My first sponsor used to say it to me almost like a correction, like he could see me reaching for the wrong tool. People talk about the HOW of this program — Honesty, Open-mindedness, Willingness — like it’s a sequence, like you get honest first, then your mind opens, and somewhere at the end of that line willingness shows up as the reward for having done the first two parts correctly. He didn’t buy it. He’d tell me the order mattered, and the order was willingness first, and that it was possible — more than possible, common — to get sober on willingness alone, long before you were capable of real honesty, and longer still before you were anything close to open-minded.
It’s not HOW, he’d say. It’s WHO.
I didn’t understand him for years. I don’t know that I fully understand him now. But I’ve lived long enough on the other side of it to see what he meant.
It took me ten years to become willing. Ten years of knowing exactly what was being asked of me and not being able to do it — not the honesty part, not the surrender part, none of it. I knew what the door looked like. I just couldn’t make myself walk through it. What finally moved me wasn’t insight. It wasn’t a moment of clarity where the fog lifted and I suddenly understood myself. It was surviving attempts on my own life that were supposed to end it. I didn’t arrive at willingness. I was left with it, after everything else had failed, including my own effort to disappear.
I think about that when I watch newcomers walk in now. I feel something close to reverence for them, honestly — for the sheer courage it takes not just to walk through that door but to come back a second time, a third time, after they’ve seen what’s actually being asked. Because once you see it — once you understand that this isn’t going to be a tune-up, that it’s asking you to take apart the whole self you built to survive — most people leave. I don’t blame them. I left, in every way that mattered, for ten years while my body kept showing up to the wreckage of my own life.
What I didn’t have in those ten years was honesty. I was still negotiating, still managing the story, still convinced some version of me could keep drinking if I just got smarter about it. I definitely didn’t have open-mindedness — I was contemptuous of anything that smelled like religion, allergic to surrender, certain I knew better than a room full of people who’d apparently failed at their own lives. What I had, eventually, was just this: a willingness the size of a mustard seed. Not faith that it would work. Not belief that God existed or cared. Just willingness — a “you bet” instead of a “yeah, but.”
I’ve heard it said that only a small percentage of people who try get long-term sobriety — I used to repeat a number, three percent, like it was settled fact. I don’t know that it is. Nobody’s really tracking it, and the honest answer is we don’t know. But I don’t need the statistic to know the truth underneath it: most people who try this do not make it on the first attempt, or the fifth. That’s not a knock on the program. It’s just what it costs to become willing when you’re not.
The parable of the mustard seed always gets read as being about how big your faith needs to grow. I don’t think that’s it at all. The point was never the size it becomes — it’s that the smallest amount there is, the tiniest seed on the table, is still alive. It doesn’t need to be impressive to start something. It just needs to be planted. That’s willingness. Not conviction, not resolve, not even hope most days. Just deciding to act before the feeling shows up to justify it.
Honesty came later, and slowly, and it’s still coming — Step 4 and Step 5 cracked something open that kept cracking open for years after. Open-mindedness came even slower, mostly because I was so certain my own mind had gotten me this far and could get me the rest of the way, which is exactly the lie that almost killed me. Both of those, when they finally arrived, arrived as fruit. Not as entrance requirements.
My sponsor was right. It was never about doing the three things in the correct order and unlocking the next stage. It was about who kept showing up. Who kept coming back after seeing exactly what it would cost. Who said you bet, without meaning it yet, until eventually they did.
That’s the courage I see in newcomers now. Not that they’ve figured anything out. Just that they’re still here.