Wisdom Of The Rooms - 2020

[bluidkiti]

August 17

Quote of the Week

"You grow, or you go."

Years ago, when I was new to the program, I heard someone say that if you got a horse thief sober, all you had was a sober horse thief. I couldn’t for the life of me understand what that meant. At the time, I thought that if someone got sober, then everything else would change, too. All the problems would go away, situations would get better, and life would improve in general. How wrong I was.

When I got sober, I still had a lot of old ideas that I acted on. I still felt like I deserved more than most people, and now that I wasn’t drinking anymore, I felt that the world owed me even more. Getting a normal job still seemed beneath me, so I used that as a rationalization to continue my illegal activities. My sense of entitlement led me to keep cheating in other ways as well, and soon I was even more miserable than I had been while drinking.

When I confronted my sponsor and asked why I wasn’t feeling better now that I was sober, he said it was because I was refusing to recover. He said just putting the plug in the jug but not changing anything else meant I was just another sober horse thief. He explained that recovery meant working the Twelve Steps and growing past my old self. Only by discarding the old and having a spiritual experience would I change and feel better. As I watched others refuse to do this and go back out, I realized the wisdom in the saying: You grow, or you go.