![]() “I was in my element, talking with a colleague, and I realized I was more than just a recovering addict. “All of the sudden, it was like the light came on, and I realized who I was academically,” she says. While directing parking in the lower lot of the main campus at 4726 Airport Highway in Louisville - where the reunion will again take place this year - she struck up a conversation with a patient volunteer who happened to be a physician. It was during an Alumni Reunion weekend a few years ago, in fact, that she found her calling as a writer. I was a volunteer at first, and after three years, I got on the payroll as a van driver - a ‘transportation specialist,’ they called it.”Īs she grew in recovery, she began to rediscover the things that had made her life fulfilling before they had been stolen by alcohol and drugs. “I left, but I stayed in the Knoxville area, and I came back after two years when Anne (Young) offered me a job as a house parent. “I was so shocked when he told me it was time to leave, but they knew that I had to, that I had to go out on my own and put into practice the things they taught me,” she says. She rattles off a list of individuals to which she’s profoundly grateful, too many to name, and remembers a particular conversation with Mickey Kirby, who gently broke the news after she’d been at Cornerstone for a year: It was time to go. I was in there for a year, and it was the most amazing experience of my life.” I was not even well enough to comprehend what they were saying to me or understand things like Schemas, but I knew that they loved me. “But the people at Cornerstone just opened their arms to me and accepted me. “I had 17 years and lost that sobriety, so the shame of that on top of the relapse was horrific,” she says. More than anything else, she says, it crushed her spirit. She had achieved several years of sobriety, but a relapse cost her everything, from an academic career in the treatment field to a job as a flight attendant. Her enthusiasm is a far different emotional animal than those that clawed at her wounded soul a decade ago, when she came through the doors of Cornerstone broken and defeated. All my friends are there, and I can’t wait to move back home.” A bottom with a trap door “I made a life in Knoxville, and I found a home at Cornerstone. “I like to say I’m just up here in Minnesota doing business, away on a little sabbatical!” she says with a laugh. 1, is a means of doing some advance work before her potential relocation. Although she’s currently laying her head in Minnesota, she’s considering a move back to Tennessee this fall, and the annual Cornerstone homecoming, set for Aug. Not just to East Tennessee, where she built a life, but to the place that gave her that life: Cornerstone of Recovery, where she’ll be one of the featured speakers for the 29 th Annual Alumni Reunion and sign copies of her inspirational book, “Word.”Įven the book, she says, was inspired during her time at Cornerstone - as a patient, as a volunteer and as an employee. On Labor Day Weekend, Canda Corcoran is coming home.
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