I was done: the floor was too spongy. I can’t remember if it was New Year’s Day, or New Year’s Eve, but we were in the house we’d just bought nine months before. Living in an old house is like any other relationship: you bask in the loveliness and you acquire a tolerance for quirks and flaws. But this one was too much for me. My husband and I went downstairs to the basement and discovered that, oh, crud: there was A Problem. One of the floor joists had cracked, and its sagging made the water line weight bearing. My beloved called his father and got advice. We made a trip to the hardware store for a “temporary” jack stand that was undoubtably starting its career as a permanent feature of my home. We learned how to sister joists. What I’m really telling you is that we fixed before it was a crisis.

That’s the best practice for most problems. You don’t wait for an imminent crash before hitting the breaks. You don’t wait for the garden to be choked with weeds before yanking them out. You don’t wait for a friendship to be a breath away from dissolution before trying to reconcile; you start when you notice something’s up.

And then we have how our culture perceives issues with substance use and addiction. There is an idea floating around that someone must be at “rock bottom” before they will acknowledge an issue. That’s like waiting for the house to collapse before repairing it.

I borrowed Russell Brand’s Recovery: Freedom from Addictions because I was feeling an itch to read recovery literature, and this was the first hit in the search. Russell Brand is apparently famous. I can not identify a single movie he has been in. I also think I had confused him with Russell Crowe. This is normal for me – I am wildly oblivious to movies. Brand, a British fellow re-writes the Alcoholics Anonymous twelve steps into profane vernacular, and then describes his experience with encouragement for the reader to follow in his footsteps.

Morbid curiosity carried me through a lot of the book. For one, Brand violates the first tenet of memoir-writing: you need to have a relatable narrator. He and I may just be incompatible, and that’s OK. At times he struck me as someone whose company requires a lot of patience to keep. I did respect his unflinching discussion of his struggles and his efforts to work on them. The detail and vulnerability is brave, and his motivation with the exposure appeared to be the hope he could help others, which is admirable. He found success in the 12 steps, and presumes a universality to them in the way that a convert to Christianity is really excited to tell you about Jesus.

For me, this book helped me clarify why the 12 steps feel almost like a threat to my well-being.

Once upon a time (5 years, 9 months, and 24 days ago) I realized I was on a destructive path with my drinking and that if I didn’t stop, and stop outright, bad things would happen. So I did. I did not do a program. I did not seek professional help. In the same way I’ve broken every other bad habit I’ve ever had, I more or less white knuckled my way out while counting successful days. I texted a very good friend in moments of more acute temptation; I will always remember his kindness with gratitude.

Embarrassment and shame initially kept me from telling most people that I was changing. I was going to quietly fix the problem instead of admitting that I had one. My husband would have to confirm but I think I was 2 weeks into abstention before I admitted to him, my partner and love of my life, that the lack of drinking was going to have to be permanent.

You see, my life was not unmanageable. I had a job, a husband, kids, a house, and lots of friends. I now have a different, better job. The friend roster has seen some expansion and rotation – but everything else is the same. Despite the later signs that I had acquired a physical dependence, I was rarely hungover. This was not rock bottom, in the ways that I have heard and seen other people land there. I saw a warning light, and heeded it. Thus far, I have not relapsed.

That should be a type of triumph: fixing something serious before its maximized its destructiveness. We take that approach with just about everything else. We repair the car when it starts acting odd. We see a doctor at the initial signs of illness instead of waiting to be near death. And then we shrug about people using substances I’ve felt like a very narrow understanding about a struggle has been projected on me that doesn’t line up with my experience.

One of the ideas is that you’re not actually recovered unless you do 12 steps, which I have never done and actively avoided. Allow me to clarify: there’s an AA group that meets around the corner from me. I’ve encountered the (usually) gentlemen outside on a smoke break when I go for walks. They give off vibes of warmth and kindness. I am not avoiding a group of people who have decided to give strangers moral support. I think the people are really lovely. I am avoiding the steps themselves.

My relationship to a higher power is very Unitarian Universalist – in flux, subject to change as my understanding of the world changes, not something I prioritize relative to the energy I put into trying to do a decent job of being alive. I will say that Brand’s rebranding of the 12 steps was actually pretty UU-friendly on that point, emphasizing one’s own smallness in the grand order of things, and open to a lot of interpretations of “higher power”.

