Recovery Journey Quotes

I don’t shake at the site of alcohol anymore. I don’t feel the need for it. If anything I’ll get stoned. I always told myself if it got to the point that it was affecting my songwriting and music that I’d stop. And it did get to the point.

I'm not the kind of person who could join AA or have rules for myself or on Thursday take this vitamin pill. So, basically, I learned the hard way. I learned by trial and error, and tried to get drugs out of my work. That took about a year. If I was going to work, it was best that I be straight. And I was surprised at what came out.

If I hadn't been a drunkard, I probably would have committed suicide long ago.

I'm a dumb-ass, and I poisoned myself for years. Now I understand things better.

I sit there and think how it isn't fair that I can't drink at all, even a little. I realize I have crammed an entire lifetime of moderate drinking into a decade of hard-core drinking and that is why. I blew my wad.

But my activities have been pretty much focused in the last almost 30 years on the recovery, of my own recovery, the understanding for my family of my recovery.

I did mostly alcohol. There were drugs, too - pills - and there was a danger that I would go over the edge. I could have. I thank God I didn't.

You take the cards you're dealt. I'm now ferociously healthy in body and mind. You couldn't pay me to go near a psychiatrist again. Stopping seeing them was my first step to getting well.

I was a weekend drinker...I'd start on Saturday, end on Friday...thought I was controlling it...but I don't drink any more.

When I got sober, that was 1990.

Nothing heals like love and time

I was heading in a self destructive direction. My priority wasn't together, wasn't in order. So me getting locked up was actually a blessing for me. It helped for me to see the light. Once you get the rug snatched from under you - I had my career and family snatched from me, and I was forced to just sit there in that box for three years and think about what I did and how selfish I was, it made me really see things with new eyes, like, hold up, why was I doing that? What the hell was I thinking about? I gotta change. Something's got to give. I can't ever come back in this place again.

Through recovery, I've been able to do so much good stuff.

When the addict gets recovery, his family gets recovery, right?

I had a real good thing going for me, and I got sidetracked. It doesn't have to be that way. It doesn't have to be drugs. It doesn't have to be alcohol. That part of my life is over.

I've got a lot of experience with anorexia - my grandmother and great-grandmother suffered from it, and I had a lot of friends at school who suffered from it. I know it's not something to be taken lightly and I don't.

I have become a pupil of the AA movement rather than the teacher.

I'd be in my hotel room, smoking too much, drinking, going to clubs, just being numb. That was being in jail to me. I wasn't happy at all on the streets. That was the addict speaking.

I think I have a duty as a recovering guy to help, to make my knowledge of what I went through accessible.

I gotta quit smoking, doctor's orders, and the drinking, court orders.

Getting clean made me grow up. I feel like all the years that I was using drugs, I wasn't growing as a person.

The automobile crash was... devastating in ways that I still cannot really bear to think about... It took me many years to recover. In some ways, I never have.

We admitted we were powerless over alcohol—that our lives had become unmanageable. We came to believe that a Power greater than ourselves would restore us to sanity.

I had not had any drugs for 5 years but then I relapsed again. I have also smoked nearly everything. Every day it was a battle to recover, which I fought for my son and myself.

You want to know the truth about drugs? You can only go one or two ways. You can go up, or you can go down. That's it. After a certain point, though, no matter what you do, what you take, you don't go anywhere, and that's when you've got to sit down and face yourself.