‘Junkie to Judge’ Mary Beth O’Connor on Drug Use, Addiction, Criminalization, Recovery, and Community
The CIA put crack in Black and brown communities, and then the government made the penalty for crack 100 times greater than that for cocaine: another concoction from the same plant, used by white people and the rich. This is how you know the War on Drugs has always been an imperialist war on poor Black people and people of color. Criminalization and incarceration statistics support the claim. 
Drugs are used at the same rate by white and Black people, and white people are more likely to sell drugs than Black people; yet, Black men are incarcerated on drug charges at a rate six to 13 times that of white men, and between 36% and 62% of people in state prison for drug charges are Black, despite Black people comprising only 13% of the US population.
As civil rights attorney and Black political and cultural thought leader Olayemi Olurin told me, “I’ve never seen more cocaine usage than on people I went to school with that are now prosecutors today. I’ve never seen more people fighting, doing more crime. The only difference is it’s not treated as crime.”
Indeed, drug use is not a poor problem. Or a Black problem. It’s a mental health problem. And a policy problem.
When used responsibly, drugs aren’t a problem at all; a quarter of people living in the US consider themselves drug users — and are not addicts, or criminals. Drug mis-use and drug addiction are what need to be addressed. How we respond to drug use, drug addiction and drug treatment is what needs to be decolonized.
In fact, local organizers can even learn from the ways communities of safe drug users and communities of recovering addicts operate: prioritizing privacy, safety, autonomy and interconnection. We can learn from the stories of the drug users who co-created or recovered and thrived in these communities. For a long time, Dharma Punx and Refuge Recovery have served this purpose for people like me.
Author and speaker Mary Beth O’Connor also found her community, transforming herself from a self-described junkie to a federal judge, with the help of friends. Now a board member of LifeRing Secular Recovery, She Recovers Foundation and The Hyer Calling Foundation, O’Connor turned a childhood of abuse and neglect into a successful career — and a commitment to giving back. And while O’Connor’s story is far from customary, it’s symbolic of what can be achieved by individuals, families, and communities; what O’Connor learned about drug use and drug addiction can inform drug treatment and drug policy.
As O’Connor tells me in our CounterPunch-exclusive 30-minute conversation:
“I had methamphetamine on me every day, and I was stopped by the police several times — like accidents, or tickets, or something. Never was I searched. And the reality is that, if I would have been a person of color or lived in a low-income community, the odds of me getting searched would have been very high. Which meant I would have had a longer criminal record, which meant I wouldn’t probably have ever been a lawyer, much less a judge. But it’s because we have a really vast racial disparity in our drug enforcement laws.. White people and people of color use drugs at the same rate. And yet a person of color is more likely to get stopped. If they’re stopped, they’re more likely to get searched. If their drugs are found, they’ll get charges. They’ll be felony charges, instead of misdemeanor charges. And the sentences are going to be a lot longer.”
That’s why drug treatment needs to change. Along with the laws regulating drug use.
For O’Connor, “The number-one thing we should be doing is decriminalizing drugs.” The abolitionist collective TEN DEMANDS concurs, calling to “end the criminalization of drug use and drug addiction.”
As O’Connor explains, “You can treat three to six people… for drug addiction for the price of incarcerating one — and it will be more effective.”
Additionally, she says, “We do not have drug treatment for everyone who wants it. We don’t have enough harm reduction. We don’t have enough mental health treatment.”
A partial solution, according to TEN DEMANDS, would be to “invest state and federal revenue from legal marijuana into communities most impacted by the War on Drugs” — and then use this financial infusion to deliver mental health, behavioral health and addiction recovery services at the local level, nationwide.
It’s quite simple, O’Connor tells me: “incarceration money” would be “better redirected in another direction.”
From Addict to Advocate: A Conversation with Mary Beth O’Connor, Author, From Junkie to Judge
Phil Mandelbaum/AWKWORD (Host): I’ve done a lot of interviews as a guest and as the host. My Global Warning show is running right now, but today’s episode is special and exclusive for CounterPunch.
My guest is or was an addict, depending on how you look at it. She was the victim of horrifying sexual, physical and emotional abuse in and outside the home, from youth into adulthood. She was kidnapped three times. And then, as she put it in her extraordinary, informative and empowering book, she went from junkie to judge.
