We are all creatures of habit. That’s especially true if you’re addicted to alcohol. People who read articles related to getting sober are probably not happy with their drinking habits: too much, too often. You’re not running the show; King Alcohol took the helm a long time ago.

I was a high bottom drunk. Still owned my ad agency, albeit with fewer and fewer clients. I could still function, but the quality of my work was slipping away.

I left the office at 3pm to go buy a bottle.

I bought the bottle from a rotation of three liquor stores as to not appear habitual to clerk (fooled them, didn’t I!).

I drove home along the same route, no cops along the way.

I threw the empty bottle out the window at roughly the same spot.

I sucked on the same mints.

I lied.

You likely have your regular brand of booze (or mouthwash/cough syrup/lemon extract, depending how low your bottom), sit at the same bar stool, etc. etc.

Chances are you’ve been drinking for years, probably decades, until you reach that point where you’re sick and tired of being sick and tired.

Regardless of the path you take in your pursuit of sobriety, you’ll need to overcome what I’ll call the inertia habit. The inertia in my life was a downward journey of actions I was ashamed of but couldn’t seem to stop. And this journey was comprised of small habits.

“Watch your thoughts, they become your words; watch your words, they become your actions; watch your actions, they become your habits; watch your habits, they become your character; watch your character, it becomes your destiny.” Lao Tzu

It may be easy for you to quit drinking (and not start again the next day.) The rewards of sobriety may come quickly and easily. You’ll look and feel better. You’ll have an extra dollar or two in your pocket.

Or it may be a difficult series of starts and stops and starts again. Maybe you’ll get a 30-day coin at a meeting. Everyone will clap. Your friends and family will begin to think that this time, you might be sincere about quitting.

And then you’ll go back out.

If you’re lucky, you’ll live to quit again.

If you’re in a program, you’ll call it a slip. People around the table will not judge you, they’ll admit they had plenty of slips themselves.

Me, I don’t believe in slips. A person decides to drink again; they don’t slip. Slip is what you do on the ice.

Crossing the Plateaus

But regardless of how you get there, you will reach a stage in your recovery where things will become boring. You’ve reached the ‘sober, so what’ plateau. In a world where immediate results are often expected, the slow pace of change in habit transformation can be discouraging.

Plateaus are affirmation deserts, stretches where no one is patting you on the back, no mile markers of accomplishments or rewards, just miles of ordinary life as far as the eyes can see.

I crossed boring plateaus at year two my sobriety. I was especially tough. I didn’t think about drinking again, but I did question whether a sober life was all it was cracked up to be.

My sponsor mentor told me the analogy of an oil tanker. A full loaded tanker, he said, require more than mile to change course. They have tremendous inertia to overcome. So much inertia that you can turn the wheel hard to starboard, and you won’t sense the change in course for some time, but the ship is turning.

In the intricate journey of altering deep-seated habits, particularly in the context of heavy drinking, the recovery process is often gradual and imperceptible, akin to a 500,000 ton ship altering its course.

Persistence and patience are critical. Just as a ship’s captain must hold steady to the new course and patiently wait for the ship to respond, when alcoholics or those with AUD reach a plateau they must remain committed to their sobriety. I struggled because improvements were not immediate. The gradual nature of change should not be mistaken for failure but recognized as a part of the process.

Accept the gradual nature of your transformation, stay the course, and I promise you a life so rich, you can’t imagine.

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M Scott Peck published a little-known recording entitled Addiction: The Sacred Disease. That perspective stops most people cold. Most would say that sacred and disease don’t belong in the same sentence. But taking that perspective is not saying addiction is good. When I refer to it as such, I’m not romanticizing the pain and suffering or minimizing the damage it leaves in its wake. I’m just pointing to the strange, brutal way addiction sometimes forces a person into a life they would never have chosen but cannot imagine giving up.

I’m a good example.

Yes, addiction is destructive. That part is not in question. It ruins health, ends careers, and destroys families. Addicts or alcoholics lose years, relationships, and sometimes their lives. There is nothing noble about any of that. The “sacred” idea comes into play because of what some people find on the other side, if they survive long enough to get there.

What the phrase points to is the way addiction strips a person down to something raw and exposed. Most of us protect ourselves with lies, habits, and the stories we fabricate about who we are. Addiction dismantles all of that. Control goes first. Then pride. Then the image you worked years to maintain. At some point, there is nothing left to hide behind. For many people, that collapse is the first time in their lives they have seen themselves clearly. Not because they wanted to, but because there was nowhere left to hide.

Said another way, the disease isn’t sacred because it’s good. It’s sacred because it can lead to a transformation that an ordinary life doesn’t demand. It holds your head underwater until you ask for help. Down at the deepest level, you find truth.

That kind of rightness is impossible to embrace virtually any other way. People spend decades in therapy, in self-help, in spiritual practice, trying to get to uncover what I’ll call ‘soul-truth’ that addiction forces on a person whether they want it or not. The excuses stop working. Those around you scoff at your rationalizations. What remains is the reality of what’s happening, which is often the foundation of actual change.

Alcoholics don’t change direction until the cost of staying the same becomes unbearable. The disease bears that cost. It makes the stakes concrete and personal. For some, the consequences become the turning point they never would have found any other way. That’s where you’ll hear, “I’m sick and tired of being sick and tired.”

Peck spoke directly about Alcoholics Anonymous. He connects it to structure and community. Not a perfect system, by any means, but a working one. He saw that it gives people a path. Steps. Accountability. A place where denial gets challenged. That’s where I found it; you might find it there or elsewhere.

The program accountability pushes people toward bigger questions. When you have lost nearly everything and then rebuilt something, you stop taking the ordinary things for granted. People in recovery regain a sense of purpose. They sense a spiritual dimension, whether or not the person has any traditional religious beliefs. It tends to feel less like philosophy and more like necessity.

There is also something that happens between people who have been through it. Recovery cultures, particularly groups like the one that saved me, create a kind of honesty that is rare in ordinary social life. People admit to character defects that most people spend their whole lives avoiding. Shared pain, spoken plainly, breaks the isolation on which addiction feeds. Built on something real, the relationships formed around the tables are often among the strongest you’ll find.

People who come through addiction often describe rebuilding their lives from scratch. New values. New habits. New ways of measuring what matters. Some of them spend the rest of their lives working with others who are still in it. That sense of purpose, of turning the worst thing that ever happened into something useful, is what it’s all about.

Don’t confuse the issue: given a choice, addiction is not a path you follow. And not everyone who goes through it arrives at clarity, purpose, or connection. Some people never get the turning point. Some do not survive long enough to find out. Recovery makes no promises, but the word “sacred” was coined by people who came through something terrible, picked themselves up, and walked forward on a new path.

Alcoholism causes serious harm. But for some of us, surviving it and doing the work leads to a kind of clarity, humility, and purpose that we did not find any other way.

OK, I’ll stop preaching.

Photo by Tima Miroshnichenko:

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I’m an alcoholic, so my cathartic moments have presented themselves at AA meetings. But they can happen in any meaningful conversation with someone you trust.

I was sitting in my usual chair at a meeting when it came my turn to share on the topic. I’d spoken plenty of times before. But this topic hit different. When I started talking, my voice shook. My hands gripped my knees. My throat felt tight.

That’s when I knew. Whatever made my voice quiver was exactly what I needed to work on.

Your Body Tells the Truth First

Our voices give us away. They shake before we even understand why. It’s not weakness. It’s information.

I’ve watched my hands tremble when I talk about certain things. I’ve felt my chest tighten. I’ve had tears come from nowhere. These aren’t problems to fix. They’re signals pointing me toward work I haven’t done yet.

In recovery we say we can’t talk about certain things until we do. That sounds backwards. But anyone who’s sat in a circle and felt their voice crack knows exactly what it means.

The shame lives in the silence. The healing starts when we give it sound.

Something Happens When Others Hear

Thinking about hard things alone is one thing. Speaking them in front of people is different. I don’t know why exactly. But something shifts.
When I finally talked about the specific ways I’d hurt myself and others while drinking, the room changed. I changed. Psychologist James Pennebaker spent years studying this. People who share traumatic experiences get healthier. Their immune systems work better. They need doctors less. They feel better.

But it’s not just the speaking. It’s the being heard. In AA meetings, there’s a trade. The speaker risks something. The listeners give acceptance back. No fixing. No judging. Just presence. We realize we’re not alone in our damage. Our secrets are common currency.

The Quiver Points the Way

I started paying attention to my shaking voice. When my turn came to share, and I hit a subject that made my throat go tight, I’d found something.

An area I needed to work on.

Sometimes it was anger I hadn’t admitted to. Sometimes it was fear I’d been outrunning. Sometimes it was grief I’d been avoiding instead of feeling. The shaking voice marks a threshold. It’s the space between old silence and new truth.

Why We Stay Quiet

We don’t speak certain things because we think speaking them makes them more real. More dangerous. Harder to manage.

It works the other way.

Brené Brown says shame gets its power from being unspeakable. When we speak our shame, our fear, our regret, we start to digest it. We start to heal.
The things that made my voice shake were things I’d carried alone too long. Secrets have weight. They make us sick. We build elaborate defenses to protect our silence. We deny what happened. We rationalize why it had to be that way. We blame other people. We rage at the world.

We drink to quiet the voice that wants to speak. We use to numb the body that already knows.

Practice Makes You Stronger

Talking about hard things is practice. Like running. Like prayer. It doesn’t get easier. You get stronger.

The first time I talked about a specific topic, I could barely get words out. The second time, my voice still shook, but the words came faster. The tenth time, I could say it almost plainly. Like giving directions to the grocery store.

You’re not trying to go numb. You’re building capacity to be with hard emotions without being ruled by them.

Each time you speak the unspeakable, you grow your tolerance for truth.

