When I got sober, mtnmagic, I was finishing up a multi-year divorce, going through formal proceedings to fire me from my job, and facing sentencing for a felony charge.
About the only thing I had going for me was nothing to lose. I could surrender to the 12 Steps because I had no choice but to surrender. So, I stayed focused on those actions, every day, making a little progress in the solution that had worked for others. And some days those first few months were hard, but my circumstances became kind of a background noise. They were not the focus of my life at the time. Instead, I focused on that flimsy thread that seemed like my only hope of getting through this.
The end result was a completely different life and a chance to clean up the messes I had made. I'm sure that if I had focused instead on the messes, there would have been the same life and many new messes in it.