I didn’t start this blog because I had something figured out. I started it because I was sober, successful, and quietly suffering from depression — and the truth kept showing up like fog, then burning off before I could hold onto it.
The turn began a year ago, when my wife set a boundary after 26 years that finally got through to me – change, learn empathy and compassion, and get in touch with your feelings, or I’m gone. I started journaling. I started ACA. I started writing a gratitude list every morning, small and unglamorous, day after day. And somewhere in that quiet repetition, something loosened. I began writing and talking about feelings in a language I didn’t know I had. I learned what honesty actually felt like — not the absence of lying, but the presence of truth I used to run from. I saw, for maybe the first time, how much my ego had been twisting my perception all along, dressing fear up as competence and calling it strength. And as I could finally articulate what had been suppressed for so long, this blog is where I started putting it down.
None of it is new, exactly. That’s the strange part. The insights were always mine. I just spent most of my life under a code that ACA names plainly: don’t talk, don’t trust, don’t feel. Survival rules, built for a child who needed them, still running a grown man who didn’t. Every time truth surfaced, some part of me would say yeah, but, and the fog would roll back in. I’d forget. Not because it wasn’t true — because I wasn’t built yet to keep it.
There’s a line in the Big Book about people who don’t make it: constitutionally incapable of being honest. Not dishonest by choice — built that way. I read past it for years, assuming it meant someone else. It took me a long time to see it was me.
Here’s what I understand now that I didn’t then: everyone’s access to the truth is mediated by fear. Some people’s fear was just severe enough to functionally lock the door. So it’s true — constitutionally incapable of being honest is a real condition. What it isn’t is a permanent one. The door was locked by fear, and fear can be worked with, walked through, outgrown. Being built that way isn’t a life sentence. It’s just where you started.
So this blog became the place I try to cement it. Manna that used to spoil overnight — I wanted a way to keep it past morning. Not to prove anything. Just so the fog doesn’t win, and so somewhere there’s a witness to what’s actually true, even on the days I forget it myself.
My constitution is still changing. I don’t write from the far side of it, looking back. I write from inside it, while it’s still happening — trading fear for love, control for intimacy, a life performed for a life that’s actually mine.
If you’re on your own long way home, I hope something here is useful. Not as an answer. Just company on the road.
The Step That Keeps Us growing, p.264
Sometimes, when friends tell us how well we are doing, we know better inside. We know we aren’t doing well enough. We still can’t handle life, as life is. There must be a serious flaw somewhere in our spiritual practice and development.
What, then, is it?
The chances are better than even that we shall locate our trouble in our misunderstanding or neglect of A.A.’s Step Eleven–prayer, meditation, and the guidance of God.
The other Steps can keep most of us sober and somehow functioning. But Step Eleven can keep us growing, if we try hard and work at it continually. – Grapevine, June 1958