🍴Food for Thought: Wherever You Go, You Have to Take Yourself with You

There’s an old expression many of us have heard:

Wherever you go, you have to take yourself with you.

Usually, it is meant as a warning that there are no geographic cures.

A new city will not automatically fix an old pattern. A new job will not magically create peace of mind. A new relationship will not remove the need for honesty, responsibility, or recovery.

For many of us, gambling followed us because the real problem was much less about where we were, and more about how we were living.

That part is true.

But I have also come to see that phrase in another way.

Wherever you go, you can take yourself with you.

Not just the old self. Not just the fear, shame, old habits, or escape routes.

You can take your program with you too: positive routines, gratitude, phone calls and texts, meetings, honesty, boundaries, the willingness to pause before reacting, the ability to ask for help, and a growing sense of who you want to be and are already becoming.

This week, as I travel to Nashville for the National Council on Problem Gambling conference, I am thinking about this with enthusiasm and gratitude.

Travel can interrupt the positive routines we are comfortable with. New places can throw us off a little. Conferences, airports, hotels, late nights, and full days can make it easy to drift from the things that keep us steady.

But recovery doesn’t have to stay home.

The life we are learning to live can travel with us too.

What part of your recovery do you want to take with you wherever you go?

Because wherever we go, we do take ourselves with us.

And with practice, that can become very good news.

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