• I am young. I am strong. I am confident, and I am love
• I am young. I am strong. I am confident, and I am love
• I am young. I am strong. I am confident, and I am love
• I am young. I am strong. I am confident, and I am love
• I am young. I am strong. I am confident, and I am love

Where it all began. This string of affirmations changed my life forever. I didn’t even realize what was happening. It wasn’t intentional. In my mind, I was just trying to push myself; I was trying to just keep running. I was training for a marathon, and I needed all the help I could get. Nine years earlier, I attended a small group that was a part of my church. We were working through these small booklets filled with questions and thoughts to ponder. One page had a line upon which we were to write down a ten-year goal. As I had no goals at the time, I wrote down the first thing that popped into my head. Once it was on paper, there was no going back. I didn’t listen to music while I ran. I needed the time to be filled with silence, or, rather, the slow, rhythmic plodding of my feet hitting the pavement. It was meditative. It was restorative. It often felt like death as I pushed my body beyond its prior known limitations. It was exactly the death I needed to begin my journey beyond my invisible addiction onto the new path of recovery.