# Recovery

It's amazing us alcoholics have regular access to a space where we can authentically express ourselves without judgement and lean on the community for comfort.

"Mono means "thing," and aware (pronounced ah-wah-reh) translates to the sensitivity or gentle sadness about the transitory, ephemeral nature of life. It can also mean sensitivity toward things and the nature of life – something that is consciously recognized and accepted with a hint of melancholy or wistfulness."

Then it got more specific:

“This is... See more

"True acceptance is very, very, very had; but true acceptance has been the key to my recovery, to my tranquility and happiness. I needed to accept that things, at this particular moment, are exactly as they should be—including me. I had to let go of the idea that it was up to me to traverse the chasm between what I was and what I should have been. ... 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 alco... See more

You know it’s okay to need people, right?

To ask for help? We know that a lot of people believe that you should be out here pulling yourself up by your bootstraps but we’d like to propose an alternative: that we put out our hand when we need help, and let someone else do the pulling. And when we’re up and steady, we reach back and offer a hand.

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 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.

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

Regardless of what label we give it—we already know some of the most important things about addiction. We know it can, and often does, kill. We know it hurts the people we love and ourselves. We know it’s a medical condition. And we know it’s possible to recover.