Memory is notoriously unreliable: we leave out some details and enhance others; we rewrite old understandings based on what we currently know; we simply forget. I've written about most of the incidents in this blog from memory, even those few events I do have written records for, simply because it can be both time consuming to find and read the records and painful to revisit them first hand. However, for the past few weeks, I have been time traveling back through my life -- reading through old diaries and letters -- as I work on my 1st Step.

My old diaries are a treasure trove, but there are still many incidents I left out; much of what I saw of my husband's addiction (although I didn't call it by that name then) at the time I either didn't consider important enough or considered too confusing and painful to record there. Fortunately, starting some fourteen years ago, I began saving copies of the letters I wrote to my best friend, where my sharing is both more mundane and at times more telling than what I shared with myself alone. Last night I found the following letter from October 12, 1996 about two of my husband's acting out partners, as I perceived them at the time. Mark and I were engaged, but not yet married at this point.

The first woman I mention was a coworker Mark dated during our engagement. She was unaware that we were engaged at the time; Mark didn't tell her, instead she found out later, when other people at work congratulated Mark on our engagement in front of her. I was completely unaware anything had gone on between them until Mark told me during disclosure seven years later. The second woman was someone who had gotten Mark's e-mail address either through a mutual friend or a career networking website. They carried on a long-distance flirtation filled with sexual innuendo for a year or so, but never met.

One of the things that stood out at me in reading this was the extent to which I minimized my own feelings and played off any worries as the result of my own unreasonable "jealousy" or "paranoia" or "insecurity." I was also struck by how I was reassured after talking to Mark, who would certainly have told me, not just that nothing was going on, but would have made me feel very loved and attractive. Since I believed at the time that infidelity of any kind (physical or emotional) was absolutely incompatible with love and attraction, the only option open to me if I believed that he loved and was attracted to me was that I must be crazy, since he certainly couldn't be unfaithful under those circumstances.

Another thing that struck me, and still resonates with me, is my rage toward older (in this case Mark and I were close to 30) men who date women of high school and college age. I still am not entirely certain where this rage comes from, and I am continuing to examine it. But I do know that age difference remains a trigger for me, although generally only when teens, or those just barely out of their teens, are involved.

"It's 11:30ish on a Saturday nite & I'm home alone in a weird funk. I figured you'd help me talk myself out of it. I was fighting the urge to tear some stale wine out of the fridge -- but I've decide to fight no longer -- vinegar or not it'll be relaxing...

"Mark's out at a birthday party for one of the administrators in his department -- they're at some jazz club -- I think -- in [city name]. I decided to bag -- an hour there & an hour back plus the $8 cover charge and drink money for some woman I've only met once just didn't seem worth bagging the end of Game 4 of the Yankee/Orioles playoffs. I was sort of bumming about not having Mark around -- he's been out at work all day -- but right now if this wine were just a little bit better life would be perfect.

"I was kind of bent out of shape earlier b/c I was cleaning up & was moving a pile of Mark's papers from the living room floor to the top of his dresser when I saw a letter -- actually just the envelope -- from this "penpal" of his at [college name] addressed to him at work rather than here at home. So I -- having a jealous streak about a mile wide -- started fretting over it. His correspondence with this woman has always made me sort of paranoid. He's never met her -- they met thru e-mail -- but they write all the time. I guess it's reasonable that he gave her his work address -- since he doesn't really know her but... I guess she hits a sore spot with me -- touches on all my insecurities. She's an undergrad -- which makes her much younger than us -- but that only fuels my insecurities. Just before Mark & I started dating he was dating this woman who was a senior in H.S. -- he was finished with college at the time. That is something that has always made me angry beyond the point of reason -- men who date younger women. I have no idea why -- but it disgusts me more than anything else in the world -- I find men who date younger women to be the most reprehensible scum...

"I feel like I'm in an episode of Laverne & Shirley -- with those words Mark entered the room. Guess I'll get back to this later -- shame really -- I was just feeling better...

"October 13, 1996... Mark & I had a nice talk last night about my many jealous paranoid delusions -- and now everything is fine. I go thru these things every four-five months or so -- and talking to Mark always makes it all seem so ridiculous that I feel better right away. I guess I just get scared sometimes -- I start imagining what it would feel like if something happened -- if I did lose Mark -- and I start going over every little thing -- making sure it's all ok -- and if I come across anything I'm not sure about I freak out. I suppose that's nothing new -- my love for Mark has always been (this sounds so cheesy but...) so powerful that it terrifies me. (That really is so melodramatic I'm tempted to cross it out...)"

