We admitted we were powerless over alcohol—that our lives had become unmanageable.
When I first came into AA, I understood Step One in a very literal way.
I was powerless over alcohol.
I couldn’t drink safely.
And eventually, I couldn’t pretend that it wasn’t taking something from my life.
So I surrendered.
What I didn’t know was that Step One would come back to find me decades later.
Only this time, it wouldn’t be alcohol standing in front of me.
It would be pain.
And pain has a very different kind of power.
I didn’t choose it.
I couldn’t simply put it down.
Even ordinary things could begin to carry an invisible question:
What if it hurts?
And once that question enters your mind often enough, life can slowly become organized around avoiding the answer.
I began to see something I had known intellectually for years but had never fully experienced in my own body:
Control is often an attempt to create safety.
I learned that very young.
I learned to pay attention to other people’s moods.
I learned that if I could anticipate what was coming, perhaps I could protect myself from it.
That little girl grew up.
And she became very capable.
She helped people.
She worked.
She taught.
She created.
She searched for answers.
She became a woman who could often figure things out.
And then pain arrived in a place where figuring things out wasn’t enough.
So I did what I had always done.
I tried to understand it.
I tried to manage it.
I adjusted my life around it.
And slowly, I began to see the cost.
My world was getting smaller.
Not necessarily because the pain demanded it—
but because fear of the pain did.
That realization brought me back to Step One.
I am not powerless.
I am not helpless.
But I am powerless over whether a sensation appears.
I am powerless over exactly when my nervous system will sound an alarm.
I am powerless over making pain disappear through force.
And perhaps the most important thing I have learned is this:
I cannot control my way into feeling safe.
That is a difficult truth for someone who spent a lifetime trying.
But it is also liberating.
Because if I don’t have to control the pain, I don’t have to spend every waking moment trying to make sure it doesn’t happen.
I can begin to live differently.
Step One doesn’t ask me to like the pain.
It doesn’t ask me to give up hope.
It asks me to tell the truth.
I cannot control this.
And strangely enough, that admission doesn’t make me smaller.
It makes my life bigger.
Because the moment I stop making control my job, I have energy available for something else.
For living.
For breathing.
For loving.
