We Are the Luckiest: The Surprising Magic of a Sober Life

I could not connect the person who hid alcohol in closets to who I imagined I was.

I am the only one responsible for my experience.

sobriety is about freeing yourself from any behavior, relationship, or way of thinking that enslaves you and keeps you from being present to life.

Forget forever. It doesn’t exist, anyway. As Eckhart Tolle also said, “It is not uncommon for people to spend their whole life waiting to start living,” and that’s exactly what you’re doing when now is swallowed by projections of forever. Nothing in the future exists yet. But anything is possible right now. Including the thing you think you cannot

I had created a totally separate internal world that didn’t match my outsides, and this incongruence left me feeling terribly alone, even when I was surrounded by people.

Life will present itself to them.

Most of my life up to that point had been a series of small or large acts of pretending, which made the ground I was standing on shaky and unstable. I was never going to feel whole standing on that ground, even when it appeared to be attractive, solid, and right, because it was built on falsities and my soul knew it.

Things like approval seeking, people-pleasing, not voicing my opinions, and avoiding conflict at any cost — these were all dishonesty masked as something sweeter and more socially acceptable.

To me, this was the most painful reality of drinking: the deadness, the flattening of my spirit — although I had never articulated it that way.