Eric Zimmer

It was snowing.

Aerosmith's Dream On was playing on the radio, and I was sobbing because I so desperately didn't want to do it.

And yet I had no ability not to do it at the same time.

which is a really awful feeling.

Yeah, it's got to be up there.

Luckily, I didn't take him with me to AutoZone, so I spared him that indignity.

All of us know that feeling of watching ourselves make exactly the wrong choice.

And by wrong, I mean the choice that the best part of us knows we shouldn't make.

Yeah, what you're describing is a moment in the book where I agree to go to long-term treatment, and that would be the big moment.

Or we often talk about hitting rock bottom, or this one thing occurs.

But that moment is only significant because of all the thousands of little choices I made after.

If I had not made those choices, I would not have stayed sober, and that moment would be just like all the others that I thought I was going to get clean and failed at.

And so we overprioritize sort of the epiphany, the watershed moment, and we tend to underappreciate all the little steps that we make along the way after that, that are how we actually change.

Yeah, it's a good story.

I mean, we love stories.

We like drama.

And the truth is a little more boring.

You know, the truth, as I'm saying it here, is a little bit more boring to say like, well, yeah, that was important, but...

I didn't hit the punching bag three times, visit four old people in the nursing home, and suddenly I was fixed, right?

I got better little bit by little bit, day after day, you know, choosing to go to a meeting, choosing to call my sponsor instead of my dealer, choosing to drive a different route home instead of going by a bar.