One humbling and empowering thing that I’ve found to be at the core of my sobriety has been the idea that I myself am responsible for a large portion of my misery. Not in the sense that there’s something fundamentally wrong with me, that I’m a weak sinner in need of surrendering to the superior force of grace; I mean that in the sense that my drinking wasn’t immediately provoked by my circumstances but by me riling myself up with a particular story about my circumstances and by a particular story about myself. Rather than just focus on what’s going on right in front of me I would freak out relentlessly about things that might maybe happen someday or about things that had happened long long ago. I would make “being in my head” extremely agitating and extremely compelling, then I drink to get away from all the thoughts and all the feelings about thoughts that I had cooked up for myself.