The Invisible Line

I am five and a half years into recovery from alcohol addiction.

There was no single moment when my life fell apart. It happened slowly, then all at once. Alcohol took things from me long before I was willing to call those losses consequences. My life became smaller. The future became difficult to imagine. Relationships weakened. Trust disappeared. The person I believed I could become moved farther away until he felt almost fictional.

Addiction builds its own world around you. The walls move inward, but gradually enough that you learn to live inside each smaller room.

There is also an invisible line in society. Above it, people see your struggles as temporary. They offer patience, encouragement, introductions, second chances. They continue to imagine a future for you.

Below that line, something changes.

The phone stops ringing. Relationships become conditional or disappear altogether. Your explanations are no longer believed. Your mistakes are no longer viewed as mistakes, but as evidence of who you are. People begin protecting themselves from you. Eventually, you begin to see yourself through the same eyes.

I had internalized a belief that I was worthless long before I knew how completely that belief was directing my life. Alcohol provided temporary relief from that feeling while quietly producing more evidence for it. I drank because I felt broken, and the consequences of my drinking seemed to prove that I was broken. Shame became both the wound and the reason I kept reopening it.

By the time I was ready to change, I did not simply need to stop drinking. I had to find a way back into a world from which I felt increasingly separated.

That return is much harder than we often acknowledge.

Recovery asks a person to begin rebuilding at the exact moment when they may have the least confidence, the fewest resources, and the weakest connection to other people. It asks them to make responsible decisions while carrying the consequences of years of irresponsible ones. It asks them to trust when trust has become dangerous, to hope when hope feels naïve, and to imagine a future while standing in the wreckage of the last one.

I was fortunate. Some of my support systems remained intact. There were still people who could remember who I had been and imagine who I might become. Even with those advantages, rebuilding was extraordinarily difficult.

That has never left me.

I have shared my recovery journey with people who did not have the same foundation. People trying to recover without reliable transportation, stable housing, family support, an education, financial security, or a professional history they could return to. People carrying criminal records, untreated trauma, damaged relationships, and years of being told, directly and indirectly, that they had become a problem to be managed.

What amazes me is not that people struggle under those conditions. What amazes me is the strength required to change at all.

We often look at a person in early recovery and see instability. We do not see the strength it took to survive long enough to arrive there. We see gaps in employment, missed appointments, anxiety, poor communication, or difficulty trusting authority. We do not always see the history underneath those behaviors or the enormous amount of effort being used simply to remain present in a seemingly terrifying world.

We call people resilient once their recovery becomes inspirational. We are less generous while that resilience is still messy.

My own recovery has also gone through stages. At first, it was defined largely by meetings and Twelve Step work. I was desperate for acceptance and reassurance. Looking back, I can see that some of my early engagement was superficial. I gained value from saying I was in recovery before I had fully internalized the principles that make recovery transformative.

As my life improved, I began pulling away from the recovery community. I became more involved in my professional and social life, but I separated those parts of myself from my recovery. Eventually, I felt familiar ways of thinking returning. Fear. Isolation. Self-pity. The belief that I had to manage life alone.

I had not started drinking again, but I was learning that sobriety and recovery are not always the same thing.

I returned to meetings, found a new sponsor, and went through the Steps again. This time, I began to understand that recovery could not remain one part of my identity. I had to live it.

Service slowly stopped being something I did to maintain my recovery. It became the way I wanted to participate in life. Recovery was no longer about escaping the person I had become. It was about surrendering bondage to self, and becoming useful to other people.

HighTop Cleaning Services was founded during this period of my life. It began as a cleaning company, not as a formal workforce development initiative. We clean homes and commercial facilities. We train employees, build systems, solve problems, and try to provide reliable and quality services to our clients.

But through this a way to help others became visible, arising organically through trying to live a life of honesty and service, and approaching relationships with a deep level of empathy only found and fostered in the darkest moments of the human condition.

