Between Breaths Quotes

“that when fear is your default state of mind, you try very hard to control everything. It is a futile battle that can leave you exhausted, and desperate for relief. We”
― Elizabeth Vargas, Between Breaths: A Memoir of Panic and Addiction

“If we are truly fortunate, we have employers who did not abandon us, family who stood by us, and perhaps someone who helped us find our way back, who never forget that beneath all the appalling behavior there was a human being.”
― Elizabeth Vargas, Between Breaths: A Memoir of Panic and Addiction

“behind our carefully contrived exteriors, we all have something we’re dealing with. No one walks through the world immune to insecurity, worry, failure, heartbreak.”
― Elizabeth Vargas, Between Breaths: A Memoir of Panic and Addiction

“Alcohol robbed me of the ability to see others—like Marc—and understand what they might be feeling or going through. Drinking to escape was profoundly selfish, and all those unresolved resentments and worries metastasized while I drank to ignore them.”
― Elizabeth Vargas, Between Breaths: A Memoir of Panic and Addiction

“But I can tell you that nearly every addict I know drank or took drugs because there was something else bigger that felt wrong, that hurt so much, it was unbearable. Numbing that “something else” became the only way to survive. We were, many of us, tormented souls who needed to find our way, however possible, to a place of grace. Alcoholism”
― Elizabeth Vargas, Between Breaths: A Memoir of Panic and Addiction

“So I leaned into the mountain, and on I went. One step at a time, steadily, timed to my own breath. Inhale, step left, exhale, step right. Farther and farther up I climbed, until the air grew chilly and the wind picked up, the sound of it humming through the few pine trees left. Finally, in the afternoon, exhausted and exhilarated, I stumbled over the last ledge and reached the summit. I was alone at the top of the world. There was a pond of water, so clear and still that you could see the fish darting around beneath the clouds reflected on the surface. I sat down at the edge of it and waited for Dan. It was only then, as I leaned against a rock and turned my face up to the sun, that I realized this hike, this test of physical endurance, was a metaphor for recovery: one step at a time, one day at a time. Don’t look up at the whole mountain, or your whole life without the crutch of alcohol can seem too much. Just focus on what is right in front of you. Focus on that next step, and do the next right thing.”
― Elizabeth Vargas, Between Breaths: A Memoir of Panic and Addiction

“I was confronted with the memories and the wreckage every time I opened a drawer.”
― Elizabeth Vargas, Between Breaths: A Memoir of Panic and Addiction

“Left behind were closets crammed with his clothes and guitar cases, shelves filled with photos of birthdays and beach vacations… all no longer wanted or needed, shed like an old skin. He had a clean slate, with no reminders of the past.”
― Elizabeth Vargas, Between Breaths: A Memoir of Panic and Addiction

“do not make any big life changes in your first year of recovery. Your sobriety is too new, too fragile. All the ordinary feelings you have been numbing with alcohol can seem overwhelming.”
― Elizabeth Vargas, Between Breaths: A Memoir of Panic and Addiction

“Her simple statement that she knew what I had gone through, and was sorry she didn’t do more, somehow eased the pain of those 40-year-old memories that I had been dragging behind me all my life, like bedraggled baggage.”
― Elizabeth Vargas, Between Breaths: A Memoir of Panic and Addiction

“On the last day of the family weekend, the addicts and their family members were to read to each other a list of regrets and requests. This was done in front of a group, with everyone else watching. It was an important and emotional part of the weekend.”
― Elizabeth Vargas, Between Breaths: A Memoir of Panic and Addiction

“Hungry, angry, lonely, tired. HALT”
― Elizabeth Vargas, Between Breaths: A Memoir of Panic and Addiction

“we each retreated to our separate corners to nurse our resentments and grow inexorably apart. The fragile happiness we once enjoyed began to crumble.”
― Elizabeth Vargas, Between Breaths: A Memoir of Panic and Addiction

“We led parallel lives, the trajectories unspooling alongside each other, without ever intersecting in any meaningful way.”
― Elizabeth Vargas, Between Breaths: A Memoir of Panic and Addiction