An alcoholic I know named Louise says she used up her entire twenties looking for “the big improvement,” something that would come along and whisk her off toward some new and better version of herself. Always, she used drugs and alcohol toward that end, drinking and snorting her way into an altered state of being, but she did it in other ways too. Most alcoholics I know did. For Louise it would be a new apartment, a new job, a new city. Things would fall apart in one place and she’d pack up and move someplace else. This is known in AA parlance as a “geographic,” the constant moving from place
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