The Release Is Real

The Greeks had a word for it. Catharsis. It means cleansing. They thought it happened when you watched tragic plays. You felt big emotions. Then you were purged of them.

In recovery, we’re not watching. We’re doing. The catharsis comes from speaking.

I’ve seen it hundreds of times. Someone shares something they’ve been holding close. Their voice breaks. Their hands shake. They get through it. They finish.

And you can see it happen. Shoulders drop. Breathing gets deeper. Face softens. They’ve set something down.

Speaking calms your nervous system. It quiets the alarm bells in your brain.

It Keeps Coming Up

Here’s what recovery taught me. Finding what makes your voice shake isn’t one and done. Just when you think you’ve excavated everything, life brings more. New losses. New failures. New things that need the same courage to speak about.

The practice stays the same. Notice the tremor. Lean into it. Speak anyway.
Thirty years sober, and I know this now. The shaking voice isn’t a weakness. It’s courage happening in real time. It’s the sound of someone picking growth over comfort. Truth over lies. Connection over hiding.

What You Get Back

When you finally speak the thing that makes your voice shake, you give yourself something valuable. You become whole again. You bring back the parts you exiled into silence. You get back the energy you were using to keep secrets. You free yourself to actually be present.

And here’s the strange part. When you speak your most personal truth, you often speak something universal. The thing you thought would make people reject you is often exactly what lets them recognize themselves in you.

The shaking voice isn’t the enemy. It’s the guide. It leads you home to yourself one shaky word at a time.

Photo by Jakob Gausvik-Tvedt on Unsplash

I heard the phrase years ago in a recovery meeting.

Stay green on the vine.

At first, it sounded simple. Almost too simple. But the older I get, the more weight those words carry.

Green fruit is still growing.
It still pulls life from the vine.
It still has room to change.

Fruit that thinks it is finished starts to dry out.

You can see it in people. Some folks decide they already know enough. They stop asking questions. They stop listening, and instead tell stories that you’ve heard before. Maybe 10 times, maybe more. The world gets smaller for them each year.

The curious ones move in the other direction. They stay open. They watch. They ask. They change their mind when the facts change.

They stay green.

I used to think getting older meant collecting answers. A shelf full of them. Neat and organized.

Life showed me something else.

Most of the answers I held tight in my thirties turned out to be rough drafts. Some were flat wrong. Others only worked in a narrow slice of life.

Time sanded the edges off my certainty.

Now I pay more attention to the questions.

A young guy once asked me how long you have to stay teachable in recovery.

I told him the truth.

Until the day they close the lid.

The same rule works outside recovery.

The world keeps moving. New ideas show up. Science changes what we thought we knew. People teach you things if you give them room to speak.

A stubborn mind misses all of that.

A green mind absorbs it.

When I was younger, I liked to explain things. I liked the feeling of being right. If someone challenged me, I would defend my view like a lawyer in court.

That habit cost me a lot of learning.

Then one day, I noticed something in meetings. The people with the longest sobriety talked the least. When they did speak, they used simple words.

And they listened.

Really listened.

They had nothing left to prove. They were still gathering pieces of truth wherever they could find them.

From newcomers.
From mistakes.
From quiet moments.

That caught my attention.

These were people with thirty and forty years of experience. Yet they acted like students.

Green on the vine.

Life works the same way.

You learn things from children if you watch them. They ask questions adults stopped asking years ago. They notice details most of us walk past.

You learn from younger people, too. They grow up in a different world. They see patterns you missed.

You learn from your own mistakes. That might be the best teacher of all, if pride does not block the lesson.

But none of that happens if you think you’ve already arrived.

I know a man who reads a new book every week. He is in his seventies. When I asked him why he keeps studying so much, he shrugged.

He said, I have been wrong about too many things to stop learning now.

That line stuck with me.

Staying green does not mean you throw away your experience. Experience matters. It gives you a base to stand on.

But that foundation shouldn’t be concrete, because concrete doesn’t grow.

Vines grow.

A green mind leaves room for correction. It leaves room for surprise. It leaves room for the possibility that someone else sees something you missed.

You do not lose wisdom that way.

You gain more of it.

I try to remind myself of that when I catch my mind locking into old opinions.

Stay green on the vine.

Keep learning.

Keep listening.

Keep letting life teach you things you did not expect to learn.

Personal Growth

Spiritual Growth

Self Improvement

Life Lessons

Photo by Juliane Liebermann on Unsplash

The pick-it-buddy pressure sometimes shows up when it’s busy. You can feel it, that low hum of hurry from the people walking behind you. The culture of speed doesn’t need to say a word.

Still, walking has taught me something I didn’t expect.

There’s a quiet education that only shows up when you stop trying to cover ground. You keep your eyes on the path. You notice what speed buries.

Slowness isn’t laziness. It’s not a lack of purpose or drifting without direction. It’s something more deliberate than that, choosing depth over distance. Presence over progress.

I walk slower than most people. With my dogs, that’s the whole point. They wander, they sniff, they stop to examine things I’d have passed a hundred times without seeing. They’re always out there looking for something. Maybe they know something I don’t.

My wife and my golf buddies all walk faster than I do. I notice the gap sometimes. I can tell it frustrates them now and then, though they’re kind enough not to say much about it.

I’ve wondered about that. Maybe it comes from thoughts still working themselves out. Maybe a quiet hesitation about what’s ahead. Probably both. At some point, I stopped trying to sort it out.

Slowness delivers its gifts in layers.

First comes the outer slowing. Your steps get softer. Your pauses stretch longer. The urgency to arrive somewhere starts to loosen its grip.
Then the inner slowing follows. Your breathing settles. Your thoughts spread out a little. Your attention widens past that narrow tunnel of efficiency most of us live inside.

A lot of people resist slowing down. They feel guilty. They worry about falling behind.

And then sometimes something harder to name shows up. You start to feel connected to rhythms bigger than your personal schedule. Time begins to feel natural again, not chopped into pieces and handed back to you in calendar blocks.

Modern life expects us to be fast. There are fitness rules about how far and fast we should walk. We rush between appointments. We talk fast to fit more into a conversation. We think fast to keep up with the information coming at us. Speed starts to feel normal, then necessary, and, somewhere after that, the only option. Maybe even an addiction.

But speed misses things.

Fast walking catches the large shapes. A medium pace picks up the middle details. Slow pace finds the quiet secrets, a spider web stitched together with dew, two birds trading short calls across a yard, light cutting through leaves at 4:17 in the afternoon.

A lot of people resist slowing down. They feel guilty. They worry about falling behind. Choosing depth over distance can bring a faint, strange sense of shame, like you owe someone an explanation. Those voices belong to a culture that forgot how to accept the pace of life actually offers.

Kids understand this better than we do. They slow down without effort or apology. They stop to watch ants moving in long lines, crouch beside puddles to study the small worlds inside them, shout into tunnels just to hear the echo come back. Nobody’s convinced them yet that speed equals progress.

Some things only arrive through slowness. The answer that surfaces after a long pause. The thought needs time to settle before it makes any sense. Most of my best ideas have come while walking, appearing quietly, usually the moment I stopped trying to hurry them along.

You can’t chase these moments. You can only leave room for them. And that means walking slowly enough to notice what the path is actually offering.

It took me seventy-two years to get where I am today. I ask myself sometimes, would I be any younger now if I’d walked faster my whole life?

Thank you for reading. I write about recovery, the self-examined life, and spiritual practice. Follow me here on Medium for more stories. My children’s books are available on Amazon.

Photo by Gabriel Miquelin on Unsplash

Happy people aren’t happier because better things happen to them. They’re happier because they think differently about what happens.

Same disappointments. Same setbacks. Same difficult people. Different interpretation. Different response. Different outcome.

This isn’t toxic positivity. It’s self-awareness applied to emotional response.

Most people think happiness comes from circumstances. Good job equals happy. Bad relationship equals unhappy. Money equals happy. Problems equal unhappy. They treat happiness like a logical outcome of external conditions.

It’s not. It’s an outcome of internal interpretation.

Two people lose the same job. One spirals into depression and self-doubt. The other feels relieved and starts exploring options they’d been too scared to consider. Same event. Completely different emotional outcome.

The difference isn’t the circumstance. It’s what each person tells themselves about the circumstance.

Self-awareness means noticing the story you’re telling. Not just experiencing the emotion. Examining where it comes from. What interpretation created it. What meaning you gave it.

Most people don’t do this. They feel something and assume the feeling is justified by the facts. They’re angry because the other person was wrong. They’re sad because something bad happened. They’re anxious because the future is uncertain.

All of this feels factual. None of it is. It’s an interpretation masquerading as fact.

The other person might not have been wrong. They might have been different. Had different priorities. Saw things differently. Your anger comes from deciding they’re wrong, not from them actually being wrong.

Something bad didn’t happen. Something happened that you’ve labeled bad. Someone else might label the same event good. Or neutral. Or irrelevant. Your sadness comes from your labeling, not from the event itself.

The future is always uncertain. Always has been. Your anxiety comes from needing certainty, not from the future being uncertain. The uncertainty is constant. Your need for certainty is variable.

Self-awareness reveals these distinctions. And revealing them changes everything.

When you see that your emotions come from your interpretations, you gain access to your emotions. You can question the interpretation. Test whether it’s the only valid reading. Consider alternative perspectives.

This doesn’t mean forcing positivity. It means expanding possibility. Maybe this setback is actually redirecting you toward something better. Maybe this rejection is protecting you from something that wasn’t right. Maybe this difficulty is teaching you something you need to learn.

Maybe. Maybe not. But maybe it is more flexible than the definitive negative interpretation most people automatically apply.

Happy people have learned this flexibility. They don’t assume the worst interpretation is the most accurate. They hold interpretations lightly. They stay curious about alternative meanings.

