OUR MANIFESTO
Recovery for the Revolution holds that none of us is free until we are all free.
Our biggest hope for this work is to be part of the movement where people see the interconnection between oppression, struggles with use, and liberation and seek to move towards liberation by dismantling systemic oppression and supporting people in healing from the roots of why many of us struggle.
Where people can see that systemic oppression and colonization have driven use systemically and individually, as they benefit from us staying in these cycles.
That oppression is upheld by the inability to heal and be well, especially among those of us most intentionally harmed by these systems.
That in order to sustain people en masse being able to access support around struggles with use, we must dismantle systems of oppression.
That in order to dismantle systems of oppression, we must individually come to believe we are worthy to receive and experience liberation at deeper levels than we have ever known, and those levels of liberation will come when we help others to do the same.
Whether it’s being our beautiful fabulous selves freed from the confines of who, what, and how, oppression tells us we can be, or radically redistributing resources and power as people with privileged identities who have been told they will be harmed by relinquishing power.
What keeps us from finding our freedom?
Addiction is inherently connected with oppression.
Oppression is inherently traumatizing.
Trauma is what drives addiction as the means of coping with moments, with relationships and dynamics, with a whole global history of exploitation and harm and its lived legacy today that feels unfathomable and unbearable.
Trauma lives on in our cells.
We are all living with centuries of unanswered trauma in our cells around how people have exploited their bodies, each other, and the planet in order to gain resources for the benefit of so few under capitalism, and how people have determined whose bodies are considered worthy of pleasure, joy, and freedom in order to gain and and maintain control and power.
For some of us, we cope with this unanswered trauma by leaning into addictions.
As long as we live in the legacy of colonization under capitalist white supremacist ableist fatphobic patriarchy that extracts and separates us from our sense of interconnectedness and our interdependence, addiction will continue on individual and systemic levels.
And until we heal from the traumas these systems are rooted in, we cannot get free.
Addiction treatment thus far has greatly limited our capacity for healing.
And by “us”, we especially mean Black, Indigenous people of color, queer, trans, non-binary, two-spirit folks, disabled folks, and fat folks. But don’t think that folks who are white, cisgender, heterosexual have been receiving the deep, intergenerational, decolonial healing either…
For too long, the understanding of addiction and recovery has centered cis, white, heterosexual, able-bodied men’s perspective and healing needs at the cost of so many.
So many have been harmed because our primary recovery modalities do not center the healing needs of the most marginalized.
These modalities have not carried an understanding of trauma and oppression and have overly-centered individual healing through character/moral analysis without an analysis and care for the systemic role of addiction, how trauma manifests in the body across generations, and how it may impact the most marginalized.
Instead, many of these modalities have gatekept access to community, resources, and healing, making them inaccessible for queer, trans, fat, disabled, poor, Black, Indigenous, people of color, and putting individual blame and scrutiny and shame on them for not abiding by these oppressive norms or not having material resources to support recovery that have driven many folks of these identities into their addictions.
Unfortunately, many of these recovery modalities have also shirked from accountability and any desire to change at the risk of making white, cis, heterosexual, able-bodied people uncomfortable because white, cis, heterosexual, able-bodied people at large struggle to take accountability in their role in systemic oppression, and because they believe addiction is separate from oppression.
Recovery for the Revolution is born of reckoning. It in dedication to the love and hope of ancestors.
Recovery for the Revolution is born of the reckoning of the centuries of neglect, grief, and anger of queer and trans Black Indigenous people of color denied the fullness of our existence, of our lives and the light and brilliance they are being extinguished because of centuries of systemic oppression and the ways we have not been able to access healing that supports our being.
Recovery for the Revolution seeks to honor the love and hope of queer and trans Black, Indigenous ancestors of color that we live life fully, presently, joyfully, powerfully, freely.