Why I’m Putting on a Free Recovery Day at a Casino Resort in the Northwoods
I used to make that almost-hour drive with the windows cracked and the radio low because the quiet made my head louder. Northwoods quiet. Waiting list. Then a room full of people who either already knew me or looked at me like they did. I don’t know how many times I sat there thinking the same thing: if somebody could just let people in who weren’t already somewhat fixed. If the door could have been open when I was really a mess. If something had been closer. If the stigma and the shame hadn’t drowned me before I could even walk through. Maybe my life would have changed a lot sooner. Now that I’m well, all I can think about is how many people could still be here and alive today if this had been possible.
That’s the short version of why Saturday, November 21 exists.
I’m putting on a free, full-day recovery event at the Lake of the Torches Resort Casino Conference Center in Lac du Flambeau. 8 a.m. to 7:30 p.m. Doors open at 7:45. Completely free. Everybody is welcome—people still using, people in recovery, families, people who lost somebody, professionals, neighbors, kids who need a safe room. No suits. No lectures that pretend recovery is neat. Just real talk, practical tools, and a place to sit without performing.
Register free here:
Real Talk Recovery: Progress in the Northwoods – Eventbrite
Some people have already named this and called it out. Facebook messages. Local feedback. How dare you put on a recovery event at a casino? They were up on their high horses, and even after I stayed calm and walked through it, they still didn’t get it. There are not a thousand locations north of Highway 8 where you can do something like this—especially not somewhere you can get funded, in a community you’re from. You take what you can get.
Up here our bars, our taverns, our grills have always been more community centers than pure businesses. I grew up in Winchester. Presque Isle, Manitowish Waters, Boulder Junction. Pretty much every local event I went to as a kid had a bar involved. Beer or liquor was how a lot of those organizations raised the money to even exist. I’m not pretending that makes every choice perfect. I’m saying the idea that a recovery day at a casino resort is somehow uniquely wrong doesn’t match the way this place has always worked. The point is the people in the room, not the building.
I’m white. Caucasian. I’m not pretending I’m Native. My kids are tribal descendants. My husband is an enrolled member. I grew up with the stigma that was just in the air—my dad would still be rolling in his grave about some of this, and that’s who he was in the world he came from. Does that make the old lines right? No. But the racial divide shouldn’t still be running the show up here, especially not with the newer generations that are a lot more blended than people want to admit. Our sense of community, of helping the neighbor who lives on the same roads we do, has to go beyond those lines. Especially when we’re talking about who gets to stay alive.
I started this by myself. It grew. We built a nonprofit underneath it because the day got bigger than one person. Every board member is someone touched by mental health or addiction—lived it, loves somebody who has, lost somebody who did. Licensed people. People who work with kids. People who show up on your worst day when the emergency hits. People fighting for the rights of kids—mine, yours, all of ours. Before anybody snaps to judgment, that’s who’s in the room building this.
Tom Farley said yes. His family used to camp at Trout Lake in Boulder Junction. That yes was a catalyst. It’s wild how deep the roots and the connections run up here once you start asking. The networking these past months has been real. Local businesses, local support groups, local community groups, local people—thank you. You showed up.
Why free? Because cost is still one of the biggest reasons people don’t walk through a door up here. Because “come if you can afford it” is just another way of saying some people don’t get to come. Because I spent years in the Grey Zone—after the crisis had quieted but before anything felt like a life—and I watched how many people stayed stuck because the next step required money, transportation, or the energy to explain themselves to a system that didn’t have room for the millimeter version of progress. I left the safe clinical job and built Progress is Progress in that exact stretch. Not because I felt ready. Because the thing I needed when I was clawing out didn’t exist in a form I could actually reach.
What I wish had existed is a day where you could show up exactly as you are—still foggy, still angry, still not sure you belong—and leave with one real connection, one practical tool, and the knowledge that the people in the room had already been through some version of the same hell. Not a conference. A full day in the middle of the Northwoods where the point is progress, mile or millimeter.
That’s November 21.
Register free (and share it):
Real Talk Recovery: Progress in the Northwoods on Eventbrite
If you’re in the area, or if you can get here, come. If you can’t, tell me in the comments what would make a day like this matter where you are. This is the first of the build-up posts. The day is real. The work that got us here was done in the Grey Zone, by people who’ve been touched by this, not after some dramatic finish line.
Progress is still progress. Even when you’re building the thing you needed while you’re still figuring out how to stay—and even when some people don’t like the building you found to do it in.
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