“Some of us were just too smart for our own good. We thought we had it all figured out. We felt intellectually superior. ‘I can do anything I set out to do….Knowledge is power!’ Yet we were faced with the paradox of our own addiction. Our best thinking brought us to our bottom. What we learned is that recovery from addiction requires resources beyond the capacities of any one individual addict.”

– Life with Hope, second edition, page 8

I found myself putting off anything I set to do until tomorrow. Just use once more and then I’ll do it. This lasted for years. Years of saying, “I’ll get to it tomorrow,” as marijuana kept its grip on me. Even after cobbling together some time, I thought that I must be able to use safely now. In short time, I found myself back in the miserable isolation of my active addiction, and with every relapse, it got worse and worse.

The disease of addiction is delusional, it tricks me into thinking I don’t have an addiction. It’s also progressive, because the depravity of my actions with each relapse grew and grew. My disease, as it is often said, was doing push-ups, while I worked the Steps and took service commitments.

I don’t know what this power greater than myself is, but that doesn’t matter to me today. It is not me; it is a power that I see in the courage and grace of my fellows. It is the power that I see in natural events. It changes, and that’s OK. I cannot do this on my own. Recovery from addiction requires resources beyond me. I came to believe that a power greater than myself could restore me to sanity, and I stopped obsessing over what that power is.

Final thought: Today, I believe that a power greater than myself can restore me to sanity, and I don’t need to know exactly what that power is for it to do so.