I was addicted to despair. What’s the point? Why bother? Life is hard, and then you die. In those days I called it existentialism, which cloaked the despair with a veneer of intellectual superiority. I balanced thoughts of suicide with flights of fantasy. The “right” man, the “perfect” guru, the current cause or psychological panacea would give my life meaning, patch the “hole in the soul.” When it didn’t, I wanted to die. At the bottom, I prayed to a God I didn’t believe in. “Show me the way to my mission; what is the purpose of my life?”The “sign” soon appeared in the L.A. Times Classified: ‘…person of Jewish background to work with Jewish criminal offenders.’ The hairs on both arms stood up. Who better than I? I knew I had a choice, coincidence or divine guidance. I chose to believe, to put my faith in divine wisdom, in the miracle of revelation.
God’s gift to me has been staying power and the willingness to plow through my doubts and fears when the giants loom and I feel like
a “grasshopper.” My faith in being God’s partner in healing has
sustained me when I wanted to give up and, for the past 20 years, has empowered me to put one foot in front of the other and do the next right thing.
I have found all the things I thought I would never find: a life partner who shares my passion for healing troubled souls, a reason to get out of bed every morning, and the blessing of being witness to the healing power of transformation.
Harriet Rossetto is the founder of Beit T’Shuvah, the first and only residential Jewish addiction rehabilitation program in the United States. www.beittshuvahla.org
