As part of my recovery over the past five years, I’ve made cartoons based on recovery concepts. Translating my recovery into visual terms helps keep me focused on the solution. The cartoon below came to me in May of 2009, while at the house of an old-timer in the UK where I was staying to work the Steps.

I had joined SA a year before and started meetings with three other members here in Belgium, but I could not stay sober. After yet another severe binge, I crossed the channel to visit this fellow. I had heard that this man led three-day workshops on SA’s Twelve Steps in many countries around the world, and after retirement he opened his home to members who wanted to do intensive work on the Twelve Steps.

I was fortunate to be one of those invited to his home in England. I lived there for six days, sleeping on a thin foam mattress in his study. During my visit, I worked through Steps one through Eight with him.

One morning, while I was sitting at a table in the living room of this fairytale house, I wrote a Fourth Step. The special way he had me work Step Four came down to him, he said, from an early AA member. While focusing on my part of my resentments and being confronted with the endless list of my recurring character defects, a primitive version of a cartoon of a ship’s captain—ignoring the dangers ahead—popped into my mind. This drawing of the captain ignoring the dangers represented me. It seemed that I had always avoided looking at my defects, and I was feeling devastated and hopeless at the time.

Afterward, when I was reading my Fifth Step, I shared some painful truths about my past with this man. When I looked up at my friend sitting across the table, he looked back at me with loving eyes. I felt loved and accepted.

As powerful as these experiences were, however, the intense Step work did not keep me sober for long. Just a month later I went on another binge, which lasted two months. By the grace of God I finally recognized my powerlessness, and I’ve been sober since August 2009.

Over the years I’ve made other cartoons based on recovery concepts. These have always popped into in my mind in a moment. This is one of the tangible proofs for me of a “Power greater than myself” expressing Himself as a “Creativity greater than myself,” through me. He gives an idea and I am just His instrument to work it out on paper.

Many of the cartoon ideas that have come into my head over the years are still only drawings scribbled on paper, waiting to be worked out as something that might be helpful to others. And now with the help of my ever-patient Higher Power, I hope to be able to create more cartoons to illustrate our recovery principles. I believe God gave me this vision and ability, and hopefully my drawings will benefit others in their recovery.