Letter Six: Return to Center, When Life Just Sucks Ass; Summary

In letter six, Marcus talks about our control in life. He talks about what we have control over and what we don’t. When we were drinking, we thought we had a lot more control over things then we realized. In reality, we controlled very little. It frustrated us, and we did not know what to do. Often it made us frustrated and angry, so we lashed out at people and we ended up drinking at our problem.

When we quit drinking our problems don’t just go away. Our lives don’t just magically get perfect. But if you follow these letters and really try to change yourself, you will get a new perspective on life and see things for what they are so you can live in a productive way.

When drinking we get a skewed outlook at life. We often can’t differentiate between: Life as it really is; Life as we think it is; and life as we want it to be.

Our belief systems told us what we should have, what we should do, and what we should be. We also had our own ideas on how others should act and how they should treat us. We had many unrealistic expectations about our world.

We thought others should treat us with respect regardless of how we acted. We just assumed that everyone else was going through life thinking about us and how they could or should help us. 99% of our daily thoughts were about ourselves; what we wanted, what we felt, what we needed, and what we expected.

We had these thoughts about what should or would or is, but never really living in the now.

Maybe we thought we were better workers then others because we were successful, or we were smarter than others because we are well educated, or we are just smarter then others because we just are.

When things didn’t go our way, we gave meaning to them or justified why these things didn’t go our way. Adding alcohol to our racing thoughts made things worse. We overanalyzed things. We tried to think about why things weren’t going our way and convinced ourselves of some crazy reason. Of course, not blaming ourselves or our drinking.

We developed these expectations of what life should be. We got sober and are living a good life now. Everyone should be proud of us that we got sober. We are back to being responsible and we wonder why others don’t respect us as much as we feel they should. When we don’t get what we want our egos can be hurt. We get into that destructive thought loop of over analyzing. We were used to overthinking when we drank, so we can easily go down that same path. And when we go down this path we start to wallow in self-pity.  Our self-value comes from outside of our self and when things don’t go our way, we feel defeated. So, wallowing in our defeat, we drink.

This is how society has trained us. Our self-worth is defined by our possessions, our toughness, and our strength even if it means putting others down. We can’t admit we are alcoholics because we are afraid of being week.

We can overcome these thoughts. We have to focus on the right things. We’ve been fighting these thoughts when we really need to just redirect them. We are not as strong as we think we are. In fact, no one is. We are all just 1 of 8 billion people on earth. That’s it. In the grand scheme of things our goals and dreams are pretty much insignificant.

We need to tell ourselves that we are going to be ok right now. No matter how bad things are of seem to be, right now you’ll be ok. Will you be ok tomorrow? Who knows? But right now, you are ok.

Many people in life try to run their lives on how right and justified they are when things don’t go their way. Many times, they are right, but they usually are not happy.

This is all about control. We tend to lose our cool when we are not in control of our situations. Our overthinking and self-pity are all about trying to control our world.

In reality, we are in control of very little. We have to figure out how to let it go.

This brings up AA’s serenity prayer, “God, grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, courage to change the things I can, and the wisdom to know the difference” This prayer talks about acceptance.

It tells us to accept the things we cannot change. What happened to us in life, we cannot change. We are not the sum of our thoughts, the things we have done, or the things that happened to us.

We may have been through some very bad things. We have been a victim of some bad things. We were right in feeling like injustice was done to us. People told us to just let it go. But that seemed like letting the bad people win.

We don’t have to let things go, but we do have to learn to work through them. Accept them for what they are and our part in them (even if our part is just accepting that we cannot change them). We can choose to define ourselves based of us not on outside of ourselves.

Accept the things you cannot change, stop giving meaning to things in the past. Stop carrying things from the past with you.

Accept the things you can change. Choose to love yourself for being who you are.

Your drinking has brought you to where you are right now, accept that!

Accept where you are right now, have the courage to change what you can now with your new information. Try to understand the difference of what you can and cannot do.

But most importantly, don’t drink today, even if your ass falls off.