Addiction really is a swirling vortex of doom. When I was alone in my little one-bedroom apartment, I remember thinking that my life was stuck in a downward spiral, a whirlpool of misery from which there was no escape. And I was right. Each negative experience generated a new negative expectation, and each negative expectation generated the next negative experience. There was no stopping it. It was a continuous cycle that I was not able to break on my own. It required intervention. Did I get thrown? Yes. Was I injured? Yes. Did it hurt? Hell yes. Did I eventually heal and crawl my way out of the trench I had dug for myself? Yes, or at least, I’m working on it. Ascending from a grave I had spent most of my life digging was going to take time, effort, and a lot of intentionality. But I was willing to do whatever it took to get sober. And it took going to meetings. It took working with a sponsor. It took letting go of all I had previously clung to as my lifeline of hope and taking ahold of something greater, something I had always known existed but was never willing to rely on, connection.