Not that we’re going to avoid news and politics, which is what I’m known for. In fact, we’re going to put abuse, drug use and misuse and so-called rehab in social and cultural context. As illustrated graphically in From Junkie to Judge, people in my guest’s position are not only targets of the ostensibly traditional predators, but like others involved in the street economy, are also easy pickings for police, child protective services, courts and carceral institutions. Most don’t become judges.
And that’s why Mary Beth O’Connor is here with me today: to share the lessons she learned on what causes addiction, the dangers of drug seeking behaviors, what recovery can really look like, what it takes to take the first step, stay on the path and find personal and professional success, and how to avoid and overcome the oppressive injustice system.
Now, before we begin, a bit of personal information for those who don’t know. I’m an addict, I’m neurodivergent, and I’m mentally ill. I was born this way, I was arrested, I got out because of privilege, and found myself in rehab.
For me, Mary Beth’s book was more than a compelling read. Parts shook me to my core: the things I couldn’t relate to. In stark contrast to MB’s experience, my home has always been my safe space, since birth. And always a brawler, I was safer on the streets, too, than a beautiful young woman. Other parts, though, resonated in ways I didn’t expect. The self-loathing and conflicting intelligence and accompanying arrogance; the embarrassing employment history and comparison trap; the emotional and physical ups and downs; the brutality of drug-induced violence; and the misinformation we’re fed by rehab facilities and the addiction industrial complex that is AA and NA.
Thank you, Mary Beth, for your unparalleled honesty, for what you symbolize for so many of us, and for agreeing to further exposure through this conversation.
First, I’d love to get out of the way, the part that grips me most. Our backgrounds were so different, but we’ve struggled with similar obstacles.
As you said in your book, ‘People often ask how someone so smart could become an addict, but brain disorders don’t discriminate based on intellect.” Any thoughts on how we found ourselves in similar places? There isn’t even a history of addiction in my family. What ties all addicts together? What do we all share?
Mary Beth O’Connor (Guest): You did mention mental health, right? And so for me, yes, I had a trauma history. I had physical and sexual abuse in the home. And as you said, other assaults outside the home. But what that did in part was give me PTSD and very severe anxiety. So I too struggled with mental health disorders. I struggled with depression when I was young. I really was on the verge of developing OCD, obsessive compulsive disorder, when I was young. So I would say that is a linkage between the two of us.
And as we know, untreated trauma also usually means untreated mental health disorders or just mental health disorders that are biological. Those are common pathways into developing a substance problem because we use the substances as a remedy for what we’re feeling in the beginning. And I think we need to say, in the beginning it works, or at least it seems to. So I think we definitely have a connection from that side of the coin, which is unfortunately for us a common pathway to addiction.
Phil Mandelbaum: Very well said. And you’re right, whether it’s biological, genetic, or it’s developed over time, we both had to struggle with mental illness… So there’s more in common than there’s not, actually. As both you and I experienced going to AA and NA meetings, they don’t want to talk about that part at all, they want to just call addiction a disease and give you very specific God-oriented ways to address that disease. At no point do I remember talking about what caused me to start using, and as you put it, why I kept using, because initially it works.
Let’s for a minute just talk about the connection that we’ve established. What is it about community being so critical to recovery, and how can we benefit from that shared experience and knowledge?
Mary Beth O’Connor: That is the benefit of peer support, right?
So as you mentioned, I was pushed into Twelve Steps, which is Alcoholics Anonymous and all the many Anonymouses. And Twelve Steps wasn’t a good fit for me for multiple reasons, although I acknowledge it works for a number of people, and I’m happy for them. For me, it didn’t. I found other peer supports. But even so, when I was told there was nothing other than Twelve Steps, I did go to Twelve Step meetings. And I will say the primary benefit of those meetings was seeing people tell their story, and hearing stories that were similar to mine. And yet the person, the speaker was now a year sober or two years sober, and had a job, and was looking healthy and getting their life in order. And that for me was a critical part of my early recovery, because early recovery is hard.
And when I went to rehab, I didn’t think sobriety was even on the table. I thought the best I would ever do was use less, like that was like the best I could imagine. So seeing others having success can be really critical to building our confidence, that maybe that’s an option for us if we do the work. And I say that in part because most of us are ambivalent in the beginning or we are not confident that it’s a viable alternative for us to get sober.
So that’s helpful from groups as well as being in a community that understands you. I mean, there’s a commonality, there’s a connection, it makes you feel less alone, and it can give you examples of strategies and techniques that might be useful. So there’s a lot of benefits to that community aspect. I felt that and I’m glad to share that with the world.
