My Song of Ice and Fire

All of my friends know that I am the Game of Thrones chick. I mean, I'm not special. Everyone likes the show. But, for me, it has meant something else, and I've referred to it, at times, as "the closest thing I'll ever have to a religion."

I'm a recovering addict. I've spent the last 15 years of my life battling a terrible addiction to opiates. I was an intravenous user for 12 years. I've been clean four years now. Through all of this, there has been Game of Thrones.

It sounds silly, right? It isn't.

I have ruined a lot in my life. I look back at my life, and it is only the ashes of bridges I've burnt, and for the longest time it also included the hands of loved ones desperately grasping at me, begging for me to be 'me' again, and me always floating just out of their reach.

The most damaged relationship was with my mother. My soulmate. My best friend. She is my everything. All of those years it's like I could just see her heart breaking with every visit. Every phone call, I could hear the panic in her voice. The disappointment. The shame. But there was one thing that allowed us to just be us. Mother and daughter. Two best friends without the tension and the strain.

On Sunday nights we could be normal. Bonding over Game of Thrones was literally the thread that held us together during such dark years. It was the tiny bit of normalcy that we needed in order to maintain a relationship that I'd seemingly been working so hard at destroying.

Game of Thrones single handedly got us through, and the most beautiful thing is that during this last four years of sobriety... we still have Game of Thrones. It is still special and always will be.

Of course I see a little of myself in certain characters. Like Cersei, I was a broken woman grasping for any smidgen of control over my life that I could touch. It also ruined me. Like Daenerys I overcame, and I came out of the fire untouched, stronger, knowing my worth, and my power. Knowing what I was capable of. Not just being a survivor, but a warrior.

It gave me hope. But it also gave me the most important relationship in my life, and without Game of Thrones, without those Sunday nights where my mother and I could put aside our painful reality, and live together in a world of dragons and white walkers....

We may not have each other, today.

It is Saturday night, May 11th. Tomorrow is Mother's Day, and I can't wait for her to come over, I can't wait for us both to kick back... dim the lights and whisper...

Quiet in the realm!

#VocalGOT