Thanks to all who replied.
"In recovery" is one of those really interesting places for someone who is interested in the human experience. There's a great deal going on - the paths of self-destructiveness that have taken people into recovery and the multiple ways that people have found to redeem themselves. In fact there seem to be as many ways to redemption as there are people, and ten times as many blind allies. There are all the stories of people who didn't make it, or who thought they had made it, or who thought they never could make it. For me it is an intense drama, but not one that I can easily remain detached from. And it is full of the unexpected. There are many stories which I have heard which continuously tell me that I do not know anything about anything, very much. That my framework of pigeonholes and categories for people is quite inadequate. But they, these stories, all have in common their humanity. I may have come to believe that I knew what the boundaries were to what it is to be human, but I have moved closer to admitting defeat over that one too - I don't know the extent of the human experience. And "in recovery" is that really demanding place where all the people who need redemption, and all their different ways of finding it, interfaces with all the stuff I don't know. The stuff I don't know is what I call G*d. So you ask me if I believe in G*d and I can honestly say I don't know. But I do believe in all the stuff that I don't know. In fact, I believe in all the stuff I don't know with all my heart! And I can truly say that I never used to. Sorry, that's an aside. All I can say is that when I came to believe in a power greater than myself - all the stuff that I don't know - nothing in the universe changed. Only this human shifted, just a little. But even in this little shift, lots more of what it is to be human in other people came into view - just enough so that I began to see that what had always appeared two-dimensional before was much much more than that, and hid much more than it displayed, so making me see that I knew less than I thought, and my frameworks were not comprehensive or anything like it. And the only thing I could truly know, if I was diligent enough, was myself. And often, the only way we catch sight of ourselves is in the brief reflection back from others, as in a shop window.
Bit of a ramble. I am a human, and nothing that is of humanity is of disinterest to me.