Phil Mandelbaum: I think at the local level, I believe in action at the local level, and I believe community is so critical. If communities were structured more like they used to be, many, many years ago, generations ago, we would know all of our neighbors. We would look out for our neighbors and we would be there for people struggling, especially nowadays with our advanced scientific knowledge, with addiction or mental illness… And so the addict community is kind of a really good example of a community that does work. And even though some of these war stories, as we call them, can be inspiring in the wrong way, and although some of the people don’t look great when they’re telling their stories, and sometimes you leave feeling a little bit worse, as you pointed out, it’s not just the people speaking in front of you at the podium. It’s about the people you meet at those meetings and the people you can rely on…
Mary Beth O’Connor: If you don’t mind, I’d like to add one caveat to that. I think there is an important factor in that dynamic. And to me, one of the problem areas that can occur in peer support is that people get very committed to the way that they recovered being the one and only way that everyone should do. And that is a sort of a problem that runs throughout, including in Twelve Steps. And to me, that is ego.
I really feel that there is value in sharing our story, like you and I are talking openly about our story. There’s multiple ways that that can be useful, including stigma reduction. I think it’s helpful for me to say, look, here’s how I did it. I used secular techniques and strategies. I went to other peer support groups like LifeRing Secular Recovery.
I think it can be useful to hear my story because I succeeded. But I also feel that I need to say it in an attitude of these are ideas for your consideration. Not these are things you must do to succeed, but rather I’m sharing these so that you can think about them and see if my approach is going to be a good fit for you. And I think that’s a very critical distinction that unfortunately not everybody in recovery has when they talk to newcomers.
Phil Mandelbaum: Yeah, I totally agree. One way is authoritarian. The other is essentially socialist, right? Let others do what’s best for them within this safe space, as opposed to telling them what they have to do. And, you know, conversely, as a judge, sometimes you’re forced to tell people what to do, which is a funny segue.
But, before we get into the harrowing details of what led to the drug seeking behavior and eventual drug addiction, I do want to talk about the happy ending. The extent of your intelligence, which was part of my story too, was made clear in the book. But beyond that, how did you transform from a self-described junkie to a judge? And then, as a judge, what did you focus on and why?
Mary Beth O’Connor: I was addicted in my early teens, and I was shooting methamphetamine by seventeen, in full bore addiction, out of high school. I did a little better in college, but then at the end of college, I started using meth again on a daily basis and I didn’t get sober till thirty two. So that was a really long haul.
At thirty two, I have a Berkeley degree and good grades, and an embarrassing resume, because I couldn’t hold a job. I mean, my terminology is: I worked my way down the corporate ladder, after college, for the next ten years. And so when I got home from rehab, I had that normal urge of: I need to sort of make up for lost time and leap ahead and fix everything. But that wasn’t going to happen, especially professionally. So I had to start where I was.
And so thirty two, home from rehab, my first job was a part-time, temporary, low-level job, because it’s really all I was ready for. And then I worked my way into a full-time, permanent job. And then I worked my way into a supervisory job at a high-tech company. I lived in the Bay Area. And then at six and a half years sober, I emphasize six and a half years, I went to Berkeley Law School. So it was a process to get to that point. And I graduated law school at forty two…
I worked at a big law firm, and I did class action work for the federal government. And then at twenty years sober, in my early fifties, I was appointed a federal administrative law judge, which I did for five and a half years. And now I’m retired. So that was the arc of it. To me, it’s an example of how far you can get by just focusing on what’s the right next step.
Phil Mandelbaum: Very true, and you know it’s the cliche, but it works: one day at a time. And that’s kind of how you put your growth too, and it really is an inspiring and, I have to say, probably unusual experience.
You mentioned being targeted, harassed and arrested for how you looked, for who you were hanging out with, for your reputation. Addicts are treated a certain way in society. And if you have double disadvantages: poverty, a skin color that isn’t privileged… What’s the difference when you’re rich versus poor? That, you experienced, I think, right? And then, in retrospect or listening to other stories you’ve heard, what extra hurdles might others have to face if they don’t enjoy the privilege of white skin or being cisgender or something like that?
Mary Beth O’Connor: Yeah. So I was arrested once when I was eighteen, and I was treated very lightly.
