# Recovery

I was a shy and anxious kid, consumed by big feelings and perfectionism, neither of which I understood.

I work with extroverts, people who were never the kid no one wanted to sit next to on the bus

I have always struggled with emotional regulation. I was subject to runaway feelings, scary racing thoughts, from a pretty early age. Scary things that I was not able to dispatch on my own. Fear was such an overwhelming feeling for me, I was afraid to be afraid, if that makes any sense. My imagination produced incipient catastrophes from relatively... See more

I don’t how shame came to be part of the equation of who I am—but it ran pretty deep. I think that sense of inner shame is pretty common among us alcoholics and addicts; it’s true that drinking and using let us escape other people and external obligations—but it was mostly me that I was running from.

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.

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

If ever I felt that I was showing too much of my real self, I simply drank more. I became the girl I thought I had to be in order to be loved.

the opposite of faith isn’t doubt. The opposite of faith is certainty.