Forgiveness for when you need it.

It's not your fault, your addiction. Yelling at your kids while high, selling yourself for hit money, the Ziplock taped to the underside of your desk, it's not your fault. Getting your kids drunk, cheating on your spouse in a haze, driving drunk everyday for a year, that wasn't your fault. When you ate food from from the garbage, stole money for a binge, smelt like vomit at school, you weren't guilty.

You are not bad.

And the consequences, the scars, disfigured face, liver disease and diabetes, your wounded children, estranged exes and disappointed parents. You did it. But you are not ruined.

Addiction is devouring. It is a mental superhighway with no exits and no road signs and on which you can travel two hundred miles before even realizing you got on.

Telling you yet again that addiction is a disease and all the subsequent blah-dee-blah about neurochemicals and reward patterns may not convince you you're forgiven, even though that blah-dee-blah is true.

And though you may still hope that all you really need is just to hear that one answer you want so much, to that one question you're afraid to ask of those people you love and hurt so badly, their forgiveness may not work either.

You have to forgive you. But this is crazy talk. Yeah, I'll just squeeze that muscle.

Take this super-hopeful video from the awesome YouTube SobrietyTelevision channel as inspiration:

You can decide not to hate you anymore. You can. It will be hard. It will often suck with discomfort. The whole process will often crap out. But you can. Under every tar asphalt of addiction, behind every heroin dealer, black-out drunk and obese sugar addict, is a just another soul. No monsters. Souls that are sick, and lost, not evil. This includes you (imagine a visual Smokey the Bear point here for emphasis).

Believing this may be too hard. And if it is, that's okay. Because even if you never feel it or believe it, underneath that disbelief will still be a soul that is not at fault, not bad, and never ruined.