Lying and withholding is the cheapest, easiest way to control others. You control their perception, control their response to you, control who you need them to be, In telling the truth, I was surrendering control with the hope that it would lead to something different. I hoped it would lead to something real.” I stopped drinking alcohol over 3 years ago, at the beginning of 2020. I’ve never considered myself an “alcoholic,” but started to recognize that I didn’t like the way alcohol was making me feel, and decided to stop. My favorite “Quit Lit” is mentioned in this book - “Quit Like a Woman” by Holly Whitaker. It was the perfect book for me that arrived at the perfect time in my life. if you truly want to live with peace in your heart and be free of the burdens of the past — you must be brave enough to be willing to look at yourself honestly, clearly, and without reservation. You must take responsibility for everything that’s ever happened to you. Not blame. Responsibility.” The truth is alchemical. It transmutes the bitterness of pain and dishonesty and shame into something else, something we can actually live in and stand on.” I had high hopes for this book because I heard so many good things about it. I just finished it and I think it’s OK. There’s nothing Earth shattering about it. I’ve definitely read better books, and I’ve definitely read worse. This is one of those books I’ll read once and that’ll be that.

We Are the Luckiest - Libby We Are the Luckiest - Libby

What I know is this: The truth is ultimately life affirming. Even when it was ugly and inconvenient and has the potential to dismantle your life. It feels like relief even when it's painful...in a "this is real and therefore you can stand on it" way. The truth is uncomfortable but confining. You know the difference when you feel it. Oncologist Hill (pediatric palliative care, Indiana Univ. Riley Hospital for Children) shares a deeply personal story of addiction, depression, hope, and recovery in an effort to improve access, treatment options, and resources for all affected by similar conditions. Writing from firsthand experience, he relates feelings of extreme turmoil as well as the disappointments he faced in seeking treatment, emphasizing throughout the important role empathy plays in the process of healing and understanding the suffering of others with addiction issues. Benefit from weekly 90-minute live calls, weekly private sobriety support meetings + weekly office hours* (see details here) Often for me, faith simply meant deciding to trust the people who had gone before me. Like the women whose books I had read...surely they couldn't all just be full of shit, right? I had faith in that.” Most importantly, I found myself hoping that her words would be able to reach as many women as possible. Her story has the power to motivate others to consider changing their drinking habits to embrace a life worth living. Personal responsibility + change ain’t always easymuch the same way as I feel about becoming a mother: it has brought me right up to the nose of life itself and forced me to look it straight in the face. At first, the nearness was too much; there was nothing to protect me from the immediacy of things - not from the bright lights or the sharp pain. But then, eventually, I came to realize that this is what it means to be alive - to not look away from any of it - and that all I was really doing before was pretending: floating through my days half-numb, half involved, half-awake, thinking I was really living when in fact I was missing it all.” Until about 5 years ago, the "thing" that ran my life was perfectionism. Pair that with a demanding career (for which I got all kindsa high fives for said perfectionism), the challenges of new motherhood, a comparison habit, catastrophic thinking, a punishing intolerance for mistakes and an under-trained ability to notice and diagnose my own feelings... and more, but you get the point... and what you've got is a legit perfect storm. A masterpiece. It’s the truest, most generous, honest, and helpful sobriety memoir I’ve read. It’s going to save lives.” No matter how far astray you’ve gone or how many times you’ve tried and failed before, as long as you’re still sitting here, breathing, and reading these words, freedom and joy are still possible.

We are The Lucky We are The Lucky

Without missing a beat, he smiled, looked at him, and said, "Of course you can. Are you drinking now?"

Loneliness started to abate only when I began to really let people in and tell them the truth, and that took a long, long time. The antidote to loneliness wasn’t just being around others or sharing common ground. It was intimacy.” Forming a new life is a really, really big deal. As John O'Donohue says in his blessing called "For the Interim Time," It is difficult and slow to become new. It's supposed to be difficult It's supposed to take everything you have. It's supposed to take longer than you want and to change you, completely. This often won't feel good when it's happening, but nothing worth having ever does.” The effort of putting words to my experiences, of trying to describe things as accurately as possible, felt like it was saving my life. One sentence at a time, I was writing my way to an understanding and a grace I could not otherwise reach. I breathed power into a new life for myself and also slowly started to make sense of what I'd never been able to before.”

