Recovery, as a way of living, makes you see things from the monster’s point of view. You see things from his point of view because you are him. You sit in the rooms and listen and you hear terrible, terrible things, but they are also ordinary things. Because everyone in that room has been through them. Leslie Jamison has written about this gift of the ordinary—your own story is not paramount after all. It’s a new experience of empathy for me—the empathy of saying what is worst about me, what is most monstrous, and having it accepted not because I am special, but because I’m not. (An
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