I don’t compare my recovery to anyone else’s

We all arrive in sobriety from different places.  We start off in a unique position.  Accepting that someone else’s day 1, day 10, day 100 will be different from mine has been a lifesaver.  Comparison takes my focus off myself.  It isn’t helpful, it brings in better than and less than, challenging my ability to sit with self worth and acceptance.  And those two things there, lack of self worth and acceptance, those have to be faced into and challenged.  Because thoughts that don’t help have no place in my thinking.   Sitting in meetings I could be pulled into those thoughts.  In the early days, I compared my drinking.  Every drinking story was better than mine and I assessed my own on a qualification perspective.  I didn’t qualify for membership of a sobriety programme.  My own drinking stories were inadequate and I wanted better ones.  It didn’t matter that I was sat in this room wanting to change, my thinking wanted me to do more drinking.  There were huge internal debates until I began to watch them.  From a distance.  I sat back from my thinking and saw that it wasn’t helping me.  I’d come into sobriety because it had got as bad as I wanted it to get.  I didn’t want to do anymore.  So I told the thoughts to stop, I looked at the similarities, no longer the differences.  And I accepted that where I was, that was the only place I needed to be.

I have learnt to focus on the thoughts that I need to stay sober, just those.