My job has nothing to do with graphic design, advertising, illustration of magazines, or anything like that … years ago in my beginnings in SA I combined the design of the bulletin of my parish with sessions of consumption of chat and pornography … only by a miracle of my Higher Power did I never by accident place a lust image in one of those newsletters… And, logically, the quality of my work was barely regular, the time invested twice as much as normal, I stayed up late and I used to be easily annoyed if someone criticized my work.

I have had several episodes of withdrawal in SA, from days to months without consuming, I became what the literature calls a “periódico”, or chronic relapser, a pattern that has been repeated over and over again… Today I am less than a month away from turning one year of sobriety and my knees tremble just thinking about making the fatal decision and consuming again… You’ve taught me that recovery is one day at a time… and that service is a fundamental pillar of a sober and happy life, so I am deeply grateful for being given the opportunity to be part of the translation group of the ESSAY magazine into Spanish.

Today is Sunday, the first of January 2023, it has been the most productive day in terms of the work of organizing the ESSAY magazine of the month of December 2022, originally I dreamed of having the magazine ready for Christmas… This was not possible… I’m thankful that it is… just like this… for who wants to see my ego saying: “… they saw guys… I made it…”

The magazine is an exceptionally good work, the illustrations are of high quality, the texts are organized with elegance and sobriety, there are no excesses in the use of color or font size, I am sure that if we did a twelve-step worldwide contest of fraternity newsletters, our beloved ESSAY would win first place.

The work of passing the magazine from English to Spanish, involves not only cutting and pasting images, but also translating texts that sometimes is not an easy task, because some phrases when translated literally lose meaning, requiring then to change the text in its literalness to make it more understandable, we could say that in the work of translation, We try to make the final texts understandable for Spanish-speaking readers.

The translation team is made up of men and women from various countries, with varying degrees of English proficiency, but with a shared desire to serve, there is camaraderie between us, and I have no hesitation in thinking that our hearts are filled with pride and joy at seeing each edition translated.

In this work we all win, it is impressive to read the stories, somehow we connect positively with the original writers, we are enormously blessed with the possibility of providing this service. Just for today!