I see your true colors and that's why I love you

Recently I posted a story on Instagram about walking across my college campus with my dress tucked into my underpants.  Yes it was a humiliating moment of my life. But in the rooms of recovery, we talk about our past becoming our greatest asset.  The things we have been through, the terrible and hilarious and unforgettable moments of our lives, are the things that end up saving someone else's life.  When I was 26 years old, I felt like I was the only one who had done the things I'd done. I felt deeply humiliated and ashamed of how I had behaved and the choices I had made while under the influence of drugs and alcohol.  I felt broken in a permanent kind of way.  I lived under a blanket of shame, thinking if you knew the real me, you would be ashamed of me too.  The problem is, when you feel this way about yourself, it affects all the choices you make in your life.  If you feel unworthy of goodness, you will accept the unacceptable.  You will choose partners who mistreat you, jobs that don't fulfill you.  You will keep your bar low. This was me when I began the road to recovery. And things started to change when I began to show people the real me.  And I discovered that I wasn't the worst person in the room. That you had done these things too. What I had been hiding became the thing that connected me to you.  It was the beginning of the end of isolation.