This makes them more resilient. Not because they’re tougher. Because they’re more flexible in how they construct meaning from events.

Someone cuts them off in traffic. It could mean that the person is an asshole. It could mean they didn’t see you. It could mean they’re rushing to an emergency. It could mean nothing about you at all. Happy people don’t automatically pick the interpretation that makes them a victim or makes the other person a villain.

They pick the interpretation that lets them move on. is usually the interpretation that has nothing to do with them personally.

Most people take everything personally. They interpret neutral events as commentary on their worth. They read minds. They assume malice. They collect evidence that the world is against them.

Then they wonder why they’re not happy.

Self-awareness interrupts this pattern. It creates space between event and interpretation. In that space, you can choose. Choose what this means. Choose what story you tell about it. Choose how this affects you.

You can’t choose what happens. But you can choose what it means. And what you make things mean determines how you feel about them.

Happy people know this. They’ve learned through practice or luck or good teaching that they’re not victims of their circumstances. They’re participants in creating meaning from circumstances.

This is not the same as pretending everything is fine. Some things genuinely are bad. Some interpretations are more accurate than others. Some situations deserve negative emotional responses.

But most situations are neutral until you interpret them. And most people interpret them in ways that cause them the greatest suffering. They catastrophize. They personalize. They generalize from single events to global conclusions about themselves or the world.

Self-awareness lets you catch yourself doing this. Lets you question whether this interpretation serves you. Lets you test alternative interpretations that might be equally valid and less painful.

This is the work of happiness. Not changing your circumstances, but changing your relationship to your circumstances. Not through denial. Through awareness. Through flexibility and questioning automatic interpretations.

It’s simple. It’s hard. It’s available to anyone willing to pay attention to the space between what happens and what they make it mean.

That’s where happiness lives. Not in perfect circumstances. In a flexible interpretation of imperfect circumstances. In the awareness that you’re always choosing what things mean, whether you realize it or not.

Might as well choose consciously. Might as well choose in ways that serve you. Might as well be happy about things that don’t require everything to go perfectly.

Because nothing ever goes perfectly. And waiting for perfect circumstances to be happy guarantees you’ll never be happy.

Happy people figured this out. Self-awareness is how to be happy.

Author and wife, helicopter ride to Sagarmatha National Park in Nepal (Mt. Everest).

My wife’s love was tested by chaos.

By bottles hidden in the garage. By promises broken before the words were even cold. By the man she married disappearing into someone she didn’t recognize, while she held everything together with both hands.

She stayed anyway.

I don’t romanticize this. There’s nothing romantic about alcoholism. Nothing beautiful about watching someone you married destroy themselves while you keep the lights on and the children fed. Nothing noble about being the anchor when the boat is trying to sink.

But she did it. For seventeen years before I got sober. She did it.

The bills got paid. I don’t know how. I wasn’t paying them. Wasn’t thinking about them. Was too busy feeding the demon that lived in every bottle. She managed the money I spent on drinking.

Managed the mortgage, the utilities, and the groceries, and somehow kept us from going under.

She was mother and father to both our sons when I was there, but not when I wasn’t. When I was physically present but absent in every way that mattered. She went to the soccer games. Helped with homework. Tucked them in. Told them their father cared, even when I wasn’t showing it.

This is what commitment looks like when it’s load-bearing. When it’s holding up a structure that should collapse but doesn’t because one person refuses to let go.

I think about what she carried, and I can barely breathe. The fear. The anger. The exhaustion of never knowing which version of me would walk through the door. The loneliness of sleeping next to someone who was already gone.

“The greatest thing you’ll ever learn is just to love and be loved in return.” — Eden Ahbez

The quote sounds simple. It’s not. Being valued when you’re worth valuing is easy. Being chosen when you’re a drunk who’s breaking everything he touches — that’s something else entirely.

She didn’t stay because I deserved it. I didn’t. She stayed because she’d made a choice and she was stubborn enough to stick with it. Even when every reasonable person would have left. Even when I gave her a hundred reasons to go.

I got sober thirty years ago. Forty-two years old and finally ready to face what I’d been running from. She was there for that, too. Through the shaking and the sweating and the demons that come out when you stop drowning them in whiskey.

She sat with me through the night terrors. Listened to me talk about things I’d never said out loud. Didn’t flinch when the truth was ugly. Didn’t leave when it got hard.

And it got hard. Getting sober doesn’t fix everything. Doesn’t erase the damage. Doesn’t give you back the years you lost. You have to live with what you did. She had to live with it, too.

But she stayed. Through early sobriety, when I was raw and mean and learning how to feel things I’d been numbing for decades. Through the amends that brought up old wounds. Through my becoming a different person than the one she married.

She stayed through all of it.

People ask if I’m grateful. That’s too small a word. Gratitude doesn’t cover it. What do you call the feeling when you know someone saved your life not once but a thousand times? When they were the only reason you had something to come back to?

What I feel for her now is bigger than it was at forty-seven when we stood at an altar and made promises I didn’t know how to keep. Bigger than in those early years when everything was easy, and we thought we were invincible.

It’s bigger because I know what she’s made of. I’ve seen her strength. Not the kind that comes from lifting weights or running marathons. The kind that comes from standing in the fire and refusing to move. From being the last person holding the line when everyone else has retreated.

She could have left a hundred times. Should have left, probably. Any therapist would have told her to. Any friend who had watched what she went through would have said, “Enough.”

But she didn’t.

Thirty years sober now. Thirty years of showing up. Of being present. Of trying to be the man she never stopped believing I could be. Of building something with her that can’t be broken because we’ve already survived the worst.

I watch her now, and I see all of it. The young woman who married an ex-Marine. The mother who raised two boys mostly alone. The wife who paid the bills and held the family together while I was drowning. The woman who sat with me in the dark and didn’t let go.

But I’m here now. Present. Sober. Showing up every day to give back what she gave when I couldn’t give anything. It’s not enough. It will never be enough to balance what she carried.

But it’s what I have. This feeling is deeper, stronger, and more real because it’s been tested in ways most marriages never have to survive.

This isn’t the stuff of greeting cards and Valentine’s Day. Not even close.

This is what my wife gave me. Still gives me. Every day for forty-seven years. Through chaos and calm. Through drinking and sobriety. Through the worst of me and now, finally, something closer to the best.

How do you tell someone they’re the reason you’re alive?

You can’t. Not really. You just keep showing up. Keep being present. Keep choosing her the way she chose you when you didn’t deserve to be chosen.

That’s what I do now. I show up for her. I help pay the bills, take care of the house, and try to give her some of the stability she gave me for all those years.

It’s not repayment. You can’t repay something like that. It’s just what you do. The deepest commitment I know. The kind that’s been forged in fire and came out stronger on the other side.

She didn’t just stay through the chaos. She was the reason I survived it. The anchor that kept me from drifting away completely. The light that was still on when I finally found my way home.

Not in spite of what we’ve been through. Because of it. Because I know exactly what she’s capable of. What she’s willing to give. What she chose when she could have chosen anything else.

And I will spend the rest of my life grateful for that choice. Honoring that choice. Trying to be worthy of that choice.

That’s what it is. At least, that’s what it is for me.

It’s her. It’s always been her. Through chaos and peace. Through darkness and light. Through everything.

Thank you for reading. I write about recovery, New Thought, and the messy beauty of starting over. Follow me here on Medium for more stories. My children’s books are available on Amazon.

My final year of abuse was pure deception.

I’d mastered it. The lies. The hidden bottles. The elaborate stories I fed my wife to keep her hoping I’d quit. But she was suspicious. The bottles were harder to hide. I needed a new plan.

Enter codeine cough syrup. Ugh.

Perfect. Technically legal. I could tell my wife I’d quit drinking. And I had. No more vodka in the garage. No more beer cans stuffed in gas station trash. Just medicine. Respectable. Who questions cough syrup?

The twisted logic of addiction told me this was genius.

Codeine delivered what I needed. The numbing. The relief. Same as alcohol, different bottle. I convinced myself this was progress. It wasn’t. I’d just traded poisons. Same disease. Different flavor.

The Hunt Begins

The law required you to sign for the bottle; no more than 4 oz every 48 hours. But what happens when one bottle becomes two? Two became three.

You need to keep moving. The pharmacists started recognizing me. Questions were pointed. Willingness to sell evaporated. I’d burned through my local spots.

But I had a job that gave me freedom. Driving around. Supposedly looking for clients. Really? I was hunting.

I learned to read the landscape differently.

Water towers became my compass. Those massive structures rising above the treeline. Each one meant a town big enough for an independent pharmacy. A place where my face wasn’t known yet. Where could I buy another bottle without the confrontation? Without the looks.

Each water tower was a possibility. Promise. Temporary escape from withdrawal.

I’d take the exit. Drive into these small towns. Hit their pharmacies systematically. When one pharmacist knew me too well, I’d find another water tower. Another town. Another chance.

The ritual consumed me.

I thought I was clever. Sustainable. I wasn’t drinking, after all. Progress, right?

Wrong. Just another cage. Different chains. Same bondage.

The Weight of Deception

Those dark codeine months helped make me a master deceiver.

My wife asked about my days. I crafted elaborate stories. Each lie was a weight. Each evasion is another brick in the wall between us.

I told myself I was protecting her. She didn’t need to know about the water tower hunts. The bottles tossed along the road.

Bullshit. I wasn’t protecting her. I was protecting my addiction.

I became more isolated, the few friends I had grew distant. Relationships required honesty I couldn’t afford. Family gatherings became performances. I played someone getting better while planning my next pharmacy run.

The boundaries blurred. True self. Pretend self. I stopped knowing which was which.

Getting the Nickname

I got clean. Got sober. Started spilling my guts at AA meetings.

