Once upon a time there was woman who sat at a bar, clothes half falling off, mascara smudged beneath her eyes as she slurred to a tattooed well-built young bartender about how one day she was going to be a writer. Now imagine this, the look that was on his face as he could really care less about this barfly’s drunken dreams. He’d heard them all before. In fact, the only thing she was good at writing that he could see was her phone number on bar napkins for random strangers th

I am a recovering addict who values my anonymity. Let me be clear, though, I am not ashamed of my status of being an addict in recovery. In fact, I am incredibly grateful for (most) everything I have been through that has made me who I am today. A big aspect of anonymity is privacy. This is why we don’t use last names, or take photos in meetings. This is why, at the end of some meetings, we say “what you see here, and what you hear here, let it stay here.” This is why there i

Recovery, whether you're a newcomer or have been clean and sober for some time, is all about change. We don't get well looking at things the same we've always looked at things, thinking the same way we've always thought of things and definitely not doing the same things we've always done. When I came into recovery, there was a lot of tearing off I needed to do. I needed to strip multitudes of layers off—anger, resentment, lies, self-centeredness, selfishness and heaps of deni