The greatest enemies of us alcoholics are resentment, jealousy, envy, frustration, and fear.
Just an unstable woman, undisciplined, poorly adjusted, and filled with nameless fears.
In all these strivings, so many of them well-intentioned, our crippling handicap had been our lack of humility. We had lacked the perspective to see that character-building and spiritual values had to come first, and that material satisfactions were not the purpose of living.
May I always remember that the power within me is far greater than any fear before me. May I always have patience, for I am on the right road.
But I’ve also learned I am not powerless over some things. I am not powerless over my attitudes. I am not powerless over negativity. I am not powerless over assuming responsibility for my own recovery.
So, for today, I have become an agnostic, who occasionally experiences violent swings toward faith.
I have found that pain is a friend; it lets me know there is something wrong with my emotions, just as a physical pain lets me know there is something wrong with my body.
Ninety days sober cleared my thinking enough to make me realize I’d hit bottom. If I were to go back to drinking, it would be just a matter of time before one of two things happened: I’d succeed at suicide, or I’d start the life of the living dead.
Life at home was falling apart around me. Every time I turned around I’d done something to make my mother cry.
Happiness happens when results exceed expectations.
The first thing apparent was that this world and its people were often quite wrong. To conclude that others were wrong was as far as most of us ever got. The usual outcome was that people continued to wrong us and we stayed sore. Sometimes it was remorse and then we were sore at ourselves. But the more we fought and tried to have our own way, the worse matters got. As in war, the victor only seemed to win. Our moments of triumph were short-lived.
For the first time in years I opened my box of paints and poured out an honest rage, an explosion of reds and blacks and yellows. As I looked at the drawing, tears of joy and relief flowed down my cheeks. In my disease, I had given up my art, a self-inflicted punishment far greater than any imposed from outside.
I was self conscious and ill at ease most of the time, my health was at the breaking point, and I was thoroughly miserable.
When we became alcoholics, crushed by a self-imposed crisis we could not postpone or evade, we had to fearlessly face the proposition that either God is everything or else He is nothing. God either is, or He isn’t. What was our choice to be?
A New Year: 12 months, 52 weeks, 365 days, 8,760 hours, 525,600 minutes – a.
Second, I discovered that I was able to love someone else responsibly, with respectful and genuine concern for that person’s growth. Before that time, I had thought that my ability to care sincerely about another’s well-being had atrophied from lack of use.
I had sent her to four consecutive psychiatrists, and not one of them had gotten me sober.
I had been a real “people addict”; wherever I went there had to be someone who would pay some kind of attention to me.
You hit bottom when you stop digging.
I have no control over some of the things that happen in my life, but with the help of God I can now choose how I will respond. Today I choose to be happy, and when I’m not, I have the tools of this program to put me back on track.