All will not go well. You should know that to speak out loud is to be misunderstood. You should know that you will go out and pour your whole heart into the world and someone will watch and then sit back and say: “Well, that’s not much!”

I could choose a lot of days over the course of my life that were turning points, but this particular day is big. Today, June the 1st, marks 30 years of continuous sobriety. The last day of May, 1985, I was 30 years old. I had lived off the grid since I moved from my parent’s home in 1971. My life up to that point had been a series of drunken, drugged, often suicidal days.