January 27 – Someone We Didn’t Want to Be
“It’s like I’m watching my life from the cheap seats.” — Reality Bites
Looking back, our lives didn’t just get messy — they got strange. We’d wake up after a bender and think, Who is this guy? Why did I do that? I know better. How the hell do I get out of this? Somewhere in our life, we started crossing lines we swore we'd never cross. We lied to people we cared about, made promises we couldn’t keep, and called it “getting by.”
We used to think “unmanageable” meant total chaos — flashing lights, jail time, the crash-and-burn stuff. But now we see it showed up quieter, earlier, before we could even recognize it — pretending everything was fine while it all slipped through our fingers. We weren't out of control in the dramatic sense — We were just quietly losing the ability to steer. Every fix we tried only made the mess worse.
Life had become centered around survival — keeping things from falling apart, holding people at arm’s length so they wouldn't see how much we drank, maintaining the delusion. Underneath it all, We were scared — scared of being found out, scared that we had no purpose in life. We weren’t bad people. We were just sick and tired of being sick and tired, lost, and afraid to admit it.
It wasn’t only the drinking that broke us — it was everything that came with it. Our dishonesty, our need to control, our endless reruns of good intentions followed by regret. Step One isn’t about failure; it is about recognition. The life we built on self-will wasn’t sustainable. It never was.
Am I still trying to convince myself I can steer this thing alone, even when I’ve already seen where that road leads?