At one early meeting, I told the water tower story. The room got it immediately. That particular cocktail of ingenuity and desperation. The details were mine. The compulsion was universal.

Someone dubbed me “Water Tower Tom.”

It stuck.

I wore it like a badge. Shame and hope mixed together. It marked who I’d been. How far I’d fallen. But also the beginning. My honest reckoning with myself.

The men and women at those tables spoke the language. They had their own symbols. Their own rituals. Their own water towers. We talked in metaphors because the literal truth hurt too much.

Water Tower Tom became my story. My cautionary tale. My connection point.

A New Kind of Search

Here’s the irony: I still scan horizons while driving.

But now I look for church steeples.

Water towers once drew me toward my next fix. Church steeples now guide me toward my higher power. The parallel isn’t lost on me. Still searching. Still looking outside myself. But the search has transformed.

A church steeple means hope. Different kind.

It marks community. Spiritual possibility. Connection to something greater than addiction. When I spot one, sometimes I pull over. Sit in the parking lot. Denomination doesn’t matter. Intention does. Willingness to seek help from a power greater than myself.

The program talked about spiritual transformation. Just words at first. But when I started replacing water tower hunts with church steeple visits, something shifted. Same driving compulsion. Different direction. Toward healing instead of destruction.

The Same Sad Story

Clarity began to appear in someone else’s story. I’d recognize my demons. Different details. Same arc. The lying. The isolation. The elaborate systems we built to sustain our addictions. The moment when the weight became unbearable.

The water towers that once attracted me began to fill me with dread, reminders of the person I’d become. The poor choices I’d made. The distance I’d traveled from any recognizable version of myself. The thrill was gone. Replaced by grim recognition. I was trapped in a cycle that would destroy me.

No longer symbols of hope, the water towers became markers along the roads of decline. Monuments to desperation.

The Hard Work of Recovery

Facing truth meant dismantling every defense.

I had to admit to my wife what I’d been doing. Accept the hurt in her eyes. Sit with the shame of having betrayed her trust completely. Tell the full story at meetings. Not the sanitized version. The ugly, desperate truth.

Recovery demanded vulnerability. Vulnerability terrified me.

For so long, survival meant hiding. Deceiving. Maintaining control through secrecy. Now I had to ask for help. Admit powerlessness. Trust others with my truth. Skills I had to relearn from scratch.

But with each honest conversation, something shifted.

Each admission of struggle. Each moment of asking for help instead of reaching for a substance. The weight lifted. Incrementally. Isolation gave way to connection. Shame transformed into something else. Not pride exactly. But quiet acknowledgment. I was doing the work. Taking the steps. Choosing recovery. Day by day.

The Road Ahead

Today, I travel highways and notice both.

Water towers. Church steeples.

The water towers are still there. Rising above trees. Marking towns I once hunted through desperately. But they don’t call to me anymore. Just structures now. Neutral landmarks. The landscape no longer threatens to consume me.

The church steeples are different.

They represent ongoing work. Daily practice of seeking connection beyond my broken willpower. They remind me I don’t face this alone. Help is available. Surrender isn’t weakness. It’s wisdom.

The nickname “Water Tower Tom” has become something I embrace.

It tells people in recovery, I understand the depths. I know what it means to construct elaborate systems to feed a compulsion. I’ve been where they’ve been. It creates a connection. Opens conversations. Reminds me never to forget who I was.

Recovery isn’t about erasing the past. It’s about integrating it. Learning from it. Using it to build something better.

Chasing water towers taught me about addiction. How resourceful and destructive we become in the service of our compulsions. Church steeples teach me about recovery. How that same intense focus can redirect toward healing.

I’m grateful for the journey. Even the darkest parts.

You can only appreciate how far you’ve climbed when you know how far you fell. Without experiencing the depths of deception and isolation, I couldn’t value the honesty and connection that sustain me now.

The road ahead has challenges. Recovery is a daily practice. Not a destination.

But I travel with tools I didn’t have before. Honesty. Community. Willingness to seek help rather than rely solely on myself.

The water towers are behind me. The church steeples point forward.

And Water Tower Tom? He’s still here. Not so many miles on the odometer.

But now he’s headed toward hope instead of desperation. Toward connection instead of isolation. Toward life instead of the slow death of addiction.

I’m walking the dogs across a nearly deserted golf course. The fairways are empty, the greens damp and unplayed. Summer has drained out of the place, leaving it suspended somewhere between seasons. The wind moves low through the trees, and the dog’s nose is at the edges of puddles that reflect a gray sky. It’s quiet, except for the occasional birdcall and the rhythmic click of their paws on wet cart paths.

There’s a stillness here that isn’t sterile. It’s the kind of quiet that listens back.

What the Music Knows

A minor key lives in this kind of day. Not sad, exactly. Just weighted. Reflective. The way a cello reaches down inside you and doesn’t ask for a reply.

I used to think minor keys were just melancholy. Now I understand they’re more complex. They hold space for the emotions that don’t fit on greeting cards or in casual conversation. They shape things we only half know — nostalgia, longing, those aching moments when joy and loss arrive in the same breath.

Walking on these empty grounds, I hear that music. Not literally, but in how the wind passes through bare branches, in the soft give of the earth beneath my feet, in how my thoughts wander back to things I hadn’t planned to remember.

A Life in Layers

Some parts of my life feel like they were lived entirely in a minor key. Not the tragedies — we remember those differently. I mean the slow passages. The months that stretched without high drama, just the steady hum of uncertainty, the muted palette of waiting.

The time before a friend moved away. The weeks after a job ended, but before something new began. In the mornings, when the light came late and the coffee didn’t taste quite right, I drank it anyway. Nothing dramatic. But every detail felt etched, permanent, and important.

This golf course in late fall fits that memory perfectly — bare trees, yellowed grass, a flag snapping in the distance with no one to watch it.

Listening Beyond the Noise

Minor keys teach you to hear what’s beneath the obvious. They don’t hand you answers. They make you sit with the question.

As I walk, I think about the music that’s marked me over the years. Dylan, Springsteen, and Harry Chapin in his final albums, voices that have seen things. They know something about endurance. That speaks to parts of you only solitude can uncover.

And I think about how certain experiences tune you the same way. Not louder, but deeper. You begin to notice more. The breath between words. The weight of silence in a conversation. The tenderness in someone’s voice when they don’t know what to say but stay anyway.

The Gift of Unfinished Things

There’s something holy about moments that don’t resolve. We tend to rush past them, seeking conclusion. But the minor key reminds us that some feelings should be left unfinished.

Out here on the course, the dogs wander ahead, pausing only to look back when I slow. I let them lead. There’s no hurry. The path turns along a row of willows, and the smell of damp leaves hangs in the air like old paper.

I don’t know why this moment matters. But I know enough to mark it. To remember that not everything meaningful announces itself. Some things ask only that you be there fully.

The Balance of Light and Shadow

Life doesn’t stay in one emotional register. It modulates. The cheerful days come, and so do the overcast ones. Some hours sing with brass and bright chords. Others hum along in half-light.

The trick, I’ve found, isn’t to avoid the minor key. It’s to recognize its beauty when you’re inside it. To understand that sorrow isn’t the opposite of joy — it’s often what makes joy so clear.

Out here, with barren trees, no game in play, and no one to cheer, the course still holds meaning. It was built for play, yes — but in stillness, it teaches something else: patience, presence, humility.

Coda

We head back slowly, the three of us. I watch the dogs chase smells I can’t detect, tails high, feet wet. The clouds haven’t lifted, and they may not. That’s fine. This morning lives in a minor key, and I’m not rushing to change the tune. I’m just walking it out, one quiet note at a time.

In my recovery journey, I thought booze was my biggest issue.

It ran a close second to resentment.

Resentment weighed more than any suitcase I’ve ever carried. No handles. No wheels. Just dead weight I carried for years. I collected these grievances like some people collect stamps — carefully, deliberately, with pride in my growing collection. I didn’t know in the early days that resentment and serenity can’t share the same space. One always squeezes out the other. In getting sober, I learned this the hard way.

The Power of Resentments

Resentment actually means to “feel again.” That’s the problem right there. You feel the same anger over and over, tempering it each time. What starts as a natural reaction to being wronged, or thinking I was wronged, grows into some sort of hard tumor. And it’s not benign.

My list ran long. Parents who had little time for me. Coworkers filled with defects. Spouses who didn’t understand. The man in the mirror, for all my failures. Each entry grew more elaborate with every mental revisit until the catalog of grievances became part of who I was.

These resentments fed my drinking as reliably as the corner liquor store. They gave me reasons to pour another. Then the drinking created new resentments. A perfect, closed loop of hurt, anger, and depression.

The Poison

Like me, you may not notice at first the cost of carrying resentments. In fact, you may not even consider those thoughts as resentents. But they accumulate silently, like rust on an old truck.

Relationships withered. My view narrowed. Worst of all, I got stuck in the past, unable to live in the present moment.

Someone once told me, “Holding resentment is like drinking poison and waiting for the other person to die.” While I clutched my grievances, the people I resented went about their lives, completely untouched by my anger.

Ownership

Release didn’t arrive in one big moment. It came through the hard work of honest self-examination. Through a thorough inventory. I had to identify each resentment, name what lay beneath it, and — hardest of all — see my own part in it.

Writing down my resentments forced me to look at grudges I’d carried so long they’d become part of me. For each one, I answered tough questions: What exactly did I think they did to me? What part of me got hurt — my pride, my security, my relationships? And the kicker: What was my role in what happened?

This last question changed everything. In almost every situation, I found my fingerprints somewhere — expectations I never voiced, boundaries I never set, projections I cast onto others. This exercise didn’t erase legitimate hurts, but it moved me from victim to participant. With that shift came the power to change.

