Never Quite Measuring Up

Never Quite Measuring Up

What makes a recovery story truly inspiring? Here, Matt Salis lays bare how a lifetime of goal-chasing fed both his stress and his addiction, all through the lens of a humble whole grain bakery. He shares how opening a fourth location once felt like the magic ticket to financial security, only for the numbers to settle and his sense of failure to deepen.

Matt walks through 15 years of grinding effort, constant adjustments and million-loaf productivity, yet remembers that era as “inadequacy, insufficiency… and an insurmountable mountain of stress.” One of the most striking moments comes when he recalls closing the original bakery and watching his teenage daughter “weep uncontrollably” over a place he’d only associated with pain. Her tears forced a hard question: if she remembered joy, what had he been too stressed to see?

From there, the episode looks at how self-inflicted pressure and arbitrary goals can drive people to alcohol as a coping tool. As Matt puts it, “Alcohol does a marvelous job of providing temporary relief for the self-beratement of never quite measuring up.” He distinguishes between feeling like a total failure and the quieter, more insidious belief of always being “not quite good enough” – a “cognitive cancer” that slowly consumes emotional, biological and spiritual health.

Matt also talks about gender patterns in addiction, contrasting many mothers’ deep fulfilment in nurturing their children with the career-driven goal focus he sees in many men. He jokingly calls himself a “goalaholic”, recognising that recovery for him is just as much about loosening his grip on outcomes as it is about staying alcohol-free.

With help from a friend’s mantra about staying “untethered to any particular outcome” and his daughter’s unexpected grief for the bakery, Matt is learning that joy comes from being present, not from a finish line. It leaves you asking: what arbitrary ruler are you still using to measure your worth?