Likewise, although these excerpts still raise some shame, and I'm tempted to delete them rather than share the person I used to be, I will let them stand.

There are certain moments in my life that I come back to, over and over, the way Monet came back to his waterlilies: trying to capture the way they look at just this moment, from just this perspective, in just this light. The moment I discovered my husband's addiction is one of those. I run the brush of my words over it again and again, painting it from a thousand different angles: the break between what I thought I knew and what I came to know.

I try to think of how I might explain it to someone who has never been there, how I might have explained it to the person I used to be, but it's always like saying, "Imagine you don't know everything you know" or "Imagine you know something that you don't know."  Imagine you don't know your hand is attached to your body or you don't understand that what goes up must come down.  Imagine what it's like to live on a planet that hasn't been discovered yet, whose climate and lifeforms and place in the universe we don't know.

I hear people refer to the place I came from -- the place I call the Matrix -- as "denial," and that single word seems so inadequate and misleading.  Listen to the water cooler conversations or read the tweets or listen to the callers on the radio shows, and you will hear women like me discussed: Hillary Clinton, Gayle Haggard, Silda Spitzer, Jenny Sanford, Elin Woods... "Come on, she must have known. What did she think was going on? She was in denial!" As if they all knew exactly what was going on, but chose to politely look away.  And maybe they did.  Maybe in some versions of the Matrix story, Neo is told he's living in a pod, but doesn't want to believe it.

But I was a child at a magic show.   I believed that I understood how the world worked and what the reasons were for what I saw: magic!  I believed the smoke and mirrors were real, believed the rabbit appeared out of thin air, believed it was possible to saw someone in half and put her back together again.  You can imagine what happens when one tries such things.  Tonight's canvas of Denial does not portray a woman pretending not to see the card she knows is up the sleeve, but a woman, dazed and baffled, holding a bloody saw over the person she cannot put back together again.

When I first found out that my husband Mark was a sex addict, I threw myself into the thing that had always saved me in the past: research. I had graduated at the top of my high school class, gone to an excellent college and had a successful career thanks to my ability to analyze problems and find the answers. When I became a mother, I researched. When my son had speech delays and was eventually diagnosed with autism, I researched. So, when I found that Mark was a sex addict, I researched.

I read about sex addiction and looked for meetings and therapists. And I looked for help for myself. Only I didn't like what I found. Whenever a book or a speaker or a therapist would talk about the partners of sex addicts, they'd talk about this thing called codependency, which totally didn't sound like me. I started attending S-Anon meetings in the wake of Mark's admission of sex addiction, not because I had a problem, of course, but because I didn't have anywhere else to go. I would tell anyone who would listen how totally not codependent I was. Why was everyone telling me I had a problem when my problem was Mark? If he didn't have a problem, I wouldn't have a problem. Therefore, he needed to get fixed. Problem solved!

It took years of work untangling our mess to see that my problem was not that Mark had a problem but my belief that Mark's problem controlled my happiness. That was something that research couldn't tell me. It was something therapists couldn't drill into my head. It was something that the other people in my S-Anon meeting couldn't force me to see.

The research had failed to give me the answer, because it simply didn't make intuitive sense to me. It was like my high school physics teacher telling me that most of everything is nothing, that my body, seemingly so solid, was made up more of the space between atoms than of the atoms themselves. It was so counter to everything I had observed and known to be true in my life, that I wrote in my diary that night "I don't believe in atoms." Someone couldn't just tell me something was so, I had to learn more, to experience it, to draw inferences about it and to see the other ways in which it made sense before I could discard what I had known so long and what seemed so true: my body is solid, my happiness depends on other people.

One of the hardest things for me now, a thousand times harder than dealing with an addict's denial, is to deal with the denial of another codependent. It makes me uncomfortable, because I see myself: both how I was and how I often still am. And I still have that feeling that the problem with my happiness is that they have problems, not that the problem is that I think their problems have an impact on my happiness. I often still find that I want to ease my own discomfort by saying, "Wake up! Stop being such a control freak! Stop trying to change people!" But of course, when I insist they stop holding that mirror up to me, I'm doing the exact codependent thing I want to stop them from doing, so that it doesn't remind me that I like to do that codependent thing doing. I end up seeing myself in a mirror inside a mirror inside a mirror, stretching to infinity.