Letting Go

Forgiveness turned out to be different than I thought. It wasn’t about saying the harmful actions were okay. It was about freeing myself from being emotionally chained to those events.

I acknowledged the hurt without minimizing it. Then I recognized the humanity in those who caused harm — most people act from their own pain and limitations, not malice. Finally, I made the choice to release the emotional charge tied to these memories.

The hardest part was accepting life on its terms. Many of my resentments came from wishing things were different than they were. Acceptance didn’t mean approval — it meant acknowledging reality without adding the extra suffering of resistance.

The serenity prayer became my compass: accept what I can’t change, change what I can, know the difference. Most of my resentments targeted issues outside my control — other people’s behavior, the past, human nature itself. Learning the boundaries of my influence was key to letting go.

The most unexpected gift was finding empathy for those I’d resented. When I stopped seeing others only through the lens of how they’d affected me, I could see their humanity more clearly — their struggles and pain. This didn’t excuse harmful actions but put them in context.

A Daily Practice

Living resentment-free isn’t a one-and-done achievement. It’s daily practice. New resentments still along like a bad cold — I’m human — but I now have the tools to discard them before they take root.

When I notice resentment rising, I ask myself: What fear lives under this anger? What expectations do I have about this situation and what part do I own? With diligence, these issues fade before they have a chance to ruin my day, week, month, etc.

The Other Side

Giving up resentment has been the most freeing part of getting sober. Each released grievance created space for something better: presence, connection, peace. The energy once spent maintaining and justifying resentments is now available for growth.

The freedom isn’t freedom from difficulty — life still throws punches. It’s freedom from the additional and unneccesary suffering that resentment created by resentment, the secondary pain we add through rumination.

In recovery, we talk about “living life on life’s terms.” Releasing resentment is how we practice this acceptance. When we stop demanding that life be different than it is, we discover that what remains is enough. In this acceptance lies a peace that no resentment, no matter how justified it seems, can provide.

Boy, you’re gonna carry that weight
Carry that weight a long time
Boy, you’re gonna carry that weight
Carry that weight a long time

Carry That Weight by the Beatles

We gather in church basements and community centers. Styrofoam cups of coffee in hand. The meetings begin and end on time. There’s a chairperson, a volunteer, but no boss. Everyone knows the rhythm.

We are recovering alcoholics. I’m not here to promote AA, but simply tell my story.

Some of us have two weeks, some 30 years or more. If there is a person in the room for their first meeting, we tell them our stories. We offer help.

It’s been said that recovered alcoholics possess unique gifts. As psychiatrist M. Scott Peck suggested, we are specially equipped to help others. Peck referred to alcoholism as “the sacred disease” and said that “alcoholics and AA have a great blessing and a great genius.”

The gift begins with amnesia of a particular kind. Not the forgetting of pain — we remember that with perfect clarity — but the surrender of the ego that once demanded to be medicine, anesthetic, and god rolled into one. We have forgotten the con; we no longer lie to ourselves.

We know the geography of despair — the exact contours of rock bottom. Like old mariners who survived the maelstrom, we can draw maps of dangerous waters. Our knowledge cannot be taught in universities.

We go around the room. When it’s her turn, Jane speaks. “Before recovery, I thought my situation made me different. Now I know it makes me the same.” This is the paradoxical wisdom of the recovered: our most personal wound becomes our most universal connection.

There is a vast desert that stretches between addiction and recovery. Those who have crossed it walk differently afterward. Their eyes hold a particular light — not certainty but humility. This humility creates a space where others can breathe without judgment.

According to Peck, “So the great blessing of alcoholism is the nature of the disease. It puts people into a visible crisis, and as a result into a community — an AA group.” This community becomes the key to recovery and to helping others recover.

M. Scott Peck observed that recovered alcoholics often possessed an unusually developed capacity for empathy. This isn’t sentimentality. This is recognition of suffering because it has worn the same clothes. When a person in pain speaks to someone who has known similar darkness, words become unnecessary.

The rooms where alcoholics gather in recovery are laboratories of transformation. Here, the currency is honesty. Degrees and titles mean nothing. What matters is facing oneself with unflinching clarity. This clarity becomes a gift they offer to others still trapped in fog.

Frank, thirty years sober: “We don’t save people. We stand where we are, hold the light steady, and let them find their own way.”

Recovery requires surrender and strength. The alcoholic must admit complete defeat before discovering courage. This paradox infuses their interactions with wisdom. We understand that healing often begins at the precise moment when all hope seems lost.

In the language of spiritual traditions, these individuals might be called wounded healers. In psychological terms, they have integrated their shadow. In plain speech, they have learned to tell themselves the truth and live with the consequences.

A study of effective therapists found that a personal history of suffering correlated strongly with therapeutic effectiveness. The researchers seemed surprised. Recovered alcoholics could have saved them the trouble. Experience isn’t just the best teacher; sometimes it’s the only one that matters.

Peck wrote, “Life is difficult. This is a great truth, one of the greatest truths. It is a great truth because once we truly see this truth, we transcend it.” Recovered alcoholics understand this transcendence not as theory but as lived reality.

The philosopher William James noted that some must be “twice-born” to find authentic spiritual life. The alcoholic in recovery embodies this journey. Having died to one way of being, they are reborn into another. This gives them a perspective unavailable to those who have lived only one life.

Recovery groups understand something that much of society has forgotten: transformation happens in community. The isolated individual, heroically battling demons alone, is a dangerous myth. Healing happens between people. Recovered alcoholics know this as a lived reality.

Some of us use the word ‘recovering’ to remind ourselves that the process of recovery is ongoing. This ongoing nature makes them more effective helpers in the eyes of the newcomer.

Consider what we have surrendered: the illusion of control, the comfort of numbing, the familiar patterns of self-destruction. In exchange, we now have presence and purpose. My fellow AAs have learned to stand still in the storm. This presence becomes medicine for others still caught in whirlwinds.

This is why I may lose patience when a meeting conversation drifts aware from the core message into topics of terrible bosses or an unfair spouse. This is not the place for a stitch and bitch.

“C’mon people,” I say. “The odds are that someone in this room is close to their next drink. Let’s talk about the miracle, not about why you didn’t get your raise.”

Peck suggested that recovered alcoholics develop an authentic spiritual life grounded not in dogma but in necessity. Their spirituality isn’t decorative or optional. It’s as essential as oxygen. This gives their counsel a quality of earned authority that no credential can confer.

We don’t claim to be chosen or special. Our gift isn’t superiority but solidarity. We stand with, not above. We walk beside, not ahead. Our leadership emerges not from authority but from authenticity. In my journey, I have failed spectacularly and survived to tell the tale without embellishment.

This is why, when someone drowning in addiction reaches out, it is often the hand of a recovered alcoholic they grasp first. Not because that hand is stronger or more virtuous but because it bears the same calluses. It knows the exact pressure needed. It has held on when holding seemed futile. It has let go when letting go was necessary.

In the church basements and community centers, recovered alcoholics continue gathering every day or every week. Monday @ 9:00 am; Tuesday @ 6 pm. Etc. In any community of any considerable size, you are never far from a free AA meeting. You have no excuse.

There are no guarantees. And sometimes, often enough to sustain hope, that presence becomes the difference between despair and deliverance.

This is our gift. This is the purpose of those that are serious about our recovery. This is our redemption. The very thing that nearly destroyed us becomes the thing through which we help rebuild others.

There is no greater alchemy than this transformation of poison into medicine.

And so we continue, these ordinary people with extraordinary insights, these wounded healers, these recovered alcoholics. We stand as a living testimony to the human capacity for regeneration. We embody the truth that our deepest falls can lead to our greatest contributions. Ironically, those who have lost everything are often the ones who have the most to give.

I strongly recommend Scott’s audiobook; a recording of his lecture entitled Addiction: The Sacred Disease. It’s hard to find, but this link will guide you.

Thanks for reading. Engage if you wish.

On January 1, 1972, Michigan rolled out its grand experiment of a lower drinking age. My problems of securing booze through older friends vanished overnight. Young men could vote. Young men could die in Vietnam. Now young men could drink.

The Twenty-Sixth Amendment set it in motion. “The right of citizens of the United States, who are eighteen years of age or older, to vote shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any State on account of age.” Well, now. Eighteen-year-olds could vote.

Wait, there’s more.

If eighteen-year-olds could vote, what else should they be allowed to do? What other adult privileges should they have? Michigan stepped up to the task: They could drink. Public Act №79 lowered the age to 18.

Michigan was not alone. Between 1970 and 1973, thirty-five states lowered their drinking age to 18 or 19. The reasoning was likely driven by the escalating need to feed the military machine: more young men could be drafted to fight in Vietnam. As a token, young men could vote for the politicians who sent them there.

Let’s let young men have a beer, too.

As luck would have it, a twelve-pack of Stroh’s cost $2.10 at the Jewel down the street from my apartment. Cheap. Legal. Abundant.

And almost within my college living expenses, depending on volume, which was beginning to rise.

I began drinking at noon. On my small black and white TV, Bill Kennedy, Channel 5, hosted old movies. My roommate would light up a joint. Perfect.

No need to go out into the world except to Jewel for more beer and mac & cheese.

Back to college: I had pulled a 4.0 during the first semester, which was unheard of for me. It gave me a little indication of what I could do. Raised my self-esteem.

Then along came this lower drinking age thing, and I dropped out of school immediately, missing the first two months of the second semester. I took a job delivering pizzas to support my habit. A productive member of society.

All went well until I was called to deliver the “Sportsman”. This was a gigantic pizza designed for a party; so big it wouldn’t fit in the portable oven in my car. Drunk, I tossed the box on my front seat, only to watch the Sportsman slide out and land upside down on my gravel-covered floor mat.

