Pink Cloud Comics

  • Who’s Your Daddy?

    Who’s Your Daddy?

    Step Two for God-Optional Brains

    or: How I Built a Higher Power Without a Sky Daddy…

    There’s a special kind of mental whiplash that happens when you land in a 12-step room or any recovery space, your life is burning down, and all the pamphlets keep pointing you toward God like that’s the part you’re supposed to trust.

    You know you need help.
    You know your best thinking helped build the wreckage.
    You also know you do not believe in a guy in the sky managing your case file.

    That was me.

    This post is a follow-up to my earlier one, “Knock Knock. Who’s There? Not God,” where I talked about why “give it to God” and the whole God-can idea doesn’t work for me. This one is about what I do instead.

    Step Two in AA says we “came to believe that a Power greater than ourselves could restore us to sanity.” On paper it sounds open and generous. In real life, a lot of rooms still default to church language, Judeo-Christian imagery, and spiritual shorthand that makes secular, agnostic, or burned-by-religion brains want to back quietly out the door.

    This is for those brains. The God-optional ones. The “I don’t do sky daddies, but I also don’t want to keep burning my life down” crowd.

    Why I bothered with Step Two at all

    Before I worked with my current sponsor, I wrote out what I actually wanted from the Twelve Steps and from sponsorship.

    I was clear:

    • I do not have a concrete concept of God.
    • I lean agnostic, not atheist.
    • I am not going to fake belief to make a room more comfortable.

    What I wanted instead:

    • A healthier way of living.
    • A foundation I could actually stand on.
    • A clearer sense of direction instead of looping around chaos, guilt, and big plans that never leave the launchpad.
    • The ability to show up for other people in pain, whether they ever touch the Steps or not.

    I wasn’t doing the Steps as a slogan collection. I was doing them because the way I had been living stopped working, and I was done pretending it still did.

    That “why” matters, especially if you’re secular. If you don’t know why you’re even entertaining Step Two, the God talk will send you straight back to whatever your favorite escape is.

    Step Two without the sermon

    Here’s Step Two in plain language:

    • You cannot fix your own brain with your own broken tools.
    • You need something bigger than your old habits and old thinking.
    • You don’t have to define that “something” perfectly on day one; you only have to be willing to consider it.

    AA says your higher power can be “of your own understanding,” but it still has to be something greater than you and not you. The logic is simple: if you could think your way into sanity with the same mind that built the problem, you would have done it already.

    That part, I agree with.

    The problem for people like me is the default setting: capital-G God. Church God. Sunday-school God. The God who watched some of us get abused, neglected, or discarded and somehow stayed “mysterious” about it.

    I don’t trust that God.
    I also don’t trust myself enough to promote my own ego to god status.

    So I had to build something else.

    The only real thing I can touch: now

    This is where recovery language and philosophy accidentally meet.

    The only past I know for sure is that I was born.
    The only future I know for sure is that I will die.
    The only reality I can actually touch is now.

    Everything else is possibility, memory, or fear, squeezed into this one moving moment.

    Because I’m the kind of nerd who brings existentialism into recovery, I ended up reading a book by Simone de Beauvoir, a French philosopher, called The Ethics of Ambiguity. You don’t have to care about French philosophy for this to matter. Early in the book she basically says the past no longer exists, the future isn’t real yet, and the moment we’re in is this weird, unstable space between the two.

    Translation: your whole life happens on a knife-edge called “right now.”

    There’s no warranty attached to it. You get this day, this urge, this decision, and you live with what comes after.

    That’s recovery in one line.

    The other half: I’m one of many, not the main act

    De Beauvoir also points out that we are both a subject and an object. We experience ourselves at the center of our own story, but to everyone else we’re one person in a much larger crowd, inside an even larger world.

    In real life, that looks like this:

    • I matter, but I’m not the main character of the universe.
    • I depend on other people. They depend on me.
    • Everything I do has some kind of ripple, whether I see it or not.

    That’s the second half of my higher power.

    I’m one of many. I’m not separate from the rest of it. I live inside a web of relationships, systems, and consequences: friends, family, strangers, the land under my feet, the water I drink, the animals and plants, the air moving in and out of my lungs.

    I have no idea how far my actions reach, for good or for damage. That uncertainty keeps me honest.

    So what is my higher power?

    My higher power is an internal sense of moral order that exists for the good of the whole.

    That’s it.

    There’s nothing mystical hiding in it. It’s a working definition I can live with, not a religion I have to surrender to.

    Just a few simple facts:

    • I only have now.
    • I’m part of a much larger living system.
    • My choices affect that system, and that system affects me.
    • There is a way of living that does less harm and more good than the way I lived before.

    In AA language, you could call that “a power greater than myself” that can restore me to sanity. Not because it magically fixes my life, but because it gives me something bigger than my immediate fear and cravings to answer to.

    It’s bigger than me without letting me off the hook.
    It lives in me and around me at the same time.

    Prayer, meetings, and the accountability problem

    If you’ve spent any time around 12-step circles, faith communities, or recovery talk, you’ve heard some version of:

    • “You need to pray more.”
    • “You need more meetings.”
    • “Give it to God.”

    Sometimes that comes from a good place. Sometimes it’s a way to avoid actually sitting in the mess with someone.

    Prayer can calm some people down. Meetings can keep some people connected. So can meditation, going for a long walk, volunteering, or reading a poem that knocks something loose. And if your brain is on fire, “turning it over” might also mean talking to a therapist, a doctor, or another mental-health professional who can actually help you untangle what’s going on.

