My dear Addict friends, the road of recovery is paved with a deluge of daily decisions:

Should I make my bed?

Should I go to that work party?

Should I take the long way home so I don’t have to pass the liquor store?

Of course, life presents you with all the same choices, whether you’re in recovery or not. But there’s one critical difference that makes all the difference. When Your Addict is the one doing the deciding, you aren’t making any decisions at all.

See, every time you deflect the problem, or minimize your drug’s impact on you, or engage in a futile bid for control over your drug, Your Addict claps its hands together in delight, because that means you’re looking the other way. Like a sugar-crazed kid with a distracted mom, it gets to reach its grubby little hand into the cookie jar just that much deeper, and for that much longer.

Thank God your head is no longer stuck in the sandbox of denial! Now you understand that your biggest problem is Your Addict, and that the way you allow its power over you to expand is by feeding it your drug.

As interminably powerless as you may be over your drug, though, the good news is that you don’t have to let Your Addict do your deciding for you any longer. Your biggest step toward taking back your power will be the day you decide to stop feeding Your Addict, in an UNEQUIVOCAL MASS STARVATION.

I’m talking about the day that marks your massive decision to make just one decision: the decision to be sober from your drug, right now.

Though I hope you will come to celebrate that day as your sobriety birthday, I want to point out that the decision to initiate the unequivocal mass starvation of Your Addict is not of the one-and-done variety. Especially in the first year or two of recovery, sobriety has to be a decision you make one day at a time. It’s simply too overwhelming, too confounding, and too terrifying, otherwise.

Sometimes, sobriety has to be a minute-by-minute, or even a second-by-second, decision.

In that sense, your decision to be sober isn’t one single decision at all, but a series of many successive decisions that will amount to building up Your True Self’s power, and diminishing Your Addict’s.

But I don’t want to overwhelm you, because the only decision you have to be concerned with right now concerns the right now.

What’s that you’re saying, my dear Addict friend? That you’re not ready to make the decision to be sober, right now? If that’s the case, then I thank you for your honesty. Feeling afraid to live without your drug is completely normal. We’re addicts, after all. Being emotionally, physically, and psychologically dependent on our drug is what we do!

I can assure you, though, that being honest about where you are, wherever you are, is the first step toward actually getting sober — next to admitting powerlessness, which is also an act of brutal honesty. So if you don’t feel ready to be sober, you can still start facing your fears by being honest about them with the kind of people who get it.

Just don’t kid yourself that fear isn’t the issue. Don’t delude yourself that you have good reasons for choosing to wait until your birthday to get sober. Or until the day after the Fourth of July. Or until New Year’s Day, that ol’ “I’m gonna be sober this year, I swear!” standby.

Picking a date well into the future can only mean one thing: that fear is plunking you back down in the sandbox of denial, which is exactly where Your Addict wants you.

So screw the idea of picking a sobriety date. Start with right now.

❤️

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Sent with True Love from the Universe ❤️💫