Part of that was that it was my little hometown and they knew I didn’t have a criminal record, even as a teenager. And they knew I was headed off to college, like in the newspaper for winning the most scholarship money. But that being treated lightly was a big impact on my life. If I would have been put in jail or really derailed from going to college, my whole life could have changed. But I also, I wrote a piece for the Los Angeles Times about this, was always aware of my privilege.
So, for example, the last ten years that I was using, I had methamphetamine on me every day, and I was stopped by the police several times, like accidents or tickets or something. Never was I searched. And the reality is that if I would have been a person of color or lived in a low-income community, the odds of me getting searched would have been very high, which meant I would have had a longer criminal record, which meant I wouldn’t probably have ever been a lawyer, much less a judge. But it’s because we have a really vast racial disparity in our drug enforcement laws. I mean, white people and people of color use drugs at the same rate. And yet a person of color is more likely to get stopped. If they’re stopped, they’re more likely to get searched. If their drugs are found, they’ll get charges. They’ll be felony charges instead of misdemeanor charges. And the sentences are going to be a lot longer.
And so I was aware that I was sort of riding on my middle class whiteness when I was getting stopped and not having any criminal consequences, despite having drugs on me every day for those last ten years.
Phil Mandelbaum: Important perspective and great to hear. And I’m really glad you pointed out, too, the disparities in sentencing and everything else. And just the fact that you weren’t searched is why you didn’t enter the system and didn’t have to go through all those additional hurdles. Recidivism is very common. And that’s not because of the individual. It’s because of what it’s like to end up incarcerated and how formerly incarcerated people are treated.
Moving on, anything from your experience that provided you insights either as a judge or as an addict or someone using and being in that drug-using community? Any systemic changes you’d like to see regarding drug use and drug users?
Mary Beth O’Connor: I wasn’t a criminal law judge, but I will say, for me, from a policy side, I think the number-one thing we should be doing is decriminalizing drugs for personal use. And there’s a couple reasons.
One is just that racial disparity we talked about, which means we’re not even enforcing the drug laws fairly, which undermines their validity. But also part of the recidivism reason is because a high percentage of people that are arrested for drug charges have addictions, they have substance use disorders and they’re not being provided treatment. They’re being incarcerated. Incarceration is a type of trauma. So you’re sort of compounding whatever the trauma is, and then you’re releasing people without getting the help that they need.
But the other side of that is, if people really only care about effective use of their tax dollars, incarcerating people for possession, just possession, which is, I think, still about a half a million people in jail, just for possession, is very expensive and very ineffective. You can treat three to six people, depending on the system, for drug addiction for the price of incarcerating one, and it will be more effective.
We do not have drug treatment for everyone who wants it. We don’t have enough harm reduction. We don’t have enough mental health treatment to go along with the substance treatment when we give it. Incarceration money, those dollars would be better redirected in another direction, and decriminalization would help with that.
Phil Mandelbaum: Absolutely. And it’s very interesting to think about it being significantly less expensive. Less effective isn’t as interesting because we already know that prison is not intended to reform individuals. And that is just further demonstrated by the fact that they would rather spend more money to incarcerate…
And that’s why I think about it as broken windows policing to incarcerated person to someone who is always seen as that individual, no matter how they progress, no matter how they recover. There’s a stigma, as you put it. That stigma can be self-applied too. As you said in one great moment in the book, “I did not believe I could survive without drugs since the anguish would annihilate me if allowed to surface due to the weighty baggage. The addict life was the optimum I could accomplish if I had to feel the searing pain of the many traumas. I wouldn’t just self-mutilate or take extreme risks next time. I’d kill myself or wind up in a mental institution. So while addiction was an imperfect solution, I feared it less than the alternatives.”
So, fortunately you moved beyond that. You found alternatives that worked for you. But I’m curious, did any of it wind up to be as you’d feared?
Do you see carceral elements in the institutions designed to supposedly help us recover?
Mary Beth O’Connor: We definitely have a problem with our substance use treatment system on multiple levels. One is that about forty percent of them are still Twelve Steps only. And again, I support Twelve Steps when it’s the right fit, but it should never be the only-thing option offered, especially when you don’t tell people that that’s what you’re doing, which often is what happens. But on top of that, we don’t have good regulation or standards. And so people can get sort of spun through the system. You’re in for twenty eight days and then you’re out and then they’ll shift you over here.
