The crux of recovery is love. Love for others, love for life, and love for yourself. Anyone who has walked into Beit T’Shuvah knows that, on your first day, you basically feel none of these. That is why we live by that old cliché, “Let us love you until you can love yourself.” In this community, when it comes to being showered with admiration and affection, no one compares to Penelope G.
Picture this: 21 years ago, to two loving parents in Los Angeles, a bright red-haired smiley-faced baby is born. That baby’s name was Penelope. Duh. Penelope’s childhood was seemingly normal. Her parents are still together, they treated her with kindness and respect—tending to every one of her wild “picking eating habits,” and her grades were always top tier. But, underneath it all, there was a girl who was struggling. While her peers were running around carefree, she would stew inside her head. “I had self-consciousness too early. I was always a hider.” She took on the responsibility of every look and gesture that anyone made—constantly worried about the judgment of others. “To me, every feeling that everyone else was feeling was my fault and my responsibility. I caused it and I should fix it.”
Despite her constant doubts over what people thought of her, Penelope still managed to make friends throughout her adolescence. If you know her, then you know that it is nearly impossible to not want to be friends with her. A big advantage to this, and what made her grow more comfortable around others, was that she went to the same school from kindergarten until she graduated high school. She had time to grow with people—or rather, they had time to grow on her.
The summer between eighth and ninth grade, Penelope tried alcohol for the first time. If you think that the world’s most popular social lubricant eased her social anxiety, you would be wrong. Surely, it helped but not nearly enough. That did not stop her from drinking more and more until it became a regular occurrence. How would a young Penelope get alcohol without a fake ID, you ask? Pure charm. The local liquor owner sold her booze even though she looked very clearly like a child. Isn’t LA a wonderful place?
Once Penelope hit high school, (and this is going to date her) Covid hit. So, she was forced to attend Zoom High. The pure unadulterated isolation turned her regular habit into a constant one. The only people she truly interacted with for two years were her parents. Every other aspect of her life was online. Internet connection is not connection. To this day, she is unsure if her parents knew how bad her drinking had gotten to by that point. “I was always a good hider.” It’s hard to smell alcohol breath through a mask.
Then, the restrictions eased up, we all got to breathe fresh maskless air, and Penelope got to go to college in person. She decided she wanted to attend UC Berkeley, but when she got there she got cold feet. This monumental change got to her and when she arrived on campus, “[She] freaked out, turned the car, around, and headed back.” This was the start of her gap year. Unfortunately, this gap year wouldn’t be a relaxing one when she realized that she had made a mistake not going to college and started to reapply to schools. Penelope applied to twenty schools over three months. Her goal was to go to a liberal arts school in New York and ultimately, after every essay and application, she ended up deciding to go back to UC Berkeley. “What a monumental waste of time that was! I did get a good essay about the Kardashians out of it though!”
When she made it back to UC Berkeley, for real this time, she had not put down the bottle and she had not gotten past her fear of social situations. “I would linger around people, thinking they had to make the first move to talk to me even though I wanted to talk to them. I always liked people. I like talking to people, but they always scared me as a child—they still scare me.” One person she bonded with deeply in college was her roommate—Both kindred-spirited redheads. “We were in very different stages in our lives and alcoholism…she’s not an alcoholic.”
Sadly, outside of her roommate, making friends in college seemed difficult. She was certainly no party animal, but she would attend football games… “I would walk up the hill from my dorm where the football stadium was because people would stash booze in the bushes while they would watch the game. So, I would wait for everyone to go into the game, watch people hide things, then go around with an Ikea bag, and load it up with their booze. So, I did participate in the college social scene in my own way.”
After that first year of college, her problem with alcohol became clear to both her and her parents. During that year, she had a therapist who suggested IOP. When that wasn’t enough, her parents found Beit T’Shuvah.
The nervous girl who walked through these doors almost a year ago is nothing like the girl we all know today. Penelope is one of the most changed individuals that has ever come through here—the mission in action. On her first day, she sat on the steps crying her eyes out simply because of how many people were around her—people she didn’t know and didn’t trust. Today, that reality couldn’t be further from the truth.
No moment in the past year has fully exemplified what Beit T’Shuvah is all about more than Penelope’s drash on Shavuot. It’s 1 AM. Everyone in the room is bleary-eyed and delirious. Onto the stage walks Penelope—shaking like a leaf in a hurricane. At first, she could barely get through a few sentences. The pressure of speaking in front of a crowd—being vulnerable, was too much to handle. Then, everything changed when the crowd of residents started chanting things like, “You got this!” and “Take your time!” and “We love you!” Before our very eyes, this bud started to bloom. The whole community stood with her, refusing to let her fall. Just like that, she was smiling, laughing, and making jokes. That’s when she became honest. She spoke in a truly heartfelt and deep way with a levity that had the entire room either crying laughter or sorrow at any given moment. This girl who could barely control herself just moments before was now controlling the whole room. The outpouring of love for her in the following days made Penelope feel uneasy. She had been seen—the one thing she had been avoiding for twenty years. “I could feel that something special had happened on Shavuot…even though praise makes me uncomfortable.”
Penelope’s growth at Beit T’Shuvah didn’t end there. She now works as a Program Facilitator intern. With an ear-to-ear grin she says, “I just want to help people.” And help people she has! With her skills as a PF, with her warm and inviting personality, and with her humor—every day Penelope can be spotted helping someone. She has progressed in her recovery—going to meetings and, just this week taking a cake for one year sober.
There is a reason Penelope is so widely loved throughout this community. She is unapologetically her authentic self—something she could not always say. She makes every single person she meets feel seen—exactly the way she never was. She is loyal and loving beyond comprehension—just like her community has been to her. There is no doubt in my mind that Penelope has cringed reading this entire spotlight—frankly, she may never read it at all. That doesn’t matter to me. What matters is that she knows how loved she truly is. She told me, “Everyone has shown me a lot of love the whole time I have been here.” Which is true. So, Penelope, if you’re reading this, please know that we have all been blessed to watch you grow. In a funny way, you have done every cliché in reverse. You have become someone who has love for others, love for life, and love for yourself. Now, let us love you too.
