The first time I attended a Narcotics Anonymous meeting was in July 1999. It was winter. I was zacked out of my skull. I’d been smoking crack cocaine and heroin on a three-week bender in Hillbrow, after my then-husband went to rehab and his mom took my two baby boys away from us. I’d heard from someone in the ’Brow, that there were these things called “NA meetings” and my husband would probably be there, as part of his rehab programme.

As I stumbled into a meeting in Parkhurst, Johannesburg, held in the community centre where they also offered Spanish dancing and embroidery classes, it had already begun. The ultraviolet lights and scrubbed-clean faces of about 70 recovering addicts all but blinded me. 

I found a chair in a circle. People were introducing themselves in this really weird way. “Hi, my name’s Dave and I’m an addict”, “Hi, I’m Sipho… I’m an addict”.

Then I spotted my husband across the circle of chairs. He was hardly recognisable. Once a gaunt smackhead, his eyes were now bright, his cheeks were rosy. And he was so fat! I hadn’t eaten in weeks. By this stage I was almost hacking blood. 

Although I was as high as the sky, I will never forget the look of shame in his eyes as he saw me struggling to keep still in my chair. He pulled his hoodie down, pretending not to know me. 

But I had not arrived at this place to catch up with my hubby or get help with my addiction. I was after cash.

Without a thought for what was happening in the room, I leapt up. The chair screeched. “I really need some money!” I careered towards him. He pulled his hoodie lower.

“Do you hear me? I said I’m hungry! I’m fucking starving! I have nothing! I’m so hungry, and you are so fat!” Wailing like the cracked-out zombie I was. 

I slowly became aware of everyone staring at me. It was all too much. I hurtled straight out, back to the ’Brow, back to the dealers, the hookers and pimps. And there I got lost until rock bottom blessed me. I was pulled out of Hillbrow by my family in August, thrown onto a homeless farm in the Magaliesberg, where I got clean in September 1999.

I went to my second NA meeting a few months later with a more humble and open-minded approach. I was down on my knees. Desperation can be a wonderful leveller. For the next year I went to NA every single night. I had no money for a cushy rehab, I had to make these free meetings work.

Today, 12-step meetings are housed all over the world. There are currently close to 50 different options for people struggling with addiction-related issues. They include Alcoholics Anonymous (AA), Narcotics Anonymous (NA), Overeaters Anonymous (OA), Co-Dependents Anonymous (CoDa), Cocaine Anonymous (CA), Gamblers Anonymous (GA), Sex Addicts Anonymous (SAA), Underearners Anonymous (UA), Workaholics Anonymous (WA). In some countries, there’s even Racists Anonymous (RA), which for some strange reason hasn’t taken off in this country. 

The meetings are usually housed in churches or recreation halls. They all basically work on the same premise: “There are no strings attached. We are not affiliated with any other organisations, we have no initiation fees or dues, no pledges to sign, no promises to make to anyone. We are not connected with any political, religious, or law enforcement groups, and are under no surveillance at any time. Anyone may join us, regardless of age, race, sexual identity, creed, religion, or lack of religion.” One addict helping another to stay clean.

Scott M Peck, of The Road Less Travelled fame, calls 12-step meetings “the new churches of our age”. He believes they are the only true examples of real community building, where people genuinely rally around and work together to help each other stay clean, sober and supported.

I don’t think I would be alive today if it were not for those rooms and the addicts there who helped me to get and stay clean.

Addiction is not a straightforward disease like measles, where you have it, you cure it and it goes away, leaving you resistant, immune to future attacks. Rather, addiction is like an insidious cancer of the mind, that stays hidden; it lurks, waiting. Sometimes it slides into remission. The meetings are like going for chemotherapy: they manage the disease, keep it in check. There is a belief that the space between using and being clean is just one pickup away. “One is too many and a thousand never enough.”

Last year I celebrated 20 years clean and sober. I shared my birthday at an NA meeting, the only one I had attended that year.

And then Corona happened.

The day after President Rhamaphosa announced that South Africa was in a State of Disaster, it felt like my life got cancelled. Everything I’d been planning, things I had known for sure were happening, went cascading down a drain. Book launches, book fairs, meetings, car launches, travel, events, my son’s Wits graduation… all of it simply evaporated in a single night. All semblance of control was gone.