So I take a breath and say, "Wake up, self! Stop being such a control freak! Stop trying to change people! Other people have to experience life for themselves, wear out the other roads for themselves, be crushed down to their own bottoms themselves. I can't do their research for them; my research didn't even work for me. I must trust that they are capable of living their own lives, as I am capable of living mine. I must trust that they have their own higher power, and I am not it. I must trust that they will come through it, like I came through it, on the power of their own experiences." And sometimes, just sometimes, remembering all that even works.

One morning, eight years ago, I turned on the desktop computer my husband Mark and I shared and called up the keystroke logging software I had installed. Mark didn't know that the computer was secretly taking notes on every character he typed, and I didn't want him to know. He had been staying up late at night on the computer often enough that I was concerned about it. I'd asked him what was going on, but he said he was working, and just playing around on the Internet, blowing off steam. It was no big deal.

When I opened the file, I was shocked to find that he had logged in to an e-mail account I didn't know he had, that he had logged in to an account on an adult website I didn't know he had and that he had been participating in adult video chats as well as exchanging private sexual messages with at least one of the women who worked for the website. I visited the site and found you had to pay to participate in chats, so I called our credit card company and found he had been spending nearly $100 a day.

I called Mark home from work and confronted him with the evidence of his wrong doing. And he didn't get it. Wasn't this just like porn? And I was okay with that. What was the big deal? The more he didn't get it, the harder I argued. I was going to show him how crazy he was, damn it! I was going to force him to see what he was doing wrong. And although I wouldn't have put it in these terms at the time, I was going to call him out on his denial and I wasn't going to rest until he saw it. And he seemed to. After hours of hysterical screaming, he admitted he was wrong, told me that he understood and said he was never going to do that again. Ta da! Denial fixed! See how powerful I am?

Of course, the truth was I hadn't done anything at all, but work myself into misery trying to change the things I couldn't change. His sexual behavior didn't stop at all; it only got worse from there, until eventually he had fallen far enough that he had to admit that his actions were something he couldn't stop, even though he wanted to. He had to see that he had a problem and want to get help with it. That wasn't anything I could make him see, as hard as I tried.

But that wasn't apparent to me right away. It took years, and lots more bullying for me to realize how much I can't speed the process. I yelled at him in early recovery about joining an online social networking group: "Don't you see what you're doing? You're a sex addict and you've acted out over and over again with women you've met online! You're totally in denial!" Then I yelled at him about his plans to attend an ex-girlfriend's wedding, "Are you nuts? You're going to be in a ballroom full of drunken ex-acting out partners! It's so obvious that your addiction is driving this! You're so in denial, it's unbelievable!" Then I yelled at him about the women in his 12 Step program, and when he thought about taking a job working for an attractive woman, and when he worked extra special hard to help female (but not male) ex-coworkers with their job searches, and whenever he would muse that maybe it might someday be safe for him to have female friends again ("because," I would say, "yeah, that worked out for you so well in the past").

I found I was expending a whole lot of energy and making myself crazy, yet he seemed to stubbornly work through things his own way in his own time, and when he was ready, would often end up coming to the same conclusion I was so insistent on forcing him to see. So, one day, and I don't remember when, I saw what I thought was denial and I took a leap of faith. I didn't boss or badger, I just sat with that feeling in the pit of my stomach, the one I'd come to recognize as fear — fear that he'd act out again, fear that I'd get hurt, fear that he'd leave me — and I waited. And Mark came through it himself. Wow. He worked his recovery and he worked through things all by himself. Go figure.

I was so sure that the problem was his denial, when the problem was really my own fear. Does he slip into denial sometimes? Sure. He's not perfect, but it's not my job to ensure that he is, and trying to make it my job has led to nothing but pain on both sides. But it is my job to deal with my own fear of being hurt. It's my job to learn to trust that I will be okay with or without Mark, and he'll be okay with or without me. And it's my job to believe that, even if we slip, we'll each get back up and keep working, and that as long as we both do, we'll do it together.

