I get the cold sweats just watching Kash Patel (and Pete Hegseth for that matter) and remembering the days when my drinking was so bad that people noticed. I always thought I was so slick and sly keeping myself mysterious.
People knew I was an alcoholic. Everybody knew but me.
That’s not true, I knew, which is why I ran so far away from any sort of accountability. In fact, I interpreted concern from others as judgment. And that made me angrier at myself, telling myself they were naysayers, saboteurs, and enemies. But I would retreat back into the booze or pill bottle when it came time to fix myself, blaming everyone else again.
It was a cycle that was reassuring for me in its own weird way.
The most perplexing thing about alcoholics that non-alcoholics never grasp is that no amount of external pressure will ever convince us that we’re broken and we need help. Our literature describes the “rock bottom” that we all hit but outsiders interpret it as homelessness, death, or humiliation. It can be those things but I’ve known plenty of alcoholics who had homes, lived full lives, and were held in high esteem by their peers.
Rock bottom is when the next thing we’re about to lose is greater than all the things we’ve lost to our addictions. Whatever that is.
For me, it was my mother’s joy and my own health.
On the surface, I looked like I had it together. I moved myself from my rural South Dakota reservation to Minneapolis, had a job as a managing editor at a community newspaper, lived in a tony part of the city, and had an active social life. But none of that mattered when I started coughing up blood and was unable to hold down solids.
In recovery, we say many things but what stands out for me this week, watching Kash Patel implode is simply: there is a chair waiting for you in the rooms of recovery.
We are not called to have official opinions, I am not speaking on behalf of any one particular recovery group, and I would never think I was better than the FBI Director nor the Secretary of Defense in Trump’s administration.
But I know one when I see one.
The gift and joy of recovery is it gives us enough pause to stop seeing enemies everywhere. And even if we do have enemies everywhere, it teaches us to prioritize ourselves and remove ourselves from situations that cause us to drink in the first place. And I wish that for every active alcoholic and addict who’s caught in this cage of our own making that only shrinks the harder we struggle against it.
The freedom from guilt, shame, and sorrow begins when we admit that we’re powerless.
Hoyekiyapi 
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