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“I like flaws and feel more comfortable around people who have them. I myself am made entirely of flaws, stitched together with good intentions.”
― Augusten Burroughs, Magical Thinking: True Stories

“I used to feel so alone in the city. All those gazillions of people and then me, on the outside. Because how do you meet a new person? I was very stunned by this for many years. And then I realized, you just say, "Hi." They may ignore you. Or you may marry them. And that possibility is worth that one word.”
― Augusten Burroughs

“You don't have to preserve your pain in order to prove that it was real.”
― Brittany Burgunder

“Needing help doesn't have a look, but asking for it always looks beautiful.”
― Brittany Burgunder

“Sometimes we motivate ourselves by thinking of what we want to become. Sometimes we motivate ourselves by thinking about who we don't ever want to be again. Everything we do is part of who we are. How we choose to use those memories, to motivate or to submit is entirely up to us.”
― Shane Niemeyer - The Hurt Artist

“I came to think that maybe God was what you believed in because you needed to feel you weren’t alone. Maybe God was simply that part of yourself that was always there and always strong, even when you were not.”
― Augusten Burroughs, A Wolf at the Table

“Change is inevitable. Progression is a choice. We all move, but are you going to move forward?”
― Ricky Maye

“We did not come into this world loathing ourselves or wishing to numb or feelings. As small children, we operated from a place of wonder, curiosity, spontaneity and creativity.”
― Christopher Dines, Drug Addiction Recovery: The Mindful Way

“While we are in recovery we need to be able to strike a balance between not allowing our ego to do all the talking and not letting our low self-esteem to only present what is wrong with us.”
― Noah Levine, Refuge Recovery: A Buddhist Path to Recovering from Addiction

“When we are forced to endure what we cannot endure, something breaks inside our minds. That broken-mindedness is commonly called trauma.”
― Macdougall John

“Sometimes, he thought of himself as an elephant walking through the china store, breaking everything in his path and still expecting people not to be angry with the damage he made, but rather to admire his strength and his endurance.”
― Stevan V. Nikolic, Truth According to Michael

“We learn that the program won’t work when we try to adapt it to our life. We must learn to adapt our life to the program.”
― Narcotics Anonymous, Narcotics Anonymous

“we are powerless over our addiction. I am asking you to admit something further: that you are powerless over life.”
― Rami M. Shapiro, Recovery—The Sacred Art: The Twelve Steps as Spiritual Practice

“When you are on the brink of giving up...then you’re right around the corner of where you were headed.”
― Justin Daniels, No More Vodka in My Orange Juice

“I am a work in progress.”
― Violet Yates, Lost & Found

“Everything I've ever let go of has claw marks on it. (on the wall of a bedroom at a recovery house for alcoholics and drug addicts)”
― David Foster Wallace

“Trust yourself. You’ve survived a lot, and you’ll survive whatever is coming.”
― Robert Tew

“I lived to be forgotten because I'd forgotten how to live”
― Joseph Meyering Sr

“Just because something is familiar, doesn't mean it's safe. And just because something feels safe, doesn't mean it's good for you.”
― Brittany Burgunder

“There's a peculiar thing that happens every time you get clean. You go through this sensation of rebirth. There's something intoxicating about the process of the comeback, and that becomes an element in the whole cycle of addiction. Once you've beaten yourself down with cocaine and heroin, and you manage to stop and walk out of the muck you begin to get your mind and body strong and reconnect with your spirit. The oppressive feeling of being a slave to the drugs is still in your mind, so by comparison, you feel phenomenal. You're happy to be alive, smelling the air and seeing the beauty around you...You have a choice of what to do. So you experience this jolt of joy that you're not where you came from and that in and of itself is a tricky thing to stop doing. Somewhere in the back of your mind, you know that every time you get clean, you'll have this great new feeling.

Cut to: a year later, when you've forgotten how bad it was and you don't have that pink-cloud sensation of being newly sober. When I look back, I see why these vicious cycles can develop in someone who's been sober for a long time and then relapses and doesn't want to stay out there using, doesn't want to die, but isn't taking the full measure to get well again. There's a concept in recovery that says 'Half-measures avail us nothing.' When you have a disease, you can't take half the process of getting well and think you're going to get half well; you do half the process of getting well, you're not going to get well at all, and you'll go back to where you came from. Without a thorough transformation, you're the same guy, and the same guy does the same shit. I kept half-measuring it, thinking I was going to at least get something out of this deal, and I kept getting nothing out of it”
― Anthony Keidis, Scar Tissue

“Yesterday it was sun outside. The sky was blue and people were lying under blooming cherry trees in the park. It was Friday, so records were released, that people have been working on for years. Friends around me find success and level up, do fancy photo shoots and get featured on big, white, movie screens. There were parties and lovers, hand in hand, laughing perfectly loud,
but I walked numbly through the park, round and round,
40 times for 4 hours
just wanting to make it through the day.

