When I was drinking and using, I was also doing and going all the time. You know that FedEx ad “Overwhelmed” where the guy just can’t slow down. He sits there at a completely empty desk shouting “Worky work! Busy Bee!” That was me back then. That is, whenever I could make myself get out of bed.

Looking back, I think I channeled the Energizer Bunny mostly to keep from facing how alone I felt. Not was, necessarily, but felt. As an active substance abuser, I had no comfort in my own company and so had nothing real to give back to offers of friendship.

I began working the Steps because I was terrified of my own future. It was through their simple magic and the good grace of HP (whom I chose to call Alice), that first my head and then my life got real. That’s a pretty loose description of recovery, but if you’re in it as well, I think you’ll know what I’m getting at.

These days I find great pleasure in such simple things. For example, I have a birdfeeder outside my office window, and I also scatter seeds on the ground. This morning, as I watched birds, squirrels, and bunnies feeding on the bounty of what I think of as Martha’s Nature Preserve, I had a sudden blast of that peaceful, easy feeling the Eagles first sang about oh-so-many years ago.

That feeling, to me, is one of sobriety’s greatest gifts.

When I hit bottom and bounced into sobriety, I was soooooo broke I needed professional help to untangle my finances. Mostly through cutting up my existing credit cards and not getting new ones for a couple of years, I finally managed to zoom up to a net worth of zero. In other words, I got out of debt. It was a day Alice (my personal name for HP) and I did some serious, spiritual high-fiving!

I have plastic again, but I use it advisedly—credit card for any travel that needs a reimbursement record or a tax trail; debit card for daily life. As a result of long-term sober spending habits, I almost own a house, do own a couple of non gas-hogging cars, and have some savings. And, more importantly, I have a sense of internal order about finances and life in general.

And, you know, I don’t miss spending a lot of money I don’t have the way I used to when I was still using. For example, it’s the beginning of holiday party season. I’m married to a recluse, but I occasionally sashay out on my own, and I still have a hard time going to a party in last years clothes (progress, not perfection is all I’ll ever claim, in the fashion department). So just last week, I took myself and my debit card to this great store I’ve discovered in a funky part of town that sells gorgeous clothes at about 1/20^th of their retail value. After about twenty minutes of rummaging, I found the most gorgeous pair of kind of floaty black pants at 75% off the already reduced price.

When I was using, I would have marched into some high-priced, designer-ish shop, added to my debt load, and left with a leaden, sock-in-the-stomach feeling that such out-of-control behavior always delivered.

Does sober life rock on all levels, or what?

I’m a woman who’s been Twelve Stepping for almost two decades. Honesty is right at the core of my recovery.

Before Recovery, it took me a long time to realize that what I’d made up and called “my life” wasn’t really all that much fun. After I entered Recovery, it still took me years to peel back the layers of dicey explanations I’d used to excuse all those screwy things I’d done that hadn’t worked, and that hadn’t make me, or anyone else, happy. The first thing I had to recognize was the fact that I’d been a spin-doctor for years. And why not? I had a self-image to maintain — culturally, intellectually, emotionally — that often conflicted with reality. So, even though I didn’t lie all that much to the rest of the world, I lied to myself a lot. I also had an ingrained habit of unconsciously blaming circumstances or other people for actions of mine that I wasn’t comfortable with. So when I eventually ran into Step One, being honest with myself about myself was about as foreign to me as being a man. Not that there’s anything wrong with that. With being a man, I that is.

I’m still Stepping, still Recovering, but good golly! real life is so much more fun than the La-La Land I used to inhabit.

On this Thanksgiving, I am an American who is flat-out awash in gratitude.

It’s a visceral feeling, a toe-tingling twang through mind, body, and spirit. And what I’m most grateful for is that today is so much like yesterday was and tomorrow will be: pretty durn normal. Today, so far, has been productive and pleasant. I’ve given and gotten a few hugs, done a little work and a little cooking, and—so-far—been able to shoo away those pesky Devilettes (with names like Resentment, Annoyance and Jealousy) before they’ve had time to sink their claws into my psyche.

I just want to say that you old-timers were right, when you told me all those years ago that if I didn’t drink and went to meetings, everything would get better. Once in a while I still try to figure out how my screw-up life got to be so good, but most of the time I just enjoy it. As Van Morrison put it so well: It ain’t why, why, why, why, why; it just is.

Happy Thanksgiving, everyone. Feast well on sobriety!

I was at a meeting yesterday with a newcomer who talked about how shaky his sobriety felt. The topic was “going to any lengths,” and this young man said he was sure this shakiness was his own fault, that he must not be working a good enough program.

I just wanted to march across the room and hug him. Early sobriety is so uncomfortable on so many levels. At the beginning of it I was a big onion of a person, with layers of self-imposed, stinky difficulties enveloping the pretty cheerful, well-intentioned, mostly kind person I really am. All I did for a “program” was not drink, go to meetings, work at the Steps. And, gradually, life got good.

It took me years before my own understanding of “going to any lengths” evolved from “doing more” to “trusting more”—in HP, the Steps, other people, and life, itself. I think what I mostly had to do was learn to loosen my grip, give fear a swift kick whenever it reared its ugly head, and, in general, let life be okay.

by Martha Woodroof

I’m working on a new book on faith without religion, so I’ve been thinking about God a lot—that is, when I’m not thinking about whatever story I’m currently reporting or my cats or what’s for dinner.

I had lunch with a good friend yesterday, a guy who’s also in recovery. My friend is Jewish. He’d read my book-in-progress and pointed out that, according to my own precepts, I’ve set myself the task of defining the indefinable. Nope, I said, I have not. All I’m claiming to know about God is that God is. Everything else I write about concerns the trail of breadcrumbs left through my own sober past by my partnership with God, all those small, healthy things I intuitively knew how to do that were once beyond me.

I come from a family of four thinkers; all moralists, none religious. I was raised to rely on the life of the mind—to think, to question, to test limits, to experiment, to push for intellectual understanding. Which makes a fine modus operandi for somewhere other than in recovery.

In retrospect, I now see that my recovery and my partnership with God began at the same moment; that they are, perhaps, different names for the same adventure. I also see that, my recovery took a giant leap forward into simplicity when I stopped thinking so much about Alice God and just started enjoying Alice God’s company.

About my partnership with the Almighty? I don’t understand, at all, how it works; but, thankfully, I’m no longer so intellectually arrogant as to think I have to understand how it works in order to accept that it does. I can now allow myself the pleasure of quiet wonder at the power for kind, self-less change in me that’s been made available through this partnership. It’s a change, I believe, that I would never have achieved on my own through intellectual understanding—a change that came only through acceptance that there is a Higher Power and I’m not It.