Ah, nobody will notice, right?

I can still remember the look on the faces of all the teenage girls who stood behind their dad when I delivered it. So happy that I had finally arrived. A big tip and all.

I knew as soon as they opened it they would find that ‘everything’ included four different types of meat, green peppers, onions, mushrooms, and a generous portion of Michigan gravel.

It wasn’t the worst firing I had ever received, but it was a close second.

So, hat in hand, I returned to my college professors and explained the error of my ways. I had been drinking steadily for the past two months, abandoning my studies. But I was wrong. I needed their help. Would they please give me another chance?

To my surprise, each one said ‘yes’, if I would make up the past two months’ studies. I could pick up the study material at the next class. Overjoyed by their favorable reply, I went back to my apartment.

Let’s celebrate, I thought.

Toss down a few cold ones.

I never went back to class.

Michigan’s experiment continued until December 1978. Voters raised the age back to 21. Studies later showed crashes among young drivers dropped by thirty-one percent in the twelve months that followed.

The state learned its lesson.

Not me; I needed more learning.

You’re probably too young to have heard of Father Joseph Martin. He was a prominent figure in the world of alcoholism, having written three books on the topic and traveling extensively with the message. After getting sober in 1958, Father Martin remained sober until his death on March 9, 2009, at age 84, giving him approximately 51 years of sobriety. During this time, he became renowned for his “Chalk Talks” on alcoholism recovery. He co-founded Father Martin’s Ashley, a treatment center in Maryland that has helped thousands of people struggling with addiction.

Father Martin understood drunks. After all, he was one. According to a Baltimore Sun article, Father Martin discovered his taste for alcohol during a Thanksgiving dinner with fellow priests. As he mentioned in his biography: “There are people who have to acquire a taste for gin, but I didn’t — I loved it immediately. I had two or three doubles that day.” His drinking escalated over time. Baltimore Sun

He caught the attention of the military, who hired Martin to give talks at bases around the world. He used a blackboard in his discussions, which became the basis of his Chalk Talks video, which is still on YouTube. (I’ll warn you that it is AA-related.)

I saw him speak at Fountain Street Church, Grand Rapids, Michigan, in my early days. His view that everyone was three people, depending on who you asked, resonated with me.

The Three Selves Explained

According to Father Martin, these three viewpoints are: “I am who I think I am,” which he suggests is often “far off target” from reality. The second self is how others perceive us, and the third is who we truly are. This tripartite division of identity has profound implications for recovery and personal growth.

The first self — who we think we are — often involves self-deception. As alcoholics, we might believe we have our drinking under control or that we’re merely social drinkers. This self-perception can be dangerously disconnected from reality, as Father Martin illustrated through his candid discussions of addiction.

The second self — who others think we are — reflects how our behavior affects those around us. For alcoholics, this often involves the painful recognition of how their actions have harmed loved ones.

As Father Martin noted about making amends, “I am utterly convinced that meditation about pain is most valuable when we meditate not so much on the pain that we suffered as on the pain that we caused.”

The third self — who we truly are — represents our authentic identity beyond self-deception. For Father Martin, acknowledging this true self is essential to recovery and involves rigorous honesty, especially in AA’s Step 5 (admitting to God, ourselves, and another human being the exact nature of our wrongs).

The Dance of Three Selves

These selves don’t exist in isolation. They dance together, sometimes in harmony, often in conflict. The distance between them creates tension that demands resolution.

People drink to escape, to kill pain, to chase false joy. The bottle blurs the lines between these three selves. Sober, the mind controls feelings. Drunk, emotion swamps reason. The gap between who you think you are and who you truly are widens with each glass.

Martin described alcohol as “cunning, baffling, and powerful.” The same could be said of how we deceive ourselves. The stories we tell about who we are become more elaborate as evidence mounts against them. The drunk doesn’t see the expression on his wife’s face when he reaches for another drink. He doesn’t register the boss’s concern about late arrivals and missed deadlines. His first self has built a fortress that admits no contradictory evidence.

But the body knows. The third self keeps score. Shaking hands in the morning. The racing heart at night. The mysterious bruises from falls are not remembered. The third self bears witness while the first self spins stories.

The Road to Reconciliation

Recovery means aligning these three selves. Father Martin was a proponent of the AA; he believed the 12 Steps provided the map. Admitting powerlessness. Finding faith. Taking inventory and making amends. Each step narrows the distance between the selves.

The inventory of character defects and the following confession force a confrontation between the first and third selves. No more hiding. No more pretending. Father Martin asked, “Who would want any 24 hours of their life — every thought, every desire, every word, every feeling — shown on a screen to the world?” Nobody raises a hand. But recovery demands this level of honesty.

Making amends bridges the gap between the second and third selves. It acknowledges the truth others saw while we were blind. It validates their reality. It begins to heal the divide between how others see us and who we truly are.

An active recovery maintains this alignment. Daily inventory keeps the first self-honest. Prayer and meditation connect us to something larger than our self-deception. Helping others escape the same trap gives purpose to our pain.

Beyond the Bottle

This isn’t just about drunks. Everyone struggles with these three selves — the executive in his tower. The mother is at her kitchen table. The student is facing blank pages. We all live between who we think we are, how others see us, and our true selves.

Modern life widens these gaps. Social media lets us curate the second self — how others see us — while disconnecting it completely from our first and third selves. We present carefully filtered images while hiding our struggles. We compare our complicated inside to everyone else’s polished outside.

Father Martin would recognize this as another form of alcoholic thinking: the belief that appearance equals reality. That control equals peace. That hiding equals healing.

The journey to align these three views isn’t just about staying sober. It’s about becoming whole. It’s about facing the raw truth without flinching. Father Martin showed thousands this path. His chalk talks and quiet wisdom offered more than sobriety — they provided freedom.

Father Martin’s Legacy

Joseph Martin died in 2009. He was 84. His body may have returned to the earth, but his ideas continue. At treatment centers across America, counselors still use his language. They still show his videos. They still draw the same chalk lines connecting cause to effect, delusion to reality, and isolation to community.

Martin never sought fame. He spoke to drunks because he was one. He understood that alcoholism wasn’t a moral failing but a disease. This wasn’t just clinical language for him — it was liberation. If alcoholism was a disease, it could be treated. If it could be treated, there was hope. If there was hope, the three selves could one day live in peace.

His approach combined unflinching honesty with unexpected humor. He could make a room of broken people laugh at the absurdity of their disease. Not to mock their pain, but to show that their darkness wasn’t complete. That light existed. That return was possible.

When Martin talked about the three selves, he wasn’t offering abstract philosophy. He was giving practical tools for survival. By recognizing the distance between these selves, recovering alcoholics could map their journey home. By acknowledging all three perspectives, they could find their way back to integrity — the state of being whole and undivided.

Recovery isn’t about not drinking. It’s about the reconciliation of the three selves. It means looking at the lies we tell ourselves. It means seeing the pain we’ve caused. It means standing naked before the truth and not running away. This is hard work. This is the good work. This is the work that saves.

Martin knew that every human life holds this potential for reunion. The alcoholic who finds sobriety. The angry man who finds peace. The fearful woman who finds courage. The lost child who finds a home. We all walk the path between our three selves. We all seek the place where they meet.

In the simple wisdom of a priest who knew darkness firsthand, we find a light that still burns. His chalk marks may fade from blackboards, but his understanding of the human condition remains as clear as the day he first drew those lines connecting our scattered selves to their source. As Father Martin knew, the truth is simple but never easy: we must know all three selves to become one.

Thanks for reading. You can purchase Chalk Talk here. This is an affiliate link.

One of the risks of writing about recovery is that I am always thinking about my recovery, which is a form of rumination about drinking. As someone once explained, if you’re thinking about not drinking, you’re thinking about drinking.

No? You don’t think so?

Try this: DON’T think about pink elephants. See, what did you think about? Pink elephants.

Consider The White Bear Trap

The mind operates on attention, not absence. Scientists proved this in a now-famous albeit obscure experiment by Daniel Wegner at Harvard. He told subjects not to think of a white bear. They couldn’t do it. On average, they thought of the bear once a minute. He called this “ironic process theory”: the act of suppression itself strengthens the thing suppressed (Wegner, 1987).

So it is with alcohol. The drinker who is trying to stop and who repeats, “I must not think of drinking,” has already lost. Suppression feeds obsession. Every attempt to shove the thought away gives it weight. Resistance becomes reinforcement. You think you’re building a wall. You’re just carving a tunnel.

The Bankruptcy of Willpower

Willpower fails here. Not because the drinker is weak but because the method is wrong. Mental energy is finite — like a battery slowly discharging with use. Psychologist Roy Baumeister coined the term “ego depletion” to describe this phenomenon. He found that self-control draws from a limited pool of mental resources. Spend it on resisting temptation, and you’ll have nothing left when it matters most.

This is why a white-knuckled approach to sobriety collapses. Hour after hour, the struggle to suppress drinking thoughts drains capacity. Eventually, exhaustion sets in. The obsession returns — not as a whisper, but as a roar.

The Wisdom in Service

One solution lies not in resistance but in redirection. Not a trivial distraction — but meaningful engagement.

AA’s founders understood this long before the psychologists did. “Practical experience shows that nothing will so much ensure immunity from drinking as intensive work with other alcoholics,” the Big Book says. What they discovered — through trial, error, and near ruin — is what neuroscience now confirms: helping another alcoholic redirects attention outward. You are distracted by the other person’s issues.

The obsession, starved of focus, weakens. You can’t fully attend to another’s needs and simultaneously entertain your own destructive fantasies. In service, the storm passes not because you fight it but because you step out of its path.

