Something Next To Normal

It’s not that the sacred is here and the profane is over there. Everything is profane if you live on the surface of it, and everything is sacred if you go into the depths of it - even your sin.

As a child I was taught to believe addicts are somehow “bad people.” However, now that I am white-knuckling through my own sobriety and recovery, I am finding these so-called “bad people” are my soulmates. Addicts are remarkable people. Addicts fight a war within themselves every single day. Addicts are stereotyped and discriminated against. Addicts are beaten down and made to believe they are weak. With all odds against them, addicts do live healthy lives in recovery, and for that, I am grateful.

You will never be completely at home again, because part of your heart always will be elsewhere. That is the price you pay for the richness of loving and knowing people in more than one place.

The capacity to be alone is the capacity to love. It may look paradoxical to you, but it is not. It is an existential truth: only those people who are capable of being alone are capable of love, of sharing, of going into the deepest core of the other person—without possessing the other, without becoming dependent on the other, without reducing the other to a thing, and without becoming addicted to the other.