In a very real sense, early recovery is a chemical and psychological rollercoaster. You’ve got your peaks and valleys. Your raw, burning deserts of hell. And your glorious mountaintops of pristine joy. Both – and every pothole in between – will strike you with a force hitherto unimaginable. In my early sobriety, I was prone …
The third step is riddled with acceptance and bravery. Willingness they say. I say bravery. As in, bravery to live in new ways, to pause and in the pause find a way to break with old patterns of thought and emotion. The third step is that courage to change so oft repeated the words can …
It isn’t easy to accept, although I write as though it were. I woke too early, the sun still bleary and making an attempt, only, at the cornfield outside my window. I didn’t fall to sleep until late, struggling with a thing related to heartache, but not quite there. Something more akin to restlessness and …
Acceptance, they say, is where you begin. I may be more stubborn than most, but I find myself moving in and out of acceptance. I find much in the world baldly wrong – poverty, graft, ridiculous wealth, violence – and it’s difficult for me to know how ‘acceptance’ isn’t just a weak way of saying …