Rewiring the Alcoholic Brain

Neural pathways are built through repetition. Every drink traveled the same mental road until it became a rut — easy, automatic, destructive. But new roads can be built. Hebb’s Law says, “Neurons that fire together, wire together.” Every act of service is a new signal. A different connection. A fresh trail through the mental forest.

Over time, this repetition becomes a kind of neurological reprogramming. Dr. Nora Volkow of the National Institute on Drug Abuse notes that addiction hijacks the brain’s reward system — but it’s not permanent. New habits, new relationships, new sources of meaning can physically reshape the brain’s structure and function.

The Strategic Brilliance of the 12th Step

That’s the brilliance of the 12th Step: “Having had a spiritual awakening… we tried to carry this message.” It’s not just about doing good. It’s not a religious obligation. It’s strategy. And what matters is the rewiring.

Evangelism is incidental. The recovering alcoholic who sponsors someone else has no room left for self-obsession. The brain is busy building a new reality. The birds of temptation may still fly overhead, but they find no place to nest.

Research backs this. A 2004 study published in Addiction found that alcoholics who helped others were twice as likely to stay sober in the year following treatment. This isn’t a coincidence — it’s physiology and psychology working in tandem.

The Paradox of Recovery

AA’s paradox captures the point: “To keep it, you must give it away.” Helping others isn’t an extra credit assignment — it’s the mechanism of change.

When the thought of a drink creeps in, the most effective response isn’t “don’t think that.” It’s to show up for someone else. To be useful. To carry the message. To lift, listen, sit beside, bear witness. In doing so, the addict turns from internal combat to external connection, and the voice of addiction finds an empty room.

It’s not suppression. It’s transformation. Not distraction. Engagement. The thought doesn’t vanish — it’s just no longer welcome. You don’t push it away. You build a life so full that it doesn’t fit.

I might sound like a Big Book thumber (which I am); I am simply pointing out one of the fading but still important tenets of AA: helping others as a means of staying sober.

I met Pat in my first serious recovery program. Pat was the lead counselor, and he was good at his job. He could see through the bullshit excuses that alcoholics are famous for. I often wondered if he was put into my life to help me get sober when all else failed. Or was it that I finally arrived at the point of desperation where I was ready to listen?

To quote the Tao Te Ching: “When the student is ready, the teacher will appear.”

Either way, Pat was confrontational when he needed to be, and I responded well to his nonsensical approach. In addition to getting into my face, Pat firmly believed in the capability of most ‘functioning alcoholics’. I was proof of that (sorry about the pun.) I was running a fairly successful business with a bottle in the bottom drawer.

He was aware of recovery’s strange and paradoxical truth: maintaining an addicted life requires extraordinary effort. The functioning alcoholic or addict isn’t lazy — far from it. Drunks often work harder than anyone realizes to stay afloat in a life that constantly threatens to drown them.

Think about it. All the daily routines that addiction demands. The mental gymnastics required to keep needed to ensure your fix is always available. The calculations of how much money can be diverted without raising suspicion. The energy spent hiding the bottle, making excuses, and maintaining appearances.

Pat saw our efforts as a demonstration of ingenuity and perseverance. He was quick to point out that the alcoholic (or addict) becomes a master of resource management under impossible constraints. We develop skills of persuasion, deception, and survival that would be impressive if they weren’t serving such a destructive purpose.

We wake up sick yet still make it to work. We juggle financial disasters while finding money for their substance. We’re able to maintain relationships — however strained — while hiding their true condition. We could even navigate social situations with strict rules concerning abstinence without being detected.

The Pilot’s Choice

But he also emphasized that there comes a time when you need to channel your work toward more positive outcomes. To underscore his point, Pat told a story about a young pilot who crash-landed in the desert. Stranded miles from any civilization and without food or drink, he faced an impossible situation. To survive, he drank his urine and ate insects and camel dung. Day after day, he endured this horrific existence, doing whatever was necessary to stay alive until rescue arrived.

Finally, after days of desperate survival, a search party found him and brought him home. Overjoyed at his return, his family took him to the finest restaurant in town. The waiter asked what he would like to order. “Have anything you want,” his family said, gesturing to the extensive menu filled.

Said the pilot, “I’ll take your best camel dung with a side of beetles. And to drink I’ll have a tall glass of urine.”

Of course, everyone around him was shocked. And this tale is the epilogue of addiction. Even when better options become available, we sometimes cling to the familiar suffering we’ve grown accustomed to. The survival mechanisms that once kept us alive in the desert of addiction can become habits so ingrained that we struggle to leave them behind, even when we’re finally sitting at the table of recovery with a menu of better choices before us.

Channeling a New Path

I’m not suggesting that there is nobility in this suffering. I am only recognizing that a person trapped in addiction can demonstrate remarkable resilience, determination, and capability — all while fighting against themselves.

Now, using that same strength, channeled differently, can help build a wonderful life of sobriety.

Once spent securing the next drink or drug, the energy can be redirected toward healing. The creativity once used to craft convincing lies can now solve problems. The persistence that kept the addiction going can sustain recovery instead.

When you get sober, you don’t have to maintain the exhausting facade anymore. You don’t have to remember which version of the truth you told to whom. You don’t have to plan your day around your ‘drug of choice .’You don’t have to hide receipts, bottles, or paraphernalia. You don’t have to live in constant fear of being discovered. . . of being caught.

The meaningful work of recovery can replace the hard work of addiction. And while recovery isn’t easy, it's work that builds rather than destroys. It’s an effort that pays dividends rather than extracts costs. It connects you to others rather than isolating you from them.

Unlike the pilot who couldn’t imagine ordering anything else, you can jettison the burden of what you’ve been forcing yourself to swallow. You don’t have to keep drinking poison just because it once seemed like the only option for survival.

The same resilience that helped you survive as a person with an addiction will help you thrive in sobriety. The difference is that now, instead of working against yourself, you’ll be working for yourself — for your future, health, relationships, and peace of mind.

The courage you mustered to face each day in active addiction is the same courage that will carry you through recovery. The difference is that in recovery, that courage is finally pointed in the right direction, leading to freedom rather than further imprisonment.

If you’re still struggling or wondering if you can hit the pillow sober, remember your addiction has already proven you are stronger than you know. Now, imagine what you might accomplish when that strength is finally allowed to work in your favor. You can finally order from the full menu of life instead of settling for what merely kept you alive in the desert.

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I’m at the end of a good run as an ad agency owner, creative director, and copywriter. Forty-some years, a nice home, two boys through eight years of college, and two nickels still left to rub together. Yet despite my success (and that of my wife), I still face doubt in the mirror and carry with me ten pounds of insecurity in a nine-pound bag, not to mention a side of guilt. Why I live my life in the minor key, God only knows.

But I’m not the first. The following is an unpublished essay my father wrote in 1985, entitled ‘Strike Two on the .178 Batter’.

I could have written it myself.

Two years ago, I liquidated my small advertising agency that had been sliding downhill for some time. Key accounts had gone elsewhere. My best people had left. A few customers (I always felt ‘clients’ was pretentious) were still working with me but I suspect that they would rather be served by someone younger and were considerately waiting for me to wake up and back off.

In two months, I pulled down what had taken me 20 years to build. I cleaned out the office for the next tenant except for the shreds of ego that no amount of vacuuming could dislodge from the green carpet. I gave the keys to the super and became just another man old man without a job.

I’m somewhat abashed but I don’t feel sorry for myself. I was tired of the business. I got rid of it. I paid every creditor and the tax collectors, and I walked away with money in the bank.

Nonetheless, my withdrawal was not without ignominy, and the worst was yet to come.

About 2:00 AM on another restless night, I found myself gazing across 40 years of advertising, thousands of magazine and newspaper advertisements, brochures, catalogs, outdoor posters — even a political placard for a customer’s daughter who was running for president of her high school student body. All had taken shape under my pencil and through my typewriter. Suddenly I realized there wasn’t one solitary job in the lot that stood out as the best I could do.

I got up and went downstairs for a glass of milk. If there was one time and a place better than another for meeting yourself all worked up with embarrassment and guilt it’s a cold kitchen table in the middle of the night. It’s too much to say that this self-approach still haunts me but it does keep coming back. There’s no getting rid of it by telling myself that even if I never gave a customer the best I was capable of neither did I ever pass off anything I knew was inferior. The bug is the accusation of shortchanging myself, not the people for whom I work.

We weren’t Madison Ave, but we were professional. When we presented layout and copy to a customer for approval, we believed the concept would do a respectable job if not a superior job of helping customers sell their trucking services, sporting gear, decorative accessories or school tables.

We had our standards, and I don’t remember that we ever deliberately lowered them. I’m not suggesting that everything we did was right. Customers disagreed with our selling premises; they threw our work back at us; we lost business. It’s easy to say you can’t win them all but I recognize that you could take a certain pride in claiming you did your best and sometimes it wasn’t good enough. If just once I could have said after a brilliant flash or the drudgery of working a job over and over “Thereby God that’s the best work in me.” I wouldn’t care now whether it had been approved or refused.

The reaction I get from people I talked to about this is essentially uniform. Nobody knows what their best is or ever makes a serious effort to find out. If there are such people there aren’t enough of them to count. Most of us settle for performing satisfactorily most of the time and with excellence when we can. We’d hang back from confrontation with our limits.

That’s what they told me. Their attitude asked if I thought I was some kind of Superman.

As long as experience kept telling me most of my work was acceptable, I didn’t question whether it was my best. I’m sure it wasn’t. Day in and day out it was probably no better than mediocre but there are levels of mediocrity, and I should be able to reach the highest one once in a while. After all, even a utility infielder with a .178 batting average can have a four-for-four one a day if he keeps swinging.

The past can’t give me a second chance so I’m sweating one out of the present as a freelancer. I need only an occasional job to rekindle the hope and keep me driving past the senior citizen center without slowing down.

