Many of us have been "thirty-day wonders." We were desperate and dying when we showed up at our first NA meeting. We identified with the addicts we met there and the message they shared. With their support, we were finally able to stop using and catch a free breath. For the first time in a long, long time, we felt at home. Overnight, our lives were transformed; we walked, talked, ate, drank, slept, and dreamed Narcotics Anonymous.

Then, Narcotics Anonymous lost its novelty. Meetings that had been a thrill became monotonous. Our wonderful NA friends became bores; their uplifting NA talk, drivel. When our former friends called, inviting us back for some of the old fun, we kissed our recovery goodbye.

Sooner or later, we made our way back to the rooms of Narcotics Anonymous. Nothing had changed out there, we'd discovered-not us, not our friends, not the drugs, not anything. If anything, it had gotten worse than ever. True, NA meetings may not be a laugh riot, and our NA friends may not be spiritual giants. But there's a power in the meetings, a common bond among the members, a life to the program that we cant do without. Today, our recovery is more than just a fad-it's a way of life. We're going to practice living our program like our lives depend on it, because they do.

By the time many of us show up to our first meeting, we have broken the trust of many people in our lives. For some of us, there wasn't a single person left in our lives who would believe us even if we told them the sun rises in the east. No matter how many people we burned in active addiction, over and over again, one person was more likely than any to be skeptical of anything we said—ourselves.

This is one of the huge stumbling blocks that stops many of us from truly feeling hope when we first get clean. We know ourselves! We can't be trusted. Sometimes people in our lives looked at the way we used and accused us of having no willpower, but the truth of the matter was that we had so much self-will that we had lost all freedom to choose. There was no space between our impulses and our actions. Getting clean? Sure, no problem—we can do that just fine; that is, just until we feel like using. Then, all bets are off.

One of the most courageous things we have to do in order to get clean is to allow a little bit of hope into our spirit, defying all of the evidence to the contrary we have amassed in our active addiction. People who use the way we use don't get clean. But then, we find ourselves in rooms filled with people who used the way we used. And they're clean . . . allegedly. Maybe, is it possible?

Self-will, impulsive behavior, obsession, and compulsion—even though many of us came to NA blaming the world around us for our problems, a lot of us felt, deep down, that we were too flawed to have the lives we wanted. In NA, we found people with flaws just as deep as ours, and they taught us how to become free.