It has been a whirlwind twelve days since attending my first AA meeting, and I’m on Day Eleven of being sober. For what feels like the countless time, I am facing my fight with alcohol.

At first, the advice was simple: ninety meetings in ninety days. Achievable enough, especially with meetings spread throughout the day and Zoom always within reach. Yet even in these early days, I’ve realised that what I’ve stepped into is far bigger than I could have imagined. Until then, AA existed only in films. Dimly lit rooms, chairs in a circle, strangers introducing themselves with a first name and the words, “I’m an alcoholic.” Never reality.

Did I think of myself as an alcoholic? Absolutely not. I just liked a drink, morning, noon, and night. No ritual, no waiting until 5pm to open a bottle of wine. I drank because it was what I did. And yet, somehow, reality crept up on me. Over the last two years, my habits became impossible to ignore. It took my adult children calling me that dreaded A-word, alcoholic, and therapy shining a light on my patterns to make me see what I had been denying all along.

Now, sitting on the sober side of the bottle, life feels altered in ways I never expected. I wonder; does everyone sober feel this heightened awareness of the world around them? This constant pressure to perform the role of a “citizen,” rather than losing themselves in the dregs of a glass? Drinking took me away from reality and into what felt like safety, a world where only I existed. It was hazy, numbing, certain. My own creation. To live in sobriety is to say goodbye to that world. And the hardest thing in life is saying goodbye to something that has always felt like security. For me, drunkenness was my comfort, my shield, my one stable in a frightening world.

Do I enjoy sobriety? The answer doesn’t come easily. I want to say yes, but honesty won’t let me.

Listening to others share their struggles in AA, their raw and unguarded moments, creates something I never expected: unity. An invisible thread connects the room. That unity may be the very heart of why AA works.

And yet, beneath it all, one theme recurs again and again: resentment. The literature warns that resentment keeps us sick. It’s not about apportioning blame, but about facing what we’ve carried for too long, then letting it go. Only then can we move towards acceptance and healing.

But resentment feels like a dirty word to me. My instinct has always been to hold only myself accountable, never to direct anger outward. To resent others almost feels alien. And yet maybe my inability to allow anger has kept me stuck. Maybe it has been easier to destroy myself than to face the truth of who hurt me as a child. That, too, is a resentment. Against myself. Self-resentment. Perhaps that deserves a space of its own, a blog post in itself.

Resentments aren’t always grand betrayals. Some are deceptively small, brushed aside as insignificant. But those small things, left to fester, can creep into the mind and poison us quietly from the inside out.

One of mine circles around a single word, so ordinary, spoken dozens of times a day by everyone around me; mum. Even now, hearing it stirs something sharp inside me, something that borders on anger.

My mother grew up in Surrey, and in our house there was no choice, it was mum, never mam. We were expected to mould our voices to her accent. At school, the North East girl in me could speak freely, but the moment I stepped through the front door I had to switch, twisting my voice into something that wasn’t mine. That one word became a reminder of the divide between who I was and who I was told to be.

Maybe you have a memory like that, something that seems minor, but never really left you. Do we simply exaggerate these irritations, giving them more weight than they deserve? Or are they something deeper, moments that shaped us into dutiful children, silenced us, made us small, left us unable to speak the truth we so desperately needed to tell?

Resentments, whether small or monumental, have a way of shaping who we become. In sobriety, I’m learning they cannot be ignored, dismissed, or buried, they surface, demanding to be faced. Perhaps the journey isn’t about erasing them but about loosening their hold, making space for something different. Acceptance , forgiveness, maybe even peace. If you’re walking this same path, perhaps your own resentments whisper to you too. And maybe, just maybe, we can learn to let them go together.