New city, new support

I packed my car with two years of sobriety and drove to Baltimore not knowing a single person in recovery in the entire city. I had  90 day stay arranged at a boutique sober living house. I had only seen in photos, and had a recommendation from a friend of a friend, of whom I was already leaning on harder than I wanted to admit. What I did not have lined up was a list of AA meetings, a potential sponsor I could call on a Tuesday night or a list of activities to kick things off with.

Sober living was good, in the end I stayed only two months as I felt a bit grounded and kinda had the thought "I got this." I had lined up an apartment in Hampden and bought all my early furnishings at Walmart. It was basic but cute. Besides moving, I spent the first few weeks, after I left, doing the bare minimum. I found meetings, showed up late, sat near the exit, and left before anyone could start a conversation. I told myself I was scoping things out, getting the lay of the land. What I was actually doing was hiding in plain sight, which is something I got very good at before I got sober and apparently had not fully unlearned.

The Saturday morning meeting in Fells Point is where things started to shift for me. That was a saving grace. I almost did not go. I had skipped two meetings that week already and had a whole story ready about why that was fine. I went anyway, and before I even found a seat someone walked straight across the room, looked me in the eye, and said they were glad I was there. That was it. One person deciding to move toward me instead of waiting.

I stayed for coffee. I got a few phone numbers. I said yes to a group dinner I had every intention of declining and ended up closing the restaurant down with people I had met three hours earlier. It did not feel like home yet, not that night. But it felt like home was something I could actually build here, and after a month of feeling untethered that small shift in perspective was everything.

What I know now, two years into living in Baltimore, is that nothing about this city felt like mine until the recovery community did. The neighborhood, the coffee shop around the corner, the running path by the water, none of it landed until I had a room full of people who would notice if I stopped showing up. That is what I was really searching for when I typed "AA meetings near me in Baltimore" into my phone at midnight during that first rough week.

If you are newly sober and relocating, or searching for young people in AA in Baltimore and trying to figure out how to start over, my honest advice is to go to the meeting you keep putting off and stay until someone talks to you. The community is there. I found it by accident on a Saturday morning when I almost stayed in bed, and it turned out to be the whole reason Baltimore ever started to feel like home.

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