# Recovery

It feels like there are so many contradictory rules: we have to ask questions but also talk about ourselves. We have to be cool but not detached. We have to be smart and informed but not a pretentious know-it-all.

W e, of Alcoholics Anonymous, are more than one hundred men and women who have re-covered from a seemingly hopeless state of mind and body.

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.

Until I gave up my made-up construct for the life I thought I was supposed to be living, I couldn’t begin to live the life that was actually meant for me. Until I let go of everything not meant for me, what was meant for me couldn’t find me.

“Young man, do not forget to pray. Each time you pray, if you do so sincerely, there will be the flash of a new feeling in it, and a new thought as well, one you did not know before, which will give you fresh courage, and you will understand that prayer is education.”

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

I believe the Steps are more like a spiritual initiation that works toward destroying our old, deluded, self-centered selves so that God and our Sober Elders can put the pieces of our lives back together in the form of a wholly new self.

preoccupied attachment — always scanning for proof we’re loved, always bracing for abandonment. We’re so used to checking the “supply line” to feel okay — whether that’s alcohol, a person, or constant external validation — that we forget we can carry the reassurance inside us.

You get to be the person you want to be, lead the life you want to lead, when you accept what is.