To Thine Own Self be True

My active drinking career highlighted a lot of things I didn’t know how to do:

• Be honest with myself.


• Understand my own motivations and needs.


• See my proper place in the world.


• Appreciate my own quirks.


• Believe that I’m enough for the world, as-is.

Sobriety has been about finding my true self and identifying the false narratives, and then laughing at the ridiculous grandiosity and general overblown-ness of my fears and feelings.

The lie in every alcoholic heart is this:

I need to be something different than who I am in order to make my way in the world.

At first, alcohol helped me make that difficult caterpillar to butterfly transformation., from who I was to who I thought I needed to be. Later on, it helped me forget about the burgeoning distance between what I knew of mys... See more

To be honest would have meant dismantling the whole structure, all the assumptions and impressions about myself I’d worked so hard to create: I’m together, in control; I’m the person you want me to be. To tell the truth would have meant disclosing my full self, owning up to flaws and imperfections and depths of confusion I was too ashamed to reveal

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My whole sense of reality was tied into the deception, built into the façades. To be honest would have meant dismantling the whole structure, all the assumptions and impressions about myself I’d worked so hard to create: I’m together, in control; I’m the person you want me to be. To tell the truth would have meant disclosing my full self, owning up

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the thing I did that seemed completely impossible at the start was this: I started to live my own life, the one that was meant for me.

I stopped listening to what other people said, I stopped listening to what I imagined people were saying. I stopped listening to the nonsense I said. I started listening to my heart. I stopped pretending and started... See more

My drinking grew from fearing what the Universe had in store for me; Sobriety has been accepting what the Universe has in store for me.