“Healing may give you a new life, but it’s gonna cost you your old one. Are you ready?” There’s a catch to recovery that nobody really wants to talk about. We want the new life. We’re just not always sure we want to give up the old one. We want peace without surrendering control. We want freedom …

I was in a Big Book study tonight when someone asked a question I had never thought to ask. We were reading “The Family Afterward,” and we came to this sentence: “Those of us who have spent much time in the world of spiritual make-believe have eventually seen the childishness of it.” One of the members …

Last night I was listening to Corey D. from Owensboro, KY, speak at a meeting at our Area Convention when he used a word that caught my attention: Sponsorable. Then, a little later, he pulled out an old A.A. saying I hadn’t heard in a long time: “If you wanna drink, that’s your business. If …

Last night, my sponsor and sponsor brothers gathered to read Bill Wilson’s “AA Tomorrow,” written for AA’s twenty-fifth anniversary in 1960. What struck me was how little distance there seemed to be between Bill’s questions then and our conversation now. We were talking about our lives: our families, fears, relationships, responsibilities, and the temptation to …

AA teaches us how to live without drinking. It doesn’t prevent our hearts from breaking. This has been a hard year. In December 2016, I left NYC after living there for 14 years and moved back home to Texas to be here for my aging parents. They didn’t physically need me at that point and …

There. I said it. Meetings are NOT the solution. I realize that may sound like a strange thing to say in Alcoholics Anonymous. After all, I go to meetings. I love meetings. I have a home group. Some of the most important moments of my recovery have happened in AA meetings. I have heard things …

I’ve heard some version of this countless times in Alcoholics Anonymous: “I just need to accept it.” And sometimes that is exactly right. I need to accept that I cannot control another person. I need to accept that the past has already happened. I need to accept that people may not behave the way I think they …

I’ve heard some version of this from newcomer sponsees more times than I can count: “I put down the bottle. I’m praying every day. I’m going to meetings. I’m calling you. Why don’t I feel better? Why isn’t my life getting better? And why am I not farther along than some of these other people?” It’s a fair …

Hidden in Plain Sight I was in a Big Book study tonight, reading “The Family Afterward,” when another member pointed out something I had never really seen. I’ve read this passage a thousand times. Okay, maybe not a thousand. But enough times that I thought I knew what was there. That’s what happens when I study the …