But also the reality is what we don’t really have is a robust system that’s going to treat the core issue at the same time that it’s treating the substance use. This is one of the things that really frustrates me when I talk to, let’s say, friends and family. A mother might say to me, you know, my daughter’s tried everything. She’s been to rehab six times. And when I ask a question, what happened? Was she offered the same thing six times? A twenty-eight day program that was the same for everybody that didn’t treat her bipolar disorder or her anxiety or whatever it was. It didn’t help her have housing or employment when she left. And she feels like a failure, the daughter. And then the mother feels like there’s no hope for the daughter. And it’s a very expensive approach.
If we would have given her a full full range of treatments in the beginning, it would have been less than the cost of six programs that she failed.
And so there’s just a lot of limits that are embedded in our system. People can’t properly evaluate one treatment program over another. It’s really difficult to do that. And we don’t have a good system for making sure people get all the things they need so they actually have a real chance of success.
Phil Mandelbaum: Yeah, really, really well said. I was fortunate in my experience. They had things like yoga, they had acupuncture. And one of the people who was involved with that part of the program noticed somehow that the God part wasn’t a big selling point for me either, and gave me the Buddhist version of the Big Book. And that changed everything for me. And what a privilege, although it wasn’t easy, and that’s another issue, to get into that particular place. I was surrounded by a lot of people who were sent there by judges, a lot of people who came from different backgrounds, and for someone like me that’s actually a good thing. But this is not common. I didn’t experience much violence.
My understanding is that it doesn’t always go that way. So obviously we need support then from outsiders, from family, from friends, whether we get the support we need in rehab or not, whether we end up in rehab or not.
What advice do you want to share for partners and loved ones? How important is that support and what does real support look like?
Mary Beth O’Connor: Yeah. And I’ll also say not everybody needs to go inpatient, right? It’s mostly for those of us on the more severe end. And so there are other options that people should look at, like outpatient programs or working with a therapist who has addiction expertise. I needed trauma therapy. I got an expert in trauma when I got out of rehab.
But for friends and family, what I really try to explain to them is that old tough love idea, or like on those intervention shows where the family says to the person, you’re going to go to the program we picked for you and you’re going to do it today or we’re not talking to you, that is not an evidence-based approach. Does it work for a small minority of people? Sure, everything works for a small minority of people, including incarceration, right? But does it work well? No.
The evidence-based approach is called CRAFT: Community Reinforcement and Family Training. And it’s a more positive reinforcement approach. But it also talks about the reality of having non-emotional conversations about what’s at the core of the addiction. What are the drugs doing for you? What help do you really need?
And there’s a book I recommend for friends and family called Beyond Addiction that’s based on CRAFT techniques. And it talks about all of that. It explains why it’s hard to stop. It explains why most of us, including myself, do not have perfect abstinence from day one. That happens, but it’s rare.
And it also talks about the family’s need to do self-care, because living through that experience is traumatic for the family. It’s gut-wrenching.
I know, as I’m sure you do, we are friends and family too, right? We have people that didn’t recover the day we recovered or maybe ever. And so, always, I want them to know that there’s a better approach than that tough love. It doesn’t mean they can’t set appropriate boundaries, financial boundaries, no physical assault boundaries, those kind of things. But there’s a better way that has better data. And CRAFT and Beyond Addiction are always what I recommend people look into.
Phil Mandelbaum: Perfect. And, you know, there’s often empowerment in being one of the people who is an addict or went through this and is then providing services that benefited you to others in similar places…
Do you see ways for people with drug misuse or addiction issues who’ve experienced the system or experienced the street economy to get involved in a larger movement? Say, to protect the rights of individuals who are on the streets, whether it’s unhoused people or immigrants, or to affect drug policy and things like that? What ways can we support, beyond protests or social media posting?
Mary Beth O’Connor: From the legal side, the ACLU has information about your rights in regards to drugs, and that’s one place I would look.
But I will say there is one place where you can really have an impact on your local community right now, and that’s in finding out where the opioid settlement monies are going. Because there’s billions of dollars that are being allocated over, I think, a period of ten years that filter down into your local communities, your county or your town. And the way those monies are being spent is problematic in a lot of places.
