I can't speak for anyone else, but I came to realize pretty early in the long-term sobriety I started in 1983 that I wasn't at all happy with the life I was living before I started drinking, a life that made me more susceptible to addictions, to desperately attempt to find ways to escape my own reality, to be drawn to self-criticism and self-loathing, than otherwise. I was then, and remain today, the most formidable obstacle to living what I consider to be a good life.

The "good life" I imagined I'd had before drinking was a fantasy, a protective measure that enabled me to believe that "everything was fine before I started drinking." It was never that way. If I wanted to stay sober, to build a better life, then I needed to jettison my defensive notion of "the good old days." Fact is, a healthy part of me wanted nothing to do with who and what I was before. Over time, I became grateful that I'd lost all that I'd lost from my fractured fairy tale.

I needed to start over, and the first step was to obliterate a fantasied life that I'd never lived.

Next to having had a previous relapse, living in shame is the best predictor of another relapse. There's no short cut that I'm aware of to increase self-confidence, to learn to trust ourselves and others who are worthy of our trust, or to living a life that has meaning or purpose. What I know about myself is that every time I've worked to build a better life, a life that makes it difficult for me to drink if I wanted to (and I no longer do), that I was also unwittingly building a better and stronger me, regardless of the outcome of my work. A lot of that work was about accepting my fears for what they were, and then taking action in spite of them, rather than sit on the sidelines because of them.

When I start thinking about where I've been and who and what I'm in the process of becoming, I start having weird thoughts, like whether or not all the work is worth the effort, or whether or not there is a point to my existence. But, there isn't, so I continue to do what I'm doing to make the best of what I have.

Fear is not the enemy. The enemy is a failure to act when we finally get to a place where we're serious about wanting more from ourselves and more from our lives. We're not here forever, and not everyone gets more than a second chance to set things right, or a second chance at all to work through our fears. Besides, without fear, courage would be impossible.