I started keeping a journal semi-regularly when I was in middle school.  My very earliest journal entries are a thrilling roller coaster ride through the life of a suburban tween: from the heartbreaking lows of the cancellation of my favorite TV show to the giddy highs of eating raviolis from a can for lunch.  But by high school, my journal had become my closest confidant, not because I had any terrible secrets, but because the secrets I did have became so tiresome to the friends who had to hear them again and again.

I've never smoked, never done drugs and never drank a drop of alcohol in high school (and not much even beyond that).  But I did grow up to marry a sex addict, which means I had my obsessions and I had my own drug of choice: other people.  Like most schoolgirls, I had crushes, but unlike most schoolgirls, my crushes were epic fantasies that rocked me to sleep at night and sustained me moment to moment during my days.  They were the refuge I'd escape to when loneliness or stress or fear crept too close.  They were the rock I'd cling to in an unstable world.  One day my true love, my knight in shining armor, was going to catch me as I fell, swoop me up and save me, make everything perfect.  And until that day, I'd block out the dirty imperfections of this world by drifting off into the next in my mind.

My journal didn't care how many times I described the way that boy's hair fell across my math book when he leaned back or the precise shade of his eyes in the sunlight outside.  And unlike my friends, who grew bored with the unflagging nature (or perhaps just vaguely uncomfortable with the intensity) of my interests, my journal was quite happy to watch me carefully craft each intricate detail of those moments, happy to sit quietly receptive as I painted the same scene over and over from a thousand different angles, and happy to replay all of it for reuse in future fantasies.

And replay it I did.  For years I would go back and touch those pages, softly, like a lover and live that thrill again: here he taps my shoulder, there brushes my hand as he borrows a pencil.  Then in the moment that never came, yet always sustained me, he falls down on his knees and begs me never to leave, and he never leaves, never hurts me, but makes me (finally, impossibly) whole.

Now I see something different in those pages: the sling that gently cradled an unseen brokenness and held it safe for a time, the coma that protected the injured patient who could not have coped with consciousness.  And I'm grateful, both for the service those pages rendered and for the fact that I've healed enough not to be in danger without them.

During the first year after I discovered my husband's sex addiction, I attended S-Anon, 12 Step meetings for friends and family members of sex addicts. At the beginning of each meeting we would read "The S-Anon Problem." I hated "The S-Anon Problem." I hated it so passionately that I used to skip the beginning of meetings, coming in late each week to avoid hearing it. And when I did have to hear it I would seethe and writhe. I wanted to get up and punch someone. I wanted to tear out the hair of the people who wrote it. I wanted to yell, "This is a bunch of bullshit that has nothing to do with me! I'm not like these other people and I'm not codependent!" Yes, you could say that I was experiencing some resistance.

Of course, I thought this was totally reasonable. The problem was that damn document. Me? Nothing to see here. I was pissed because I had a right to be pissed at people who try to invalidate me and deny my experiences and tell me I don't know who I am. Because Someone was saying that these words about this "problem" must describe me, just because I happened to be married to a sex addict. And Someone was saying I was not allowed to refute any part of it or say it didn't apply to me because then I would be "in denial." Wouldn't anyone be angry? Isn't it normal? I mean nameless, faceless Someones out there are accusing perfectly normal wife-of-a-sex-addict me that I have some kind of problem that I don't feel I have. What an outrage! How dare they!

Six years in, I can read that document and say, "I do have codependent behaviors and experiences, some of which are documented here, others of which are not. Some of what is described here doesn't apply to me, and a lot of it still doesn't resonate. I still think it could be written in a way that is more inclusive of the wide variety of emotions and experiences people have when coming in to recovery." But it the resistance and the outrage are gone. I know what I know and where I am right now, and I don't need to get angry of feel threatened because someone who authored "The S-Anon Problem" may disagree with me, even if those who have strong opinions about what codependency "should" look like would disagree with me about me.

I've learned that when I feel secure and a perception of me seems way off, I can let go and laugh about it. When I'm not sure of myself or when a perception hits close to things that may or may not be true about me, but that I worry about, I still feel the anger rising up; I feel the impulse to argue and convince people that they are wrong for having a different view of me than I have of myself. But now I can usually recognize that resistance as a familiar signal. I try to remind myself that my off-the-charts reaction to someone (or some document) as a sign that it has hit a sore spot. If it hadn't, I'd be able to laugh and move on. And I need to take a look at that sore spot rather than stewing in anger and expending all of my energy rattling my sword at someone else.