    For me, banking everything on talking to someone in the sky who has never once sent a clear reply is not spirituality, it’s avoidance. It’s a way to feel like I’ve “done something” without changing anything. For me, it’s not healthy to believe that a fake spirit in the clouds is handling your responsibilities while you stand still.

    My higher power doesn’t let me dump my life in an invisible suggestion box and walk away. It asks a different question:

    Okay, what are you actually going to do now?

    One day at a time for God-optional people

    So how does any of this help in the real world?

    Here’s how I use it.

    When I wake up and my brain starts screaming about everything at once, I come back to two questions:

    1. What is the next sane action, right now, that does not make the world worse for me or anyone else?
    2. Can I move through this day without turning my pain into shrapnel for the people around me?

    That’s it. That’s my version of prayer.

    Sometimes that action is tiny: eat, shower, answer one email, take a walk, volunteer for an hour, draw one comic, send one honest text that says, “I’m struggling.”

    Sometimes it’s bigger: tell the truth in therapy, quit the job that’s killing me, set a boundary, stop enabling someone, say “I need help” before I implode.

    I’m not reporting to a sky father. I’m reporting to that moral order. The part of me that knows, quietly and clearly, when what I’m doing is out of line with the greater good of the whole.

    Not the fake “greater good” used to justify abuse or control. The real one: less harm, more honesty, more care, more responsibility for my side of the street.

    Why I trust this more than “leave it to God”

    The difference between this and the God I was handed as a kid is simple:

    • This higher power never excuses me from doing the work.
    • It does not promise to rescue me from consequences.
    • It does not let me outsource my mess to an invisible manager and call it spiritual.

    It reminds me:

    • You are going to die.
    • You are not the center of the universe.
    • You have today.
    • Act like it matters.

    For me, that’s enough.

    It keeps me grounded one day at a time.
    It keeps me connected one day at a time.
    It keeps me honest one day at a time.

    And it leaves plenty of room in the circle for people who do believe in God and people who never will, to sit next to each other and talk about the real problem: how not to destroy ourselves and everyone around us.

    If you’re a God-optional brain staring at Step Two or any “higher power” talk, you don’t have to swallow anybody’s sky daddy or rewrite your head to fit a doctrine.

    You can build a higher power out of time, mortality, and moral order.

    One day at a time.

  • “Knock Knock. Who’s There? Not God.”

    “Knock Knock. Who’s There? Not God.”

    At Some Point, You’ve Got to Flush It Down—Why Recovery is Your Job, Not Divine Intervention’s.

    I was sitting in a meeting recently, listening to someone talk about their “God Can.” They explained that whenever they have problems they can’t fix or carry, they toss them in the “God Can” and let God deal with them.

    And I get it—there’s comfort in that, the idea of offloading your mess onto something greater, and for some people, it works. But for me, this idea doesn’t sit right. It’s not that I’m dismissing anyone’s faith or experience—far from it. I believe in a higher power, too, but it’s not one that takes my problems away. It’s an internal sense of moral order, rooted in love and compassion for humanity and the world around me. It’s something I can access within myself, and it guides me through recovery in a way that is personal, not imposed by a set of religious rules.

    Here’s the issue with the “God Can” approach: It’s like cleaning up the ocean and dumping the garbage in a landfill. You think you’re done, but the mess isn’t gone. It’s still there, just buried somewhere else, causing harm in a different way. In recovery, we can’t push our problems aside and expect them to be fixed by an outside force. We need to get our hands dirty. We need to sort through the mess and figure out how to deal with it. That’s where the real work of recovery begins.

    I don’t think anyone should feel like their recovery is invalidated because they don’t believe in a higher power the way others do. As AA says, your higher power can be anything you choose—there’s no one-size-fits-all solution. For me, it’s the belief that we all have the capacity to create a moral compass within ourselves, grounded in love and a commitment to the collective well-being of humanity and the earth. This allows me to walk alongside others in recovery, regardless of their beliefs, and support them in their journey.

    What I do have a problem with is when we start relying on an external force to do the heavy lifting for us. Faith and hope are important—they give us the strength to keep going when we don’t have it in ourselves. But accountability is the core of recovery. It’s about facing your problems head-on, understanding your role in them, and actively working to change your behavior. That’s how we clean up the mess. That’s how we move forward.

    There’s a fine line between accountability and faith. Faith can carry you through the hard moments, but it’s not the tool that does the work. It’s easy to blur those lines and think that prayer, or relying on a higher power, is enough to make everything better. But without the active step of doing the work—sifting through the garbage, learning from our mistakes, and repairing the damage we’ve caused—we’re just moving the mess around, hoping it will disappear on its own.

    If we don’t recognize that line, we’re setting ourselves up for failure. It’s like thinking you can just pray the weight off without ever hitting the gym. Hope is essential, but it’s not the solution. It’s the motivation to get up and start dealing with the problems that have been holding you back. That’s where recovery starts: in facing the mess, not running from it.

    Recovery doesn’t need God or a higher power to fix you. It needs your willingness to face the shit you’ve been avoiding. You can lean on faith for strength, but the real work happens when you hold yourself accountable and do the hard, sometimes messy, work of changing your life.

    In my next piece, I get into what my higher power actually looks like—and how I learned to live “one day at a time” without dropping my life in God’s suggestion box.