This year I celebrated five years of SA sobriety, one day at the time, one moment at a time, one hour at a time and so on … This is a miracle that I have been blessed with. Could this have been possible before? No, it was not possible.

I have been in SA since 2014, and been through eight different sponsors (I am grateful for each one of them). My first sponsor was really nice and I pretended I was listening to him, but in reality I took what sounded fun and easy to do, and left the rest. I would just fill the things that I thought were great for my recovery. I did not open his emails when he sent me material. It was just a false sense of reality, thinking I was working the steps, but really I was doing something totally different … The sad truth was that I kept relapsing and got resentful.

Some years went by and during this time I went through a few sponsors, trying to find the “right” sponsor that would “jibe” with me. One day I was cleaning up my emails and found my first sponsor’s email that I had never opened. The topic was about slipping and relapsing. It had a couple of PDF files that were made for SA. As I read, I felt that I was seeing a program that I had never seen before. It spoke about cultivating different attitudes. If a person relapsed, increase your activity in the program it suggested. Every time I relapsed I just wanted to isolate myself away from the program and others. Sometimes I would wait a week before going to meetings so I would not feel the shame of saying “I am one day sober.”

I printed out the paper and took it as a guide for attitude changes. Suddenly the sponsor who I had at that time, started to feel like a real sponsor. I did everything he suggested from his own experience, I asked questions from him and if he did not know, I would call many other people and hear their experience, strength and hope. I was willing to mirror my sponsor and how he was working the program.

Today I can be free of lust, I can’t promise tomorrow. I am able to have a connection with a Higher Power that I thought had abandoned me, Step 2 and 3 changed that. I could see behind my “dirty windshield” that there’s a Higher Power waiting for me, His hand reaches out. Today, I can be grateful that sobriety has enabled so many things in life.

By the way did you know that Pikachu is unable to evolve like other Pokémons? If Pikachu wants to evolve to the next form, he needs help from his trainer, who has to find a specific item. I am Sanjiv who was unable to evolve on his own. I needed the care of Higher Power to show me the way to go. I needed the books, and the experience of others so I could find the light. The “trainer” who had worked the program before, a Sponsor. And the miracle of finding me within a Higher Power.

I have found out that “willingness” is the key, and that the promise that “it keeps getting better” is true!