Years ago, before I knew about my husband's sex addiction, one of the things that drew me to him, that I really liked and respected about him, was how he seemed to have broken away from the pattern of addiction and dysfunction in his family. His dad was an alcoholic, his siblings had done time for a variety of drug related crimes, and here he was: the one sane and functional member of his family. He didn't drink, didn't smoke, didn't do drugs and was (as far as I knew then) scrupulously honest. He drove the speed limit, signaled when he turned and came to a full stop at every stop sign. I met him while he was taking some of the most challenging classes at a prestigious university, having worked hard and graduated near the top of his high school class.

After his addiction came to light and I saw just how deep and how far back his compulsive behavior extended, and as my eyes slowly cleared from the fantasy and denial that clouded my own thinking, I began to realize just how hard it is to overcome the scars that a dysfunctional childhood leaves. When I met him, the solution to dysfunction was easy; follow the codependent mantra: work harder, do better. So, I assumed Mark was better, stronger and more determined than others, allowing him to come through his childhood unscathed, when weaker and lazier men (or weaker, lazier children) would have succumbed.

The truth was, my husband hadn't come through his childhood unscathed. (Does anyone?) He knew he did not want what he had grown up with, so he tried to imitate the trappings of a sane and fulfilling life — getting good grades, going to college, getting a job, staying away from the alcohol and drugs that wreaked havoc in his family — without really knowing what lay beneath, unable to recognize the ways in which he was repeating the same compulsive patterns in a new way. And I (as much as I thought I was oh so healthy and sane and better than he in my not-addictness) wasn't truly healthy enough myself to realize that the popular indicators of success (a college degree, a job, the lack of a criminal record, abstention from drugs, alcohol and cigarettes) are not necessarily indicative of mental, emotional and spiritual health.

Neither of us realized it was possible to, as we both had, work extremely hard at entirely the wrong things. Neither of us realized it was possible to remove some of the symptoms, and take on some of the trappings of health and well-being, without touching underlying distortions of thinking so deeply ingrained they weren't even noticeable anymore. Until those trappings fell away, until we'd nearly lost our marriage and torn apart the family and the new life we'd built, neither of us could see that we were living a fantasy of health and not the real thing at all.

I was one of only five people on the planet who didn't own a copy of Thriller, largely because I like to be contrary; it allows me to feel superior and rebel against alcoholic absolutism by being absolute in a different direction. But because I grew up in the 80's, I couldn't escape knowing every song on the album whether I owned it or not. (And then secretly singing them to myself when there was no one around to see me being anything less than contemptuous of their choices.)

When Michael Jackson's skin whitened and his nose became skeletal, when he was accused of child molestation and and sued for debt, when there were reports that he bought the Elephant Man's bones, when he nicknamed his son Blanket and built an amusement park in his back yard, when the tabloids dubbed him Wacko Jacko, I liked to tell people "I told you so. I always thought there was something wrong with him." As if that were really the reason I pretended to disdain him when he was at the height of his popularity and continued to mock him as his untreated mental illness* played out on a global stage.

But my relationship with Michael Jackson (as with so many people in and out of my life) has changed as my relationship to myself in recovery has changed. Instead of seeing him as someone to mock in order to feel clever and healthy, I started to see a someone who was aching enough inside to have visibly mutilated (or paid his plastic surgeons to mutilate) his body. I saw a talented man who lived imprisoned in his own deep pain, a man who self medicated through fantasy in many of the same ways I had myself. As I came to better understand my own love of Peter Pan and the fantasy of Disney and my own desire to escape into some fantasy childhood, I suspected I better understood his too. And I used to, in my own way, pray for him. I thought about how hard it must be for someone so insulated from the world by money and fame to finally reach a point low enough to break through denial and bring desperation for change, and I would hope that he would finally lose enough to get help.

When I learned of Michael Jackson's death, I felt the same sadness I felt at the death of my father-in-law: the grief that he died without ever finding relief, redemption or recovery (in its broadest sense) in this life. But I am grateful, as I see my own progress mirrored in my changing perceptions of him, that I can finally crank up "Thriller" and spin a bit in his honor.

Sometimes my subconscious likes to be really mysterious in its messages to me (so, why, exactly, did a frog hop on the big pink bubble gum bubble I was blowing?). Sometimes it likes to tell jokes. Sometimes it (like many a subconscious) likes to play on my fears (hm, what would those be?). And sometimes it likes to tell really obviously metaphorical stories that I can turn into blog posts about living with addiction.

