It all started with a pinching pain I felt when doing my Fourth Step work over the past three months. I thought that I would be fine in time. For me, Step One had been the most difficult: seeing my disease from a very close distance and accepting my powerlessness over it and the unmanageability caused due to lust in my whole life.

I thought that I could do all the other Steps more easily than Step One, but it hit me when I started doing Step Four, specifically my sex conduct inventory listing all my adult partners, romantic relations, abusers, and all others with whom I experienced sexual exposure in some or the other way. IT WAS A SWIRLING EXPERIENCE FOR ME, especially when I started seeing and feeling the pain due to the amount of harm I have done to all the boys and men in my lust-filled life. I was not able to bear that pain. I shared with my sponsor from time to time, reached out to my sisters’ group and attended meetings, but when I still wasn’t able to cope after all the surrenders to my Higher Power, I needed something more than this to come out of the guilt, shame, self pity, and remorse. I cried, became worried, stressed, and anxious.

Suddenly my younger son came to me and started showing me some paintings and I had an idea from my Higher Power! I also picked up the paper, some water and the colors, and started playing with them. I put a drop of water, touched it with a brush of color and the spectrum of colors appeared.

It looked to me as if my secrets were coming into the light and showing me that wide range of colors which is another life for me. I need not mix colors, but when I spread the water on the whole sheet of paper, touched slightly with the tip of the colored brush, a shape of a beautiful flower appeared, as if my life is blooming with yet another meaning to it in the form of sobriety and recovery.

I felt much much better and became engrossed in the process, making more and more of these paintings. The hidden artist in me from my childhood was reborn and I was diverted from the unbearable pain I had been going through. I felt relieved and today I feel I am in a much better place in my life spiritually. The healing began as I did my Step Five with my sponsor. She moved me along to Step Six now.

God does for me what I cannot do for myself. Thank you for letting me BE.