But! I do not experience myself as powerless, and feeling OK in a scary world requires me to have a keen eye on where I have agency. Because that’s the truth: my agency may be limited but it definitely exists. If I had waited to surrender to something that I am not sure about to quit drinking, yeah, that never wouldn’t have happened. The first three steps that require you to surrender an understanding of your agency to some higher power are opposed to my spirituality.

There are the steps about making a fearless moral inventory of yourself, listing every resentment you have and confessing that to someone else. People who do 12 steps reportedly find this one empowering. I am happy for them. But, uh, spare me.

The twelve steps start with an underlying assumption that everyone is depraved. That’s Calvinist; I’m Universalist. People want to make the 12 steps more religiously palatable by futzing with the language of the first few steps. However, they don’t have the theological literacy to understand that the fourth and fifth steps are fundamental tenets of a very specific religion. Go find God and make amends, you heathen. I did not need to do either of these to stop drinking.

I exist as a white woman in a perfectionistic society. The idea that one is inadequate unless perfect is pervasive and serves to reinforce a status quo of hierarchy. The UU principle of everyone having inherent worth and dignity was salvific for me because of this context. It’s taken so much spiritual work for me to understand in my bones that the flawed version of me is fine, or fine enough. Taking too seriously the idea that I’m not worthy unless I am meeting everyone else’s expectations has landed in me in far more trouble because it leads me to other harmful behaviors. The structure of this step requires adopting a self-concept of deficit. It’s been easier for me to own my faults and make amends when the faults do not feel like evidence of being a terrible person. If I understand that I’m OK, nobody’s perfect, and doing better is supposed to be a persistent work in progress… I do better.

That truth can coexist with the very real and true fact that making amends for wrongdoing is a core part of maintaining human relationships. It can coexist with how coming to terms with yourself can be healing. I need to do these to keep my marriage, my friends, be an effective parent, have a job, and so forth. Those are different tasks.

The project of the 12 steps is not so much a “stop substance use” but “become as spiritually perfect as you can.” To which I wonder out loud: are people who never had substance use issues spiritually perfect? Was it the attainment of perfection that keeps them well? No. It’s better coping skills. You can get there through other roads.

Another idea is that you are permanently an addict. I do not long for alcohol 98% of the time. I coexist with wine bottles in the house that we use for cooking (check out Kevin Thurston’s winter tomato sauce recipe, it’s GOOD) without feeling tempted to drink them – this is just what I do now. I do not go to bars because the sickeningly sweet smell of alcohol is in the bad memory part of my brain; I don’t like being there. But if I’m in a restaurant with a bar, whatever. I do not longing look at the drinks menu. I feel more like a non-drinker than an ex-drinker these days, though it took some time to get there.

Succinctly stated: I have avoided the 12 steps because I feel like they are designed to make me feel like a bad person constantly trying to prove she isn’t. Not for nothing, some stats show it only works 5-10% of the time. That’s comparable to the prevalence of left-handedness, which for people who have recently spent time around others, can observe isn’t that common at all.

A different tactic for substance use is harm reduction. The woman who runs the harm reduction team at work describes recovery as “any positive progress.” You’re not aiming for perfect, you’re aiming for better, which we’ll describe as less destructiveness. It meets people with empathy and understanding. Like the strongest part of AA, it emphases connection to other people. It doesn’t pull up a ruler with a measurement that one isn’t meeting and them blames them for failing to meet it. It is considered an evidence based practice.

I am a sober person, a non-drinker, or a former drinker. I have felt outside of all the ways people create senses of belonging with those descriptions. Out beyond ideas of wrongdoing and rightdoing, There is a field, or so says Rumi. I feel like I have spent a lot of time there. There are so many ways that a person’s lived truth will run contrary to the concepts that exist in their culture to define it. I have found comfort in Mary Oliver’s much quoted admonishment – You don’t have to be good. You already belong.

I suppose this is nearly 2,000 words to the wandering person on the internet to say: listen. If you are where I was, noticing there is a problem, heed the warning light. Just because you have not hit catastrophe may not be proof that it’s OK if your intuition is whispering otherwise. If the 12 steps failed you, try something else. (If they worked for you, as they did for Mr. Brand, I’m really happy for you.) In moving towards something better, do what works for you. Find the people who will support you. Start where you are. You don’t have to be good to become better.