Oxford House Hates Smart, Introverted, Non-smoking Women Who Have All of Their Teeth
***Don’t dare be reserved, quiet, polite, well-groomed, and well-mannered and try to live in an Oxford House. You will not make it, at least not for long.***
- You will be accused of “isolating” if you need alone time to recharge.
- You will be accused of showing “relapse behavior” if you do not like being around crowds and do not enjoy loud gatherings.
- You could be kicked out for “not fitting in” despite following all of the rules if you do not sit outside and smoke with the other house members. This goes double if you have asthma and have to avoid being around their smoke.
And speaking of not smoking…
Prepare to choke on secondhand smoke every time you enter and leave the house. Some houses even allow vaping indoors, so you may never be free from breathing in another person’s addiction. Vaping is full of harmful chemicals too, ya know.
This is one area where the “not screening for personality disorders” is a real problem. People who can’t get over the oral fixation and don’t give a flip about who they hurt tend to be much higher on the narcissism continuum than the average person, and vapers are no exception. I will go so far as to say that smokers in 2022 are likely narcissists. Vapers could also be as well.
Walking around with their sucky and putting it to their lips every time they feel a little tense and then blowing it into the room with no regard for anyone else? Maybe not full-on NPD, but up there for sure.
Yeah, recovery is a bitch, but in this environment, it’s made worse by no oversight and no one to clean up the place and to tell these bozos to knock it off. A person’s health matters, and their autonomy and agency over their own body matter. Many people self-medicate because those things were taken away from them by abuse, usually sexual abuse of some kind. In recovery, they should have the right to breathe clean air and to be free of another person’s filth and to not have it forced on them, much like another person’s will was forced on them in their past. See how that works?
There’s no awareness in OH of the diversity of personalities of people who have experienced substance misuse. I doubt they have the awareness of this diversity in the world in general, and they definitely lack it in those who come to them looking for a safe space in their journey to get better. The ones who tend to last in OH are the typical “I lost my kids because I used to suck dick for crack” to the all-too-common toothless meth-head, the pillhead-turned-heroin-user, and the the occasional cokehead masquerading as alcoholic.
So really, everyone is welcome at Oxford House, be you “street junkie” or “jail junkie.”
People who are highly functional with good literacy and nice teeth get bullied in these houses. Sure, they’re sought after for their earning potential and the fact that they don’t steal the stainless steel spoons, but once they start offering suggestions as equal house members, suddenly their kind aren’t wanted anymore.
They don’t have the exciting jail stories, and if they made the mistake of talking about a book of literature they’re reading, it’s something they learn to never do again in an Oxford House if they want to stay.
Oversight, people. Have I made that clear yet?
