Seek Recovery First

What is important to you as a person? What do you seek first and most in life? If I were to ask ten different people the same question, I may get ten different answers. This is probably because all those ten people are in very different situations that may require different needs.
People from all walks of life strive everyday for many material things like houses, cars, clothes, lots of money in their bank accounts; in short, many possessions. So many of these material possessions are wished for and even given to people on their birthdays. But interestingly, only one or two things cannot be given as a gift but can only be wished.
What am I getting at? I am thinking about life and good health. I think that for someone to be able to successfully pursue and grasp all those other possessions I mentioned earlier, a person must be able to strive to take care of their health which will hopefully guarantee a long life (even though this may not always be the case because accidents, unexpected disasters, pandemics, genetic conditions and other unexplained circumstances sometimes do take away life abruptly).
Most of the time when I speak to clients about their goals, I hear very interesting things, like, ‘I just need a woman to take care of me and satisfy my sexual needs’. Others say, ‘I want to travel outside the country’. Most of them see these goals as the solution to their Substance Use Problems. Most clients especially in the early stages of treatment do not understand that the most important thing is to seek recovery first and then all those other goals will follow.
What most clients fail to understand is that, with everything that we acquire, there are different levels of quality that a person can have depending on his/her health status, financial status, social status and a whole lot of other ‘relevant statuses’ (I find myself laughing at that). Life and good health gives a person hope of being in the right frame of mind and body to effectively go after and acquire all those other physical needs and wants.
I just want to encourage everyone struggling to acquire all those physical and even emotional needs to the neglect of seeking treatment for their Substance Use Disorder first, thinking that, those will be enough to solve their problems. There cannot truly be any quality in a life which is plagued with bad health, running a risk of loosing that life at any point due to Substance Use.
My friends, by all means seek a comfortable life, cars, a life partner, money in your account but in all your seeking, if you have a Substance Use Problem, seek to recover from that first, because, that is a guarantee to a better quality of life which will essentially lead to a better quality of acquisitions in terms of all those other things.