The first thing that comes to mind is this degree of some kind of personal responsibility, regardless of disservices done in places we may want to blame or criticize or complain. At the end of the day, it kind of feels like I'm an agent in this body and I have so much ability to choose what I'm going to do with it, and fingers crossed, I do what's useful for myself and others....

Sometimes it's easy to forget how it felt before I got sober, but I think such a big part of it that, I didn't think of it in this way at the time, was that I was really cut off from other people. I mean, I had people in my life. I did have some support networks, but I think there were a lot of barriers that I had built up that made it difficult to connect with people. And even being in the recovery community or in different recovery communities, you hear a lot of people say, kind of just feeling like they were different or they never fit in, or you hear all these different ways of describing not feeling connected, not feeling a part of something bigger.

For some folks, the inner critic is loud and pervasive. For others, it is a mere annoyance, a pest, like a stubborn mosquito that just won’t leave you alone. Each of us has our own unique version–different scripts with different voice actors. (Tangentially, what if your inner critic had the voice of Morgan Freeman? Or David Attenborough? That would be something.)

For me, this topic hits close to home. I’ve walked through much of life with a pervasive and ruthless inner critic…