# Recovery

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I didn’t begin a life of manipulation and deceit to gain anything other than acceptance. I wasn’t trying to trick anyone out of love or money, or really anything tangible, I just wanted to make them happy. I had come to believe this meant adopting a certain persona, trying to become the thing that each and every person needed and loved, even... See more

I think I became an alcoholic because I was ashamed of me. I was afraid to be me.

Perfectionism is a mindset that demands we perform as superbly as possible to be sufficient as a person. We conflate our goodness as a person with our performance in areas we care about—academics, our job, our social behavior, fitness, appearance, parenting, home organization, the list goes on.

I’m not fatalistic, I just believe that life is about being open to whatever comes next. I also know that when I haven’t learned what I need to, well, the Universe has the tendency to keep throwing me that same pitch until I learn what to do with it.

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 was always loved, but I always wondered, also, what that love depended on." (Leslie Jamison, The Recovering)

Seeing self-criticism and self-doubt as things that play out naturally rather than fires to be immediately doused help me take them less seriously and less literally.