Books — Laura McKowen — Author

And the fact is, life is not about other people. Even if it might seem so. Other people can't break me, and other people can't make me. I have to show up, I have to put in the work, and I have to build the life I want for myself. Her profound description of her spiritual journey moved me to tears almost every chapter in the book. I cannot say enough about how incredible this book is, and what a gift she has shared. I also had to believe I had in me the capacity for things I could not imagine in my mind. That somewhere within me there was a primal wisdom I could not possibly understand or access, but that not being to didn't make it any less real. There was so much of life beyond my limited mental grasp - most of life, in fact. Breathing, for example. The impossible expanse of the ocean and the underworld it contains. Quantum physics. Animals. My daughter. So when I got really scared and thought a proud, dignified, peaceful sober life was beyond the pale of what was possible for me, I would say to myself, I can't do this, but something inside me can. I can't tell you how many times I've whispered those words in the dark.” Outside of recovery circles (and even sometimes in them) people who fall into addiction aren’t given permission to grieve. They’re supposed to overcome, repent, fix, get their shit together—and to do it quietly, somewhere else, without inconveniencing everyone else. While I’m not denying the pain and trauma that ripple through the lives of the addicted, nor the responsibility to face and heal what we can, the idea that there’s no real loss for us when we give up drinking, that we’re not entitled to grieve because we’ve brought this upon ourselves, these are destructive, insidious lies. It’s yet another face of the corrosive shame that keeps us bound and tortured in the cycle of addiction.I would have spiraled, hidden myself away, and done anything to unhear those words. I had worked my entire life to try to shape your opinion of me, and to avoid - at any and all costs - criticism and judgment...Why? Because I was ashamed. While I was reading this beautifully written, raw, and honest novel, a part of me was thinking, "Well my 'flaws', my 'addictions' are nowhere near that bad. they don't harm anyone. they don't make it so I can't live my day to day life. They are harmless compared to all this." It’s supposed to be difficult. It’s supposed to take everything you have. It’s supposed to take longer than you want and to change you, completely. This often won’t feel good when it’s happening, but nothing worth having ever does." We think it is the aloneness we fear, but I believe what we actually fear is not having a home within ourselves. For so long, I did not trust my own landscape. I had believed the stories I learned about it, and I had taken every chance to avoid living there and learning her. Sobriety forced a closeness to myself and to life that was at first excruciating. It burned, and it burned, and it burned. But in the ashes from burning all the things I was not, I found her. I found me.

We Are the Luckiest Quotes by Laura McKowen(page 2 of 2) We Are the Luckiest Quotes by Laura McKowen(page 2 of 2)

You are always with me. You are never alone. And everything I have is yours. You are granted all the love in the universe simply because you exist, not because you are good. Love was never yours to lose — you cannot lose it. It will never let you go.”Maybe I felt like she would be too intimidating. Too perfect. A shining example of a woman who has it all figured out and is surviving in sobriety. And here is the thing we must know about our things if we are ever going to survive them: We believe we can bury them, when the truth is, they’re burying us. They will always bury us, eventually." We can wish for, hope for and pray for change, but ultimately it’s our decisions that lead to creating a new normal for ourselves. We can learn new coping mechanisms and ways to deal with stress or embrace our emotions – but if we don’t actively use them, then they won’t work. If we are watching someone who’s been sober for a long time, it would be a disservice to us to look at the journey and compare it to our own. This is how it is done - how anything is done. One moment, then the next, then the next. This is how this book is being written: I type this word, then this one, then this one. The words build sentences. The sentences build a paragraph. A book is impossible, but a word and then another word is not. A lifetime of sobriety was impossible, but a moment of sobriety was not. I was doing it, and I was doing it, and I was doing it again.”