Gately speaks at AA on the Higher Power
Something they seem to omit to mention in Boston AA when you’re new and out of your skull with desperation and ready to eliminate your map and they tell you how it’ll all get better and better as you abstain and recover: they somehow omit to mention that the way it gets better and you get better is through pain.
Context
The suicide idiom inside the AA didactic voice: the free-indirect Boston-AA narration around Gately's White Flag world takes it as given that the newcomer arrives "ready to eliminate your map," and moves straight on to the pain-with-purpose doctrine. No gloss, no quotation marks — by p. 446 the phrase is simply what desperation is called in this register, the street coinage fully absorbed into the program's second-person catechism.