I didn’t get out of my pyjamas for two days. I hardly got out of bed. This was very unlike the go-getter energised me.

And without any warning, my Addict voice, who’d been in hibernation for two decades, made an uninvited appearance. “It’s over, what’s the point? You gave up smack, you gave up crack. All that hard work, just for this! The world is screwed, you are screwed. You may as well use.”

I knew this voice, I’d battled it so hard in those early days. I stared into a square of nothing. I made coffee, answered emails, brushed my teeth. But I was shaken. To the bone. I had thought I was on rock-solid sobriety ground.

Tuesday and Wednesday dragged by. I stayed inside, trying to catch up with what was happening. CNN, eNCA, Al Jazeera, Sky. Daily Maverick. Googling “Corona”. World coronavirus stats. How do you get Corona? Corona symptoms. Vaccines for Corona. Corona conspiracy theories. I got progressively frozen, unable to comprehend the enormity of what was happening to me, to our world.

Italy was fucked, Spain was fucked, the US was fucked, the UK was fucked, Iran was fucked.

South Africa with its millions of poor and immunocompromised, was going to be super fucked!

I knew I needed a meeting, but soon discovered Corona had shut down all real-life 12-step gatherings.

Oh God.

I WhatsApped a recovering addict friend to find out about meetings online.

Within minutes my inbox was flooded with links and schedules. I discovered that online NA meetings were all being hosted on Zoom, an online meeting app, founded in 2011 by Chinese IT engineer Eric Yuan, who moved to the US in 1990. In January 2013 Zoom sprang to life. Within a year Zoom had 10 million users. By 2015, 40 million. Since early 2020, in response to the coronavirus pandemic, usage of Zoom had skyrocketed as schools and businesses across the globe scrambled to set up classes and meetings in this enforced time of human isolation. 

It’s a Friday morning, three days before lockdown when I join my first World NA Online meeting. I type in the code. I press “Join Meeting”. 

I click on the video icon, choose internet audio and I’m in. Connected. There are 497 addicts from around the world online.

It’s a marathon meeting, running round the clock. It’s been going on for six weeks by the time I join. Forty-two days of 24 hours back to back.

I tune in, in the middle of a share. It’s Juan from Madrid. He has just come back from his job at the hospital. He is weeping. He speaks of Corona, of the chaos, of no beds, of no respirators, of the government’s late response to the pandemic, how people had ignored the virus, attended soccer matches, hugged and partied, how Madrid had carried on with business as usual right up until it was too late. How now all he saw was bodies piling up. He tells us he’s got three months clean and sober, he’s hanging on by a thread. By now he is crying so much he has to end his share. 

The chairperson, Aron from London, who’s been chairing this meeting for six hours straight, moves on to Susan in Birmingham. A pale, puffy-faced woman appears on my screen. She’s just relapsed. Both her children have been taken away. She’s a mess, berating herself. She says she had two years clean but she’s just gone and relapsed. In the chat box, addicts from all over the world encourage her. “Keep coming back Susan”, “You’ve got this girl”, “Just for today Susan, you’re in the right place”.

I am struck by the miracle of connection. Addicts in far off places, locked up somewhere, isolated, passing the baton, the torch of recovery, and keeping the flame alight, 24/7. Hawaii, Miami, Turkey, India, Australia, São Paulo, Birmingham, Harare, Tokyo, Melbourne, Cape Town.

I clasp my hands, I switch up the volume and I listen. 

On Friday I spend two hours online, on Sunday I do three. The day after lockdown, I’m back. There are 690 addicts online today. I listen. My soul is slowly filling up. I’m getting my old strength back, but something’s changed. I stare at the sky, I hear the birds, I notice the trees. I see the car I once loved, in my driveway. Now it’s just a box on four wheels. It’s not going anywhere. I begin to believe that the chaos of Corona is perhaps not random, that it could be an opportunity to revisit myself and my falsely constructed notions of success. Of this world. Perhaps this pain of confusion, this fog of not knowing, can be transmuted into hope, even redemption.

While I watch leaders of the world scrambling for answers, for solutions in the time of this pandemic, I gravitate more and more to the screen of addicts, fixing themselves. The wounded leading the wounded. Out of isolation. For free. DM