I was amazed before I was halfway through, so I quit.

When AA worked for me, I stopped working it.

My hands down favorite passage in the Alcoholics Anonymous literature is referred to as “The Promises.” It speaks to the wonderful gifts sobriety and a spiritually fit life will bring; peace, serenity, freedom, and the like. That sounded great, as I was sorely lacking all of this when newly sober. I knew AA was about far more than not drinking, it’s a design for living that generally makes you a better person, which in turn makes you not want or feel the need to drink. I had seen enough people with that general satisfaction in life to know I wanted it too.

The beginning of The Promises, read in many AA meetings, states that “if we are painstaking about this phase of our development, we will be amazed before we are halfway through.” I latched onto that statement and set myself a nice, concrete goal. There are twelve steps, so I decided to really buckle down and give those first six my all — the amazement is supposed to happen before the halfway mark, but I wanted to overshoot just in case.

Over the next many, many months, I really embraced the AA steps and did everything my sponsor and others suggested. I accepted that I was unmanageably alcoholic and wrestled with a higher power, taking baby steps towards faith. I painstakingly worked to clear up resentments and pain, identify my own patterns and shortcomings. I met with my sponsor weekly, went to meetings daily, and really threw myself into my sober life.

I was amazed! The promises came true! I no longer had fear of economic insecurity (oh, I still had economic insecurity, I just wasn’t afraid about it any longer), I started to intuitively know how to handle situations, I drew close to others, wanting to be of service and seeing how my crap experience could be a benefit. I had a whole new attitude and outlook on life!

Really, being sober was amazing. Physically, it goes without saying; not only did my body thank me, but I had exponentially more time, energy, and enthusiasm. Mentally, I was clear, thoughtful, capable, and inspired. Spiritually, I found peace with myself and my past, made so many deep connections with others, and had a smidge of faith in a greater good. The weeks turned into months, then miraculously into years.

As I embraced my sober life, I started to branch out beyond the community of recovery, started a new career and family. Life was really great, and I was a living example. But, I got busy living this awesome life and stopped being quite so painstaking with my recovery. I made some amends, but “wasn’t ready” for all of them. I prayed when I went to meetings, which I cut back on because sobriety brought so many other opportunities. My morning ritual of reading, journaling, and gratitude morphed into crossword puzzles and to-do lists. I sponsored another woman briefly, but she wasn’t ready to be sober. My sponsor moved away, and I had worked the steps (painstakingly over halfway), so I didn’t get a new one. I eventually moved, and didn’t find a new AA community near me. Eventually, I just stopped working the program all together.

I didn’t really “quit” AA; I just slowly let my amazing new life fill up all my time and take all of my energy. This was a beautiful thing — until it wasn’t. In the rearview mirror, I began to slip spiritually into a nagging dissatisfaction in life. The old restless, irritable, and discontent feelings snuck back in. There was nothing catastrophic to put my finger on, I just slowly fell out of love with life.

As I saw my peers, now almost all “normal drinkers,” enjoying a glass of wine at dinner or a celebratory cocktail, I thought “look how easy that is; it’s just no big deal!” I was “normal” now, after all; all of the reasons I used to drink were no longer a part of my life, so what would be the harm? I had escaped a soul-crushing relationship, had a career that I loved instead of loathed, and had built an entire life that I adored.

I genuinely thought “I’m happy now, so I can drink.” I never once stopped to acknowledge that instead, “I’m happy now because I don’t drink.” And that is the cunning, baffling, and powerful disease of alcoholism. It bides its time and creeps back in, the only disease that insists that you do not have it.

These non-alcoholic thoughts would crop up every now and then, and eventually I even discussed them with people in my life. I was no longer surrounded by other alcoholics, having drifted away socially, but that felt like a natural progression to me. Some months later, just shy of celebrating four years sober, I began having a glass of wine on occasion. I was careful to not drink too much or too often, I still had a shred of memory of the darkest days of hangovers, blackouts, bad decisions, and the crushing shame and guilt that come along with them. And it really was fine, nice even. For a little while.

Of course, in short time, the real “reason” I drank the way I did caught up to me; I’m an alcoholic. And no matter how much life changes around me, there’s no putting that genie back in the bottle. So, enter the dreaded downward spiral that lasted almost a year. I so quickly was right back to where I had left off, if not worse. I stopped several times, but struggled to stay stopped. It was a repeat of the Hell I had been through in what felt like the distance past.

Finally, finally, finally, I really got sober again. I started from square one with a new sponsor. I painstakingly again worked those first steps. I got back into the AA community, and wondered why I had ever left. Had I been going to meetings, even occasionally, I would have heard tales just like the one I had lived. I would have discussed my choice to drink again with an alcoholic who could give me better advice than someone who had no personal experience with this disease. I maybe would have even continued on the upward trajectory of spiritual fitness.

I remember my track coach from a million years ago shouting “don’t run to it, run through it!” If I look back, I ran to the line of “sober” and then coasted — and I had enough momentum to last me years, for which I am grateful, but physics did their thing, and eventually I was at a dead stopl. In my vehicle of life, I need to keep my foot on the gas pedal. Maybe minimally at times, but without the steady application of the twelve step principles in my life, I’ll eventually come to a standstill again.

Lesson learned, the Twelve Steps are not a straight line, and there is no endpoint. Steps ten, eleven, and twelve, which have us remain in self-reflection, connection, and service, are a continuous lifestyle, not a checkbox. The infinite loop, for this alcoholic, is a track I can’t step off of.

This time around, I’m remaining painstaking about the “maintenance of my spiritual condition.” Actively engaging my head, heart, and hands in a lifestyle of sobriety and recovery, rather than viewing it as a checklist of items to be crossed off, is vitally important. Not only for me to remain sober, which is something I view as a side benefit to having a life well-lived. I’m back to a morning ritual of reading beautiful words, taking time to reflect and practice gratitude, and to pray and meditate.

I have heard this same story in the rooms of AA from so many others; we are painstaking until we are amazed, then we start to slack off…it rarely ends well. I published the journal Spiritual Maintenance: 90 Days of Spiritual Practice to Build a Spiritual Lifestyle for the “maintenance steps” of AA. I know that if I have this book in my morning reading stack, I will actually practice the 10th step and 11th step, which I never diligently did before. I am hopeful it will help others to make this practice an ingrained part of their life as well, and stave of the restlessness, irritability, and discontentedness that slowly creeps back into an unintentionally lived life.

Now, when I hear The Promises read, I focus not on the promises themselves, but on the closing words: “they will always materialize if we work for them.”