Courage

I don’t care what the book says. If it’s not on the first 164 it’s hearsay. Acceptance is absolutely not the key to all my problems today. Honesty, open-mindedness and willingness play a much bigger role. So do humility, courage and perseverance. All of those played a critical role in [...]

I am a head injury patient. I am. There is hardly another explanation. I sat in a meeting and shared about it and of course I was told to work the steps. Of course there is some truth in that, truth I sometimes ignore out of an objective bias against people [...]

All men may err; but he that keepeth not his folly, but repenteth, doeth well; but stubbornness cometh to great trouble. -Sophocles, Antigone It is hard to understand how someone so clever, so witty, so completely charming and attractive as I am, someone so devoid of malice, someone through whom goodness and beneficence shines like [...]

  “Easy doesn’t do it. Easy never did it. Nothing worth doing has ever been easy.” - Unknown That’s one of the mottoes I (pretend to) live by. There are others, of course, important ones. The more important they are the harder they are to live up to. For example, “Remember who you [...]

I had an interesting and clarifing conversation with my sponsor regarding humility and humiliation. According to him, and I like this definition, I can work with this definition, humility is thinking of others more than I think of myself. Humiliation is doing something that is beneath me, for whatever reason. He said [...]

I am, now, officially freaked out. Between yesterday and today I have accumulated enough ‘Close, But No Cigar’ kind of experience to have convinced myself that I am, like an old boyfriend once said, “a complete failure as a human being.” Intellectually I know that it isn’t true, that my problems are surmountable, [...]

I went to Gooding recently to speak at the treatment center I went to, which in and of itself was really cool. Even cooler is the fact that out of that someone decided that they wanted me to show them how I’ve stayed sober. And even cooler than that, the coolest thing, something [...]

is to stay sober and to help other alcoholics (and addicts) achieve sobriety. When you’re first coming in, when you’re on the morning side of the mountain, tradition 5 seems like the dumbest or most obvious thing in the world. Duh. There is a song by Patty Griffin, I’ve talked about this before, called [...]

I have a friend, Joe K. who has been sober something like 38 years. Joe has worked with hundreds of alcoholics and addicts, not just here in Boise, but all over the country and continues to do so. A couple of weeks ago I was in a meeting and met this dynamite guy [...]

I finished writing my 4th step today. Resentments and fear anyway. Enough to get started since there is a good reason to get it out of the way. Sex inventory, like sex, can wait till later. Much, much later. But as I was sitting here tonight, answering a couple of [...]