First of all, there’s a lack of transparency in a lot of jurisdictions. It’s hard to find out where the money is going. And second of all, the money is supposed to be being used to help people that have substance use disorders. And yet a lot of the money’s being filtered over to just general, let’s buy some new police cars, or let’s buy this technology to protect police in case they breathe in fentanyl…
All those panic attacks the police are having because they think they’re going to have a problem from breathing fentanyl is the opposite of what happens when you breathe, when you are having an overdose, which means they would be sedated, and instead they’re all breathing heavily and panicking…
Don’t get me wrong, some communities are doing a good job and they’re spending it in the right ways, but a lot of them are not, and so if you want to look somewhere locally that you can have an impact, I would find out where those dollars are going and make sure they’re going where they’re supposed to be going, which is to help the community and its members recover from substance use disorders and addiction and related things.
Phil Mandelbaum: Perfect. And I’m sure that’s cathartic for individuals, too, to give back. I suspect, because I’m desperate to do this myself, that writing a book, particularly one like this, is also cathartic.
Give a brief rundown for those who haven’t read the book about what you went through growing up, which I think is the source for a lot of your mental illness issues, or mental health issues, I should say. And then the drug seeking and other dangerous behaviors.
How did you decide to write a book, as well, and get that book published, actually finish the book? And how was it cathartic? Do you recommend others take this approach as well?
Mary Beth O’Connor: I did think a lot about the structure of the book. I wanted the book to be useful. And so there were a couple of things.
One is that all the memoirs I read were Twelve Step memoirs, and I didn’t see any that talked about building an individual recovery plan, which is what I did. I combined ideas from different sources. And today that’s much more common and talked about, the individualized approach to recovery. But also the subtitle is ‘Triumph Over Trauma and Addiction.’ And so I talk about that mental health-trauma-substance interplay.
So the first third of the book is my pre-drug childhood, because I wanted to show where the addiction came from. Why did using substances at that excessive level make sense to me? Why was that attractive to me? Because I wanted people to understand better. The judge part may be unusual. The beginning is unfortunately not that unusual, right? Physical abuse in my household. My stepfather was abusive to my mother. Parent on parent violence is traumatic, even if you’re never targeted. You know, sexual violence in the home, other sexual assaults outside the home. I wanted to show where it commonly comes from that we develop a substance problem. And then the beginning is a lot of the pain and misery of what my addiction was like.
But the last third is my first three years of recovery, both from the substances and from my mental health, the PTSD and the anxiety, because that also is common that we have more than one thing that we have to recover from when we get sober. And I wanted to show sort of a more realistic example, but also a more self-empowered approach, which is what I did.
Twelve Step people can use a lot of my strategies, but still, I didn’t see a memoir that showed how to sort of tackle it by doing an individual assessment of what approach is going to be right for me, what strategies or techniques are the right fit for me. So I wanted to do those things to sort of make it useful by showing an example in a different way than what I saw out there.
Phil Mandelbaum: That makes sense. And I think you certainly achieved it.
So beyond being cathartic for you, beyond telling your story, there is value to, I would say, both people struggling with similar issues as well as their friends and family. I felt like I could identify with so much, but even I learned a bunch of stuff, and I’ve lived this as well.
One of your favorite quotes that you learned from Women for Sobriety is never compare your insides to someone else’s outsides. I think it’s beautiful, too. So I jotted that down.
I know this is advice to addicts, and we can certainly talk about that. But in conclusion, how can we apply this no matter who we are?
Mary Beth O’Connor: You’re absolutely right.
What do you see on social media, typically? It’s all the good things. In fact, I found that some people that we are friends with on Facebook got divorced only through inference. Like, they don’t announce it. They only announce the good things. And so there’s this tendency to think that other people’s surface life is like their whole life, that there’s nothing going on underneath, that there’s no challenges. And it’s important not to look at it that way.
But also for me, and I think for a lot of us, when I got sober at thirty two, all I could see because of my anxiety and my PTSD was the negative. I was hyper aware of any little mistake, or where I should have, could have, would have been if I wouldn’t have been doing drugs for ten years. And judging myself on my lack of perfection or what felt like slow pace or she’s got things that I wish I had or wanted, that’s not really helpful…
It’s so much better to focus on, how am I doing compared to yesterday? How am I doing compared to a year ago or two years ago? That’s really the important marker. And I had to teach myself to look backwards, to look at how I had improved or moved forward in six months or a year. I had to make myself pause and look, because it wasn’t my natural inclination. But it was really helpful, because if we look at the trajectory, I think it can make us start to feel a little more competent and sort of confident in our future…
