recovery

When you don’t trust yourself, you’re waiting to catch yourself in a mistake so you can pounce on your own certainty about how unworthy of trust you are. You get petty. You become fixated on your mistakes, and you keep a tally of those mistakes. In contrast, when you notice you’ve been numbing out all week beyond a level you’re comfortable with and

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Addiction is a progressive narrowing

of the things that bring you pleasure.

Happiness is a progressive expansion of the things that bring you pleasure. The former emerges passively.

The latter takes work.

The more of a substantial person you are, the better you make the lives of those around you.

Healing is not becoming the best version of ourselves. Healing is letting the worst version of ourselves be loved.

It’s common for addicts to realize that it’s addiction all the way down. While some of us have had more “extreme” addictions, all of us have been captured by a recurring false possibility that a certain solution will ease our pain, only to make our problems and pain worse.

It’s baffling how susceptible we are to this progressive, possibility-narrow... See more

I couldn’t quit smoking until I convinced myself that smoking was for losers.

Wasn’t enough to “want” to quit. I had to actively disdain it in an over the top way.

After the identity-belief changed, the rest was (relatively) easy.

Aaron Francis