The Promises

If we are even a little bit honest with ourselves — and we mean a little bit, nobody's asking for a memoir — things will get weird. In the good way.

We will stop lying awake at 3am doing the math on our own lives in milliliters.

This is the one people read at meetings and something in the room shifts. We do not fully understand why. We have stopped questioning it.

No matter how spectacularly we went down — and some of us went down, historically, embarrassingly, legendarily down — we will find that the wreckage has an address and we can visit it without moving back in.

The shame will not kill us.

It tried. We're still here.

We will develop the startling ability to sit in a room full of people without immediately calculating the exits. We will eat breakfast. We will find out what we actually think about things, now that the boofing isn't doing our thinking for us.

The people who loved us when we were at our worst will still be there. Some of them. The ones who couldn't stay — we will understand why, eventually, without making it mean something it doesn't.

Some of us will still be disasters. Functional disasters. The good kind. The kind that shows up on time and remembers your birthday and only occasionally disappears for three days without explanation.

Are these extravagant promises? Probably. We're Boofers. Extravagance is in the blood. But they're happening anyway — messily, slowly, sometimes embarrassingly — in church basements and parking lots and group chats and wherever the hell this website counts as.