# Recovery

I thought the self-loathing, anxious, ‘not enough’ aspects of my personality were integral to who I was. But they weren’t. Turning to alcohol to cope with that inner critic was a bad decision.

I do not believe in fate. I do not believe in a higher power that runs my life like a puppet master. But I do believe that it’s up to me to see, hear, feel HP in my life (step 11). It will take me a while to fully grasp the lessons I have learned through this journey.

But of course calling oneself a monster can be a form of self-aggrandizement. The worst part of myself is my occasional feeling that I am a very, very special kind of monster. A dumb story I can get caught up in is this one: No one is as big a monster as me. The grandiosity of my self-loathing (and its attendant self-pity) could blot out the sun if... See more

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.

The AA motto— To Thine Own Self Be True —is not a tagline. It’s the heartbeat of the 12 Steps, the Traditions, and the Concepts. It’s not always evident on the surface, but the principles embedded in the 12 Steps are designed to bring a person home to themselves. Not to some idealized version of self-improvement, but to the original self. The... See more

The idea that I would be ridiculed and teased if I were to reveal bits of myself, the things I liked, the things I thought, the things I was afraid of. I came to believe that the only version of me that was palatable and sale-able to the world at large was the one I was painstakingly constructing and that required the prodigious consumption of... See more

“Ho’oponopono” — it centers around 4 phrases, like a mantra, and it goes “I’m sorry, please forgive me, thank you, I love you.”

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