The eternal discontent with my life is part of my illness. I cannot find myself. My life I do not like. I need something more. That enormous expectations that I had or that I have (for worldly success, recognition, pomp and honor, etc.) seems to be the reason why I feel empty.

What can fill that emptiness? Sometimes I think that it is not enough to do the Fourth Step, to make the changes, if I do not like my life anyway. What to do then? It may even happen that I am sober and I still do not like my life. Something is missing?

Lust is for me like a store of succulent sweets which I have renounced. I could go in to eat those sweets, entertain myself by practicing my sweet and painful addiction, but I would not be satisfied. I would find myself at the end of that feast completely alone and disappointed. I would try to get out of the store, but in such a drunken state I would not find the door or the key. In the end I would feel lost in my own addiction (I have already tried everything or almost everything). I would make signs through the window to the people who go outside to help me out, and even scream, without being heard. They would see my face on the other side of the window making absurd and incomprehensible gesticulations without understanding my strange despair, and they would go on. And more and more dull and stuck in obsession, not seeing my sorry state, I would continue eating the sweets that hurt me so much.

Do I want that? Of course not. But I do not want my life to be boring, which I do not accept. So, what do I want? I need to have a spiritual awakening. For this, I need to open my mind. Realize that what keeps me in that fixed position and leads me to suffer is not my life in itself, but the opinions and judgments I have about it, the inability to trust and accept it as it is (to take care of what I should do in each moment), without making comparisons. This life is what I need here and now. I do not have to harbor self-centered expectations of a mind closed in on itself. I even think that if any of those eccentric expectations were fulfilled, after enjoying it a little over time, I would again feel as empty. Because I would always wish for more and more.

So when I see that my human discontent is usually a form of egocentricity, an extraordinary form of stupidity that keeps me unhappy and suffering, I begin to renounce that attitude, and see the light at the end of the tunnel: I open my mind: I need to be grateful. I need to remember everything that has been given to help me get out of myself (the program, the sponsor, etc…). I need to stop waiting for something outside myself to satisfy me, becoming an illusory hope of satisfaction. I need something real. I need to begin to give, to render service. Then, at some point, after the authentic renunciation that expects nothing, I discover the promised joy, which has nothing to do with the destructive pleasure of my addiction. A joy that is beyond words, because it takes me out of my own limited mind.

Then I see clearly. My life as it is in sobriety and recovery is not an error, it is not wrong, it does not lack anything. I am the only one who is wrong. I open my mind to what this day of sobriety offers me, to the grace of God when I recognize that I am the only one who is wrong. Then, at that moment, the door of the candy store opens. And I’m outside. I’m not alone anymore I am no longer locked in my own mind.