# Recovery

The greatest gift of sobriety is recovering the person I was meant to be and getting to spend time with him.

Everyone else is having a great time, everyone else knows what to do, everyone else’s life is just better.

I drank for 45 years to try and live like I thought everyone else lived.

It takes time and patience and steady pressure to extract the weed, the negative traits, the damaging and self-destructive ways of thinking. That process, by itself, is a profound act of self-acceptance. The next profound act of self-acceptance is understanding that the job will never be completely done, some traits, some thinking patterns that... See more

My body knows — has always known — what I want. The feeling of ease and sinking into, yes. This. This feels right.

In sobriety, I am recalling what my body wants.

What I have to tease out in sobriety is what is a nervous feeling for good reason, and what is a nervous feeling from trauma.

The body knows, my favorite Boundaries Coach Molly Davis... See more

my ideal self doesn’t exist.

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... See more

I knew that I had once again repeated the same old pattern: I threw everything I could into the relationship (all caution to the wind) and spent no time on taking care of myself and dealing with my own problems.

I bet all my chips on thinking that if I could find “love” that my relationship would solve all my problems.

I was wrong.

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

Go to bed earlier. Wake up and move right away. Find sunlight and get in it. Even when you feel tired, go on a walk. Cheer yourself on the entire time. These small shifts are creating an entirely new version of yourself. Commit to them, and you’ll be a different person.