No One Knew

Dear ESSAY,

It wasn’t until I first entered recovery that I heard of rigorous honesty. No one knew the real me. None of my closest friends, none of the women that I had dated, not even my wife, knew about my addiction. 

The program of recovery made me realize that my addiction thrives in secrecy. I had one dark secret that no one knew besides God and myself. My sponsor asked if I had any dark secrets that I had never revealed to anyone. After telling him the story, he offered me grace and said he was not shocked by it. 

My motives were always suspect when it came to my addiction. Now I realize that my motives can also be suspect when it comes to how I share in meetings, with my accountability circle, and with my sponsor. The program’s Step Four says, “Made a searching and fearless moral inventory of ourselves.” Fear, I think, is the most powerful character defect I have to deal with. The fear of shame cannot be allowed to paralyze me from action. It used to feel like this Program was brutal, but now I see it is rigorous. I want to continue with rigorous honesty.

Dear ESSAY,

I warmly congratulate you on your invaluable service to the worldwide SA fellowship, a service that reaches far beyond borders and touches many lives. 

Rigorous honesty does not arrive as a blow, but as a light. It does not come to accuse; it comes to reveal. In the Program, we learn that the most persistent lie was not the one we told the world, but the one we whispered to ourselves.

To be rigorously honest is to stop running. It is to look at our own heart without fear of naming what hurts. When that truth is spoken softly before another, a quiet miracle occurs: isolation breaks, and fellowship is born. We discover that our story, when told truthfully, no longer separates us but begins to unite us.

Honesty is also the threshold of true amends. There can be no repair where pride still rules or where justification lingers. Only when the truth is offered, asking nothing in return, can harm begin to heal and peace find room to enter.

Today, just for today, I choose truth because within it there is no punishment, only rest. As the White Book reminds us, we are called to “develop a manner of living which demands rigorous honesty,” and in that truth, step by step, freedom ceases to be a promise and becomes a home.