December 22 — The Gotta Dance
A lot of us come into AA full of self-will, even though alcohol just finished kicking our ass. We don’t walk in humbled — we walk in activated. We see the wreckage of our lives and treat it like a challenge to fix, not a message to slow down.
That’s when the “gotta” thinking shows up. I gotta get a new car. I gotta get a new girl. I gotta get a few thousand dollars in my bank account. I gotta get these people off my back. Gotta, gotta, gotta. It feels productive. It feels responsible. It even looks good from the outside.
You’re dancing with yourself like the world isn’t watching. You’re moving fast, making plans, stacking fixes, convinced momentum equals recovery. But if you’re not careful, you can gotta-dance your way right out the door of an AA meeting and never come back.
It happens. Not because people stop believing in sobriety — but because they start believing they’ve got it now. The danger isn’t wanting a better life. The danger is thinking you can build one on the same thinking that just burned the last one down.
Early on, the program asks for something painfully unglamorous: stop the music. Sit down. Let things be unfinished for a while. Stay close to the people who remember what it was like when alcohol was still winning.
Because the gotta dance doesn’t end in freedom. It usually ends in distance — from the rooms, from help, and eventually from honesty.
And the wild part? Nobody pushes you out. You dance yourself out.
What was something you thought you “had to have” in early sobriety that you later realized God had something better planned for?