As HighTop grew, we employed talented people facing substance use disorders, mental health challenges, trauma, transportation problems, housing instability, and other barriers. I saw people who wanted to succeed but struggled within workplaces that expected stability without helping create it.

I began to recognize something from my own life in theirs.

I knew what it was like to cross that invisible line and feel the structures around me fall away. I knew what it was like to have past behavior enter the room before I did. I knew how difficult it was to rebuild credibility when shame had already changed the way I stood, spoke, and understood my own value.

I also knew that I had been comparatively lucky.

If returning had been that difficult for me, what were we asking of people attempting the same return without the relationships, education, transportation, security, or opportunities I had retained?

A paycheck alone was not the answer.

Employment matters enormously, but a job cannot simply be an exchange of time for money. Work can provide rhythm to a life that has become chaotic. It can give a person somewhere to be, someone who notices when they arrive, and a reason to be counted on. It can provide evidence, accumulated slowly through ordinary, sometimes monotonous days, that they are capable of contributing again.

Work can become a bridge back across the invisible line.

But it can also reinforce every belief a person has developed about being broken, unwanted, or disposable. A workplace can become another institution that waits for someone to fail and then uses that failure to justify why the opportunity should never have been offered.

That realization led to HighTop Social Enterprises.

Working with partners including Jenna's Promise Recovery Center and Lamoille County Mental Health Services, we began using real commercial cleaning contracts to create supported employment opportunities. Participants receive paid employment and training while working beside supervisors who understand recovery and can provide consistent, on-the-job support.

Participants are expected to arrive on time, learn new skills, communicate effectively, accept feedback, and contribute to the team. Support does not mean pretending that behavior has no consequences. It does not mean lowering standards, removing responsibility, or turning supervisors into clinicians. It means creating better conditions for meeting those standards and creating opportunities for everyone, rather than for the shrinking minority of well adjusted individuals. This work is for everyone, to alleviate the separateness, the normalized agony of the growing space between our souls.

We try to address barriers before they become job-ending crises. When something goes wrong, we still ask what responsibility the person must take. But we also ask what happened, what can be learned, and what support might make a different outcome possible next time.

Barrier to stability does not mean barrier to worth.

This belief is at the center of our work. A person's value is not granted by an employer, a job title, a period of sobriety, or a record of perfect behavior. It is already there. Our responsibility is to build environments where people can begin experiencing that value themselves and develop the skills that allow others to see it too.

HighTop cannot solve addiction, trauma, poverty, or any other barrier to employment. A workplace cannot replace treatment, recovery communities, housing, health care, or other important human relationships. But we can create a supportive workplace that integrates into our participant's lives in meaningful ways rather than harmful ones.

Because work can deepen alienation or it can create belonging.

It can manage people through fear or lead them through trust and accountability.

It can treat labor as a cost to be minimized or recognize work as one of the places where human beings learn whether they matter.

This work is personal to me. It is shaped by the distance I once felt between myself and the rest of society, by the people who kept reaching across that distance, and by those I have met in recovery who have crossed much greater distances with far fewer resources.

Their strength and resilience continually humble me. So does the knowledge that many people are not failing because they lack the desire to change. They are trying to rebuild while standing on ground that continues to move beneath them.

I once believed recovery was about repairing my own life. Today, I understand it as learning how to selflessly participate in the lives of others.

So we must also ask ourselves whether our workplaces are ready for people. All people.

Whether we are willing to see strength before it becomes success. Whether we can hold people accountable without reducing them to their failures. Whether we can create a way back before demanding that someone prove they have already found it alone.

Workforce development is community development. When we create places where people can be supported without being diminished, accountable without being discarded, and valued before they have proven themselves perfect, we do more than fill open positions and retain employees.

We want to help restore what addiction, isolation, mental health struggles, fear, and all the unrecognized and invalidated struggles of life have taken from people: a place among others, a reason to believe they are needed, and a path back into the shared life of a community.