Frank Brown

No matter the era, conservatism is a story about how 50-year-old white guys thought everything was better back when they were 13, before the bad people came along and made it so things couldn’t stay the same forever. (This fetishized past used to be the 1940s or ‘50s. By updated math, civilization’s current peak was 1987.)

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.

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.

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.

Sobriety has been about finding my true self and identifying the false narratives, and then laughing at the ridiculous grandiosity and general overblown-ness of my fears and feelings.

““The day is to be experienced, not understood!””

— The Book of Awakening: Having the Life You Want by Being Present to the Life You Have by Mark Nepo

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The greatest gift of sobriety is recovering the person I was meant to be and getting to spend time with him.