Learning How to Stay

About this book

Learning How to Stay is an intimate memoir about moving from a life organized around survival, escape, and the search for relief toward a life rooted in presence, connection, recovery, and self-trust.Through childhood memories, family, love, addiction, loss, recovery, and the changing landscape of her body and relationships, Colleen traces the many ways she learned to run-and the courage it took to finally learn how to stay.At the center of the story is a porch, a cup of coffee, and a little Australian Shepherd named Shiva who waits patiently with a tennis ball. What begins as an ordinary morning ritual becomes a place where Colleen can pause, listen, remember, and discover that healing may not require becoming someone new. It may simply require coming home to the person who has been there all along.Honest, hopeful, and deeply human, Learning How to Stay is a story about recovery as a way of living-learning that feelings are not emergencies, challenges are not necessarily chaos, strength is not always endurance, and love does not require abandoning yourself.There is another chair. There is coffee. There is room.