the internet but also the spider web of our lives that showed us connections and gaps. Who would have thought that we could be so connected being so far away?

Every relationship, be it distant or in close proximity needs attention and time invested in it in order for it to mean anything and grow deeper. We have probably spent more time online than before supporting our fellow recoveree’s. We hurt when they hurt. We celebrated when they had successes and we cried when they cried (literally every Monday and Tuesday nights we cried in meetings as people worked through their stuff)

Close support

The DIY projects we witnessed coming to life are worthy of a TV show and fell in love with all the fur babies that lived in the homes with our zoom friends. They were even renamed them unknowingly. Santa came to visit and bring smiles to children’s faces that just made your heart burst with happiness.

We saw the people get recovery online as their first port of call for support and stay in recovery with the great support available. They worked through their difficulties, they melted in safety and they made friends across the world. Who would have thought they would even met people who lived close by who became support networks to each other.

We have sooooo many places we are going to go on holidays when we are free to travel and have soooo many visitors to entertain when our connections come to visit us.

Not first preference

Zoom might be a digital space, with 1000’s of miles between us but it has afforded so many a safe place to keep working on their recovery in a very challenging situation. When my preference of alcohol was not available I drank what was available. So with my preference of face to face meetings not available I will make do with that is available and that for now is Zoom. So keep zooming folks until we can room it.