Lucky and Relieved

This program has changed my life. It has taken away my desire to assassinate your character. It has stilled my desire to engage in gossip because it has made me feel better about myself. It has forced me to cease being intolerant and judgmental and to humbly accept that I am no better or worse than you—just equal. The Twelve Steps and the Tools have made me willing to see your value, to understand that God doesn’t make junk, so we are all not junk!

This program has enabled me to accept that my former mushy thinking might have led me repeatedly back to the food and the despair of again weighing more than 200 pounds (91 kg). It has convinced me to fire my head and hire my heart. It has convinced me that darkness cannot drive out darkness; only light can do that. Hate cannot drive out hate; only love can do that. It showed me that it was time to grow up: to quit trying to please everyone, to quit fearing change, to quit living in the past, to quit putting myself down, and to quit overthinking. It was time to begin to love the people who treated me right and forgive those who didn’t.

This beautiful program has enabled me to believe everything happens for a reason. Life will not cease to be messy. To borrow a song lyric, nobody ever “promised you a rose garden.” But the superhuman Power of my “Not Me” gives me strength and support to sail the rough seas. And finding friends all over the world with the same mental disorder as me and who understand me is priceless.

How lucky I am to have found OA. No matter how long I have traveled in the wrong direction, I can always be turned around with my “Not Me’s” guidance. Program has enabled me to believe that when things change in me, things change around me. But no one changes unless they want to. There’s only one reason I’ve changed: the realization I needed to!

When I became sincere and humbly willing to take all necessary actions with complete honesty, I found I no longer needed the crutch of excess food, because I have embarked on a new way of life, which has nourished me physically, emotionally, and spiritually for the past two decades. By accepting that I have no power and believing there is one who does and by being humbly ready to have this Power enter my soul and heart, I have been freed from my glass cage of skepticism and misery, where I’d been looking out longingly at the world but not being part of it. I’ve crossed the bridge of reason and have accepted that my “Not Me’s” Power is running the show.

What a relief knowing that I am loved just the way I am, yet my HP loves me too much to let me stay that way.

— Barbara