My sister came to visit me in my dream. I don't have a sister, but you know dreams, so in this one, I did. I hadn't seen her for a long time and when she arrived, I was horrified. Her body was grotesquely bloated and her flushed, blotchy cheeks were distended, like the cheeks of a chipmunk hoarding nuts. I worried that the huge lumps were tumors and that her bloated body was filled with cancer. But she seemed not to notice that her appearance had changed so dramatically at all, and she sat down and chatted cheerfully with me.

And I chatted cheerfully back. After all, I couldn't tell her she looked awful. If she didn't see herself as looking terrible, I ought not to either. I should see her the way she wanted me to, through the eyes of love. Telling her she looked bad might hurt her feelings. Or scare her. Or insult her. She might get angry and leave. I had to take care of her and keep what I saw from her. And really, was it even true? Maybe I was wrong. Maybe she was perfectly fine. She certainly seemed fine. Maybe I was crazy and projecting my own hypochondria on her. Maybe I misremembered how she used to look. So I kept smiling and chatting and wondering when she would leave so that I could look at old pictures of her and confirm that she really had changed and I could google things like "bloating and distended cheeks" to see if cancer came up.

That interaction with my dream sister was like my interactions with so many of the active addicts I've been close to during my life. I'll sense something wrong, but they'll seem perfectly fine, which leaves me wondering if I'm crazy. I don't feel safe telling them what I see my truth and my reality, not theirs, for fear of hurting or angering them. I don't feel confident saying that my truth and my reality are valid. I woke up thinking, "Ok, I get it subconscious!" And that was something in itself. If I'd had that dream years ago, I would have missed the metaphor entirely. Or maybe just wondered if I was crazy to see it.

When my husband was still active in his sex addiction and I was still unaware of it, we lived our life (as many living with active addiction do) enveloped in fantasy. We frolicked inside a rainbow in a castle made of pink cloud fluff. We grew roses straight out of our heads, and the bees that hummed around our heads courting the flowers would drizzle their honey straight into our mouths. We were love and romance. I was his dream and he was mine. Everything seemed perfect, except when it didn't quite.

Every now and then I'd catch a glimpse of the smoke and mirrors, of the man behind the curtain — I'd find a suspicious receipt or notice that he was glossing over details — and know something wasn't quite right, but not really believe anything could be seriously wrong, especially when Mark was so adamant that the fantasy was real. I believed more in that fantasy we wove than anything else, and it was easier to believe that I was wrong or crazy than that my husband — who loved me, adored me, told me in word and showed me in deed how special I was — could ever knowingly lie or hurt me.

But over ten years into our relationship, I found out was that he also told and showed lots of other women how very special they were too. The mirrors shattered, the smoke dispersed, the man behind the curtain stepped out and we both began the process of learning to see and own our own truths.

Now, you might think that, having seen both, it's easy to tell the difference between solid ground and the cloud fluff of fantasy. You might think it's easy to stay rooted firmly in fact without getting lost in the mists of fiction. And if you don't live with with addiction, maybe it is. But although I'm better at holding to my truth now than ever, it is still all too easy for me confuse my truth with someone else's: to doubt that I know what is real, to doubt my intuition, to doubt my senses, to doubt myself.

Occasionally, I'll share about my recovery work with one non-recovery friend or another, and as I try to explain what it's all about, I'll see them curious, intrigued and perplexed. And I'll find myself struggling for words. I'll see just how far this all is, how incomprehensible, to people who haven't been there. I'll start see my life through their eyes, I'll see the very different ways they've dealt with their own losses and hardships, and if I'm struggling or tired, I'll start to doubt myself. Are Mark and I making a big deal out of this weird recovery thing when we should just be putting it all behind us and moving on like "normal" people do? Shouldn't we be over all this? Isn't our problem really some kind of neurotic hypochondria rather than addiction?

But I remember what our lives used to be like in the wake of disclosure. I remember the lies that kept the facade propped up. And I know that our life now is happier and more serene than ever before. I know that only I know how I feel, that my feelings are real and that other people can't tell me how I should or do feel. I also know that it doesn't matter what works for other people, only what works for me. When I'm rested and in touch with my higher power, I know all these things — I know my truth — but when I'm not, I doubt my truth just as well as my fiction.