Joelle visits Gately: Abiding (p. 858)
And why Pat in counselling keeps telling me just to build a wall around each individual 24-hour period and not look over or back. And not to count days. Even when you get a chip for 14 days or 30 days, not to add them up. […] I literally wasn’t keeping it in the day. I was adding the clean days up in my head.
Context
Joelle relaying what she found herself saying at the podium: Pat's counsel, which she'd only nodded politely at, suddenly understood from inside. The program's whole temporal discipline is here as engineering instructions — wall off each 24 hours, refuse arithmetic — and her diagnosis of every prior relapse is a time-perception error: she counted. Sets up the Knievel figure two breaths later.