There's a weight that inhabits my chest some times. Like a lock in my throat, making it hard to breathe. A little less air got through
and the sky was so blue I couldn’t look at it because it made me sad, swelling tears in my eyes and they dripped quietly on the floor as I got on with my day. I tried to keep my focus, ticked off the to-do list, did my chores. Packed orders, wrote emails, paid bills and rewrote stories,
but the panic kept growing, exploding in my chest. Tears falling on the desk
tick tick tick
me not making a sound
and some days I just don't know what to do. Where to go or who to see and I try to be gentle, soft and kind,
but anxiety eats you up and I just want to be fine.
This is not beautiful. This is not useful. You can not do anything with it and it tries to control you, throw you off your balance and lovely ways
but you can not let it.

I cleaned up. Took myself for a walk. Tried to keep my eyes on the sky. Stayed away from the alcohol, stayed away from the destructive tools we learn to use.
the smoking and the starving, the running, the madness,
thinking it will help but it only feeds the fire
and I don't want to hurt myself anymore.
I made it through and today I woke up, lighter and proud because I'm still here. There are flowers growing outside my window. The coffee is warm, the air is pure. In a few hours I'll be on a train on my way to sing for people who invited me to come, to sing, for them. My own songs, that I created. Me—little me. From nowhere at all.
And I have people around that I like and can laugh with, and it's spring again.
It will always be spring again.
And there will always be a new day.”
― Charlotte Eriksson

“So I am not a broken heart.
I am not the weight I lost or miles or ran and I am not the way I slept on my doorstep under the bare sky in smell of tears and whiskey because my apartment was empty and if I were to be this empty I wanted something solid to sleep on. Like concrete.
I am not this year and I am not your fault.
I am muscles building cells, a little every day, because they broke that day,
but bones are stronger once they heal and I am smiling to the bus driver and replacing my groceries once a week and I am not sitting for hours in the shower anymore.
I am the way a life unfolds and bloom and seasons come and go and I am the way the spring always finds a way to turn even the coldest winter into a field of green and flowers and new life.
I am not your fault.”
― Charlotte Eriksson, You're Doing Just Fine

“Take a shower, wash off the day. Drink a glass of water. Make the room dark. Lie down and close your eyes.
Notice the silence. Notice your heart. Still beating. Still fighting. You made it, after all. You made it, another day. And you can make it one more.
You’re doing just fine.”
― Charlotte Eriksson, You're Doing Just Fine

“If I had to offer up a one sentence definition of addiction, I'd call it a form of mourning for the irrecoverable glories of the first time...addiction can show us what is deeply suspect about nostalgia. That drive to return to the past isn't an innocent one. It's about stopping your passage to the future, it's a symptom of fear of death, and the love of predictable experience.

And the love of predictable experience, not the drug itself, is the major damage done to users.”
― Ann Marlowe

“The reality is that there are plenty of trustworthy people in the world rebuilding their lives. It was a very gradual process for me to open up and talk about what was really going on in my recovery. The more I started to take risks by talking to others, however, the more I had an opportunity to exercise boundaries. As I asserted new boundaries, I started to gravitate towards people with integrity, warmheartedness and decency.”
― Christopher Dines, Drug Addiction Recovery: The Mindful Way

“Beauty or meaning is not intrinsic too suffering. But if you can take the suffering and find the parts that are funny or profound, you can curate your world into something that might be entertaining for someone for a while. Eventually, maybe, that time will have been useful. More useful than, like, working in a bank.”
― Jade Sharma, Problems

“It's the days you have every right to breakdown and fall apart, yet choose to show up anyway that matter most. Don't diminish the small steps that others can't see.”
― Brittany Burgunder

“Recovery is full of ups and downs.
There is no such thing as a linear life.
But you can always turn your setbacks into setups to come back stronger.”
― Brittany Burgunder

“A huge part of recovery and life -is slowing down and accepting the unKNOWN. This is how you get to KNOW –yourself.”
― Brittany Burgunder

“Each time we surrender, we find once more that the desperation that drives us to our knees fuels the passion that carries us forward. When hope manifests into reality, our lives change. Our experience affirms what we believe, and belief grows into faith. When our faith grows into knowledge, the program that we once struggled to practice has become part of who we are. We find here what we were looking for all along: connection to others, connection to a Higher Power, connection to the world around us—and, most surprising of all, connection to ourselves.”
― Narcotics Anonymous, Living Clean: The Journey Continues