I tell myself I will not allow a practiced facility and trusting customers to put limits on my efforts. In this, I’m supported by the advance of years, but the facility is waning.

The work is tougher than it used to be. The hinges that open the mind to deeper insights and verbal felicities fairly creak with complaint. The product that emerges from the typewriter is spasmodic fits and starts is disjointed and awkward, smelling faintly of metal lubricants that have turned gummy.

Most days, I do nothing but rewrite the same few paragraphs. Other days I see the hope a bit closer. Each day the odds increase that a certain number in the mortality statistics will come up. I’ve had 40 years and thousands of examples to show myself what my best is not. I wonder if I have time to see at least one example of what is.

I get it, Dad. Forty years after your 40 years, I get it

.

There comes a time in all our drinking careers, and my guess is I can speak for most alcoholics, when we’re asked by a witness, could be someone on the receiving end of our behavior, ‘Why don’t you just quit?’ The question is well-intended. I mean, if every time you ate shrimp, you broke out in rash-covered convulsions, you’d probably quit eating shrimp, right? Simple enough.

If I could just quit, I wouldn’t go to meetings or work the steps. If I could just quit, I would trust me. This ‘just quit’ question is often accompanied by tears, wrenching hands, and pleading eyes. Or maybe a final warning. Or a perplexed look from friends, if you have any left.

While I was defiant when the question was asked of me by my wife, I was heartbroken when it came from my young son. After so many broken promises, there is no longer a suitable answer for a twelve-year-old. They are too innocent, these children. They’ve stood by, down the hall, just around the corner, listening to the arguments, the screaming. They’ve gone to bed with Dad nowhere in sight.

The religious and the righteous chime in also. They’re sure it’s just a matter of getting back in good graces with Jesus. And oh, by the way, they know the way to meet that man next Sunday. They mean well. I’d say they’re about 8% right.

How do I explain it to a non-alcoholic? Analogies are often ambiguous but let me offer one. I joined the Marine Corps when I was 19. I was adrift in a sea of alcohol. Michigan had experimented with a lower drinking age of 18. For that very reason, I more or less flunked out of college. My two minor-in-possession charges earned me 15 days in jail. My moral compass was pointing to the nearest liquor store. I had no purpose, and no goals in my life. The only thing I knew was my draft number of 41 was likely to win me a free ticket to Vietnam. It was 1970 and there was talk of scaling down the war, but judging from the battle scenes on the news, that’s all it was talk.

I was sent to the marine boot camp in San Diego. A month in, our drill instructor announced that Nixon was withdrawing troops, and we ladies would have to find some other war in which to kick ass.

I couldn’t drink in book camp, of course, but I soon made up for it. My two years stateside repairing aircraft missile control systems were filled with 151 Rum and Coke. Then another two years in Westpac consisted of two-month rotations between Japan, Okinawa, Korea, and the Philippines.

I loved the Philippines: hot and muggy with ice-cold beer for $.15. That’s right, $.15. Your $283 monthly paycheck was enough to drink yourself into tremors every night.

And that I did.

The Philippines are directly east across the deep blue South China Sea from Vietnam, where only a few calendar pages earlier, many of my fellow marines went home in body bags. The same Marine Corps. So, here’s my analogy: social drinking, or even serious drinking, is as far from alcoholism as my peacetime Marine Corps life was compared to wartime Vietnam.

I wore the same uniform, worked on the same aircraft, held the same rank, and even lived in virtually the same climate. But that’s where the similarities ended. The marines in wartime Vietnam were blown apart by claymores, rockets, sniper fire, you name it.

Those marines lay awake in mud-filled trenches; I slept in a bed. My pupils weren’t a fathomless pitch black from witnessing atrocities. And years after rotating home, I didn’t jump out of bed at the sound of a firecracker.

I’m not comparing war to alcoholism (although some will argue that). War has its own set of terrors. My point is that even though I spent four years in the Marine Corps, I don’t have a frickin’ clue what it’s like to fight a war. To have an enemy lurking in the bush, safety off, finger on the trigger, 8,500 miles from home. I’ve trained for it. I’ve read about it. But I’ve never lived it.

Your family members, pastor, or concerned friends may know the experience of having too much to drink like maybe they did at the last wedding reception or cocktail party.

But when it comes to alcoholism, trust me, they don’t have a frickin clue.

Even if I were, my fall from grace would be something I could control. Like I could step out of it for a bit, take a good look at the situation, and then maybe make a few tweaks that would arrest my slide.

I also needed to ensure everyone understood this whole booze thing wasn’t that bad, and even it was, it was mostly their fault, not mine.

But I couldn’t or rather wouldn’t, because self-truth is not allowed on the slide, and worse, you’re getting used to it. You no longer notice the slow but steady abandonment of what was once important to you.

Gone is honesty. Integrity and dignity are not far behind.

Granted, this doesn’t happen overnight, but that’s part of the problem. You grow accustomed to being less of a person. You kid yourself into thinking that you don’t need to change, but the fact is you couldn’t change for the better on your best day, and there aren’t too many of those anymore.

You’re getting used to ‘the bottom below the bottom you know.’ Your clothes are rumpled; your shoes should have been replaced months ago, and god only knows the last time you saw the dentist.

There may come a time if you’re one of the few that makes it back to the tables, when you’ll meet men and women who are just like you. They weren’t born on skid row. They had a life, probably a good one.

When your fog lifts a little higher, you’ll begin to recognize the long-forgotten pedigree of your fellow alcoholics. The VP, the teacher, sales director, doctor, kid’s soccer coach, loving mom, and caring father. People on the plus side of the ledger who made the world a better place only to throw it all away in exchange for one more pull on the Popoff or MD 20/20 bottle or some other substance just this side of antifreeze.

That’s why for this alcoholic, it isn’t the shapeless form of a human sleeping under the overpass that scares me the most. It’s the guy on his way there.

The guy who’s still somewhere between you and that cliff, the middle ground, maybe sober enough to know how sick he is, who’s gotten used to crashing in a fleabag motel or the backseat of his soon to be repossessed car. The ground where prescription abuse graduates to street drugs and the last paycheck is replaced by the last theft.

I’m scared of that vision because it shows me what I will likely become if I ever return to drinking.

Take the roughed-up cowboy who stood unsteadily on the sidewalk one warm spring day outside a South Beach bakery. I happened to look out as I sat down at the window booth and saw such a man.

Dressed in well-tailored but filthy slacks, he wore expensive-looking but beyond repair boots, a blue hospital gown dangling open from his shoulders to reveal a 90-degree arm in a still white cast. I guessed him to be 40 going on 60, rummaging through a trash receptacle with his one good hand. I watched as he lifted a can of Olympia beer out of the trash. Jackpot. He chugged down what remained. I winced at the taste.

“What are you looking at,” asked my son as he sat down across from me. He was in this third year of medical school, on vacation with mom and now sober dad.

“I wonder what that guy is all about,” I said, motioning out the window.

Without hesitating, Bill said, “Well, he probably got into a fight last night, cops took him to the emergency room for a broken arm, got a cast and his pain meds, and when no one was looking, bolted out the door.”

As the Olympia chugging outpatient turned toward the next trash container, I caught a glimpse in the morning light of the fading remnants of a good man on the slide.

I took an educated guess: father of three, devoted husband, an engineer by trade, who one night probably not too long ago, just didn’t go home. Didn’t call either. He had slid down to that place where the bottle was once and for all more important than the good life he helped build. Now his family, kids, wife, job, all of it. Gone.

Maybe I’m too melancholy.

After all, I’m on reasonably solid ground these days, with a 25-year coin in my dresser drawer. Still, if I see a man on that slide, maybe out collecting cans on the roadside or rummaging through the trash in a grubby sportscoat, I remind myself, “Look. There you are.”

Explores the author's struggle with alcoholism and the 3 pm "trigger" tied to childhood loneliness and disrupted circadian rhythms. As a child, 3 pm marked an empty home and unmet emotional needs, which later became a cue for drinking. Therapy and mindfulness helped the author replace this harmful habit with healthier routines, like walks and self-reflection. Over time, they rewired their emotional patterns, turning 3 pm from a painful reminder into just another hour, highlighting the potential for recovery and personal transformation.

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I know because I have an app on my phone that tells me these things. I typically don't count days (anymore). I refer to this app because it contains the Big Book, plus some other helpful info, most from the steps or traditions. I’m a Big Book thumper, but more about that later. I don't consider sobriety anniversaries a big deal, but writing about them is a bit cathartic.

There are those who wear their sobriety dates like a badge of honor and those who never, ever speak of it. Both are right, I’m sure. I guess I fall somewhere in-between, and I’d like to tell you why.

I tell you this because I believe that the anonymity aspect of twelve-step groups, including the mother of them all, is designed to protect the organization, not the individual. This is misunderstood by many. Virtually all recovery programs today are derived from the original program with a book by the same name. Derivatives don’t work as well as the original, just as recipes that are close to Aunt Betty’s key lime pie rarely, if ever, taste as good as Aunt Betty’s key lime pie.

I tell you this because I have worked with several persons I admire who are very open about their journey, and I think I should also contribute. I hope it helps others, but I know it helps me.

I tell you this because more often than not, this topic discussed over dinner or a round of golf invariably leads to some person sharing with me the story of their wife or child or close friend who is suffering or lost. They don’t know what to do.

I tell you this because there is a gross misconception the disease of alcoholism can actually be cured or that treatment is as simple as attending more church services or following well-intended “why don’t you just quit” advice from friends and family.

I tell you this because there is simply too much political correctness, pseudo-Christianity, and conditional morality in the world today that speaking truth in a small way just seems like the right thing to do, even if it is as unsolicited as this post.

Last but not least, I tell you this because I can.