Halfway through the weekend and The Twelve Steps, we circled the evening bonfire – some finishing cigarettes, others sharing licorice and sipping gas-station slushes. Cowboy Hat stood next to Backwards Duckbill. Blanket Girl with Bronchial Cough sat and swayed while a few of us underdressed lightweights tiptoed toward the warmth, turning like rotisserie chickens. Kind Girl and I stood together. They called me Dora the Explorer for the backpack (“only the essentials”) chronically attached to me like a turtle shell.

I had arrived twenty-four hours earlier to check in, the retreat center already swarming with new fellow travelers in recovery both from suburbia and the shelter. Conscious of my single measly year without alcohol, I strung my sober days like pony beads on a fishing line. After dropping my bags on the twin bed in my room, I gathered with the others in the main meeting space for our first sessions, and I asked the woman beside me, “How long do you have?”

“One day,” she answered.

Here, I learned, we would count other things, too: stints in rehab, days in jail, DUIs, lost jobs, lost children. And after swapping names, it was hardly “what do you do?” but “what was your thing?” Though I had fewer dramatic moments to speak of, I had stories. Lots of them.

I met alcohol in my early twenties and fell in love soon after, not with the objective magic of elderflower gin dancing with tonic water, a crisp Pinot lightening the moody roux of gumbo, spiced cordial strained from wild blackberries, or a fireside stout with friends. I fell in love with the feeling of the first sip of the first drink, electric warmth coating my insides on its way down, quieting the internal chatter and making inconsequential the habits and noise of everyone and everything. Over a decade I chased those first twenty minutes over and over and over, reaching to recreate it: the nap in clean sheets after a life of insomnia, my weighted blanket muffling my feral mind and a more feral world. After all, I was the first human in history to complete this circuit, a stroke of genius – must repeat. And the longer I chased those first twenty minutes, it mattered less and less whether the electric warmth came in the form of bottom-shelf red or discount lager. I related uncomfortably to the character of Leo McGarry on The West Wing who reflects, “I don’t understand people who have one drink. I don’t understand people who leave half a glass of wine on the table. I don’t understand people who say they’ve had enough. How can you have enough of feeling like this? How can you not want to feel like this longer?”

During another midnight internet search for a yes-or-no, am-I-or-am-I-not, I stumbled on the grace of the gray area, sober-curiosity, the spectrum of substance-use disorder that did not require me to be sleeping in the street to get honest – first with myself.

With no more ideas or plans, I prayed the few words I had left: “I want to be free. If it’s going to work this time, it has to feel like freedom. It has to feel like letting go.” I had unknowingly spoken the first three steps of A.A., famously known as: “I can’t. God can. I think I’ll let him.”

Years ago, when I lived in Colorado, I often hiked the Manitou Incline, a cable car railway turned vertical trail of over 2,700 steps, a 2,000-foot gain in less than a mile with a summit elevation of 8,500 feet. Before my very first climb I heard murmurs to mind the false summit: “Don’t go too fast, don’t stop to rest. Just keep going. And once you think you’re there, you’ve just begun.”

A more experienced friend and I started after sunrise. At the trailhead she asked me what I ate for breakfast; I embellished “a whole banana” though it was only half. Despite my pink cloud of confidence, it became clear: my heart and lungs and legs were not up for the job. We approached what I believed was clearly the top, our arrival point, the end. A loving silence slid across my friend’s face.

The know-it-alls were right. We were not close to done, there was more, and it looked even steeper now, with fewer trees for shade. My friend suggested we return to the bail-out point, a common and respectable choice for first-timers. My body pale and shaking, I ruminated: I had not brought enough food or water to finish. What was the point. It sounded better to die, even without bragging rights – dead with half a banana and half a hike to my name. My heartbeat still bursting out of my eardrums, I heard a white-haired gentleman pass by, sweating off his sunscreen and whispering through his own strained breathing, “You got this. One more step. Get up.” My friend and I finished together to a chorus of cheers at the top.

Now, in my sober days, the metaphor creeps back around: when any “true” summit comes into view, I reconsider whether I'm up for the work, whether this was a wise choice, whether my critical inner voice is God eyeing my discomfort from the summit. I respond with bitterness: Is this my punishment? Are you enjoying the show? As Richard Rohr summarizes: “Surrender will always feel like dying, and yet it is the necessary path to liberation.”

It will be three years sober soon. After the off-to-the-races effervescence of the pink cloud wore off, I realized I had opened myself to questions I might not like the answers to. And I had opened myself to the unknowns of the journey. When we surrender we acknowledge the unknowns, the unfolding mystery of the time and process it may take to name, revisit, and reclaim some of the story, reclaim our voice, and make amends. We will name the pain we absorbed and perpetuated. But not just yet. Or at least not in the linear way we prefer. We will want to rush to all these things and call them resolved – we may even question whether our medicine, our way of coping, was the problem. The gift of the false summit is an invitation to surrender, to “turn our will and our lives over to the care of God.” Praying “help” is seeing ourselves as held here and now.

Before peeling away from the fire to get ready for bed, I watched Cowboy Hat toss on another log, and he continued his story about not ever feeling among family – or feeling at home – until right now. To be in a circle with all brands of brokenness who share this one thing, the thing, an admission we cannot do it alone and we are not alone anymore, as Psalm 68 puts it: “God makes a home for the lonely; He leads out the prisoners into prosperity.” Recovery is receiving freedom and receiving family. This is the body. This is church, our joy and wounds strung together, illuminating the whole place. A little taste of new creation. There is neither houseless nor housed, neither “arrived” nor “still climbing,” neither one-day-sober nor thirty years clean; for here we “are all one.”