“You forget what you’re doing as you’re doing it. Your brain’s neurons seem to sputter when they should be firing. To focus on anything for longer than a few minutes is impossible. Try to get a letter going, or read, or think along a linear course, and your thoughts turn to ether.”

“During this period, I also began training to become a therapist and have listened to people with varying degrees of addictive behavior or substance-abuse histories talk about their own skepticism over whether they fit the profile for recovery—the shame of feeling like their stories aren’t story-like enough. While the binary works for some people to change their lives the way they need to—drunk or sober, using or not using, addict or non-addict—others may benefit from the idea of a spectrum, if only to lower the chances of self-disqualifying.”

“On some of my worst days when I’d get angry about the trial or feel ashamed about who I was or what happened to Gawker, I wanted to run that story about the amends letter just to tell people how he was a fraud who never reconnected to me to prove that, once and for all, I was the ONLY one who was really growing here and that he was the one who was full of shit this whole time. But what would that have proven? I would have probably ended up writing him another amends letter after that. That’s not a good way to live life, always causing problems, destroying, then amending. I’m glad I let it go.

“I have absolutely no idea why more people don’t talk about how miserable early sobriety can be — how once you’ve stopped anesthetizing yourself from reality you’re immediately forced to become present or die trying. I didn’t know about the necessity of therapy in order to quiet the demons that led me to drink; I didn’t even know those demons were real, as I had convinced myself my “problem” was medical in origin. Feeling as though my brain was constantly trying to crawl out of my skull at recovery meetings made me, naturally, assume something was wrong with me.” — Megan Koester