I used to think that, before a bunch of relapses, before it felt like I had lived my life down to a pencil point. I was entirely certain I could and would stop drinking, the first 1-2-30-75 days, every single time I quit-- up until this time now, when it has literally been an "I don't know what I'm doing tomorrow, ask me then, but today I am sober" type of proposition. I didn't have a single second of pink cloud this time. I gradually, steadily, developed a confidence that working the program could and would deliver me from obsessive thoughts about drinking. Over time, I began to really see the distinction expressed in the saying of trouble, "that was my day, (but) that's not my life". I got truly serene in the "AA acceptance" sense of the word-- not happy and sunny and positive, but calm and rational.
In the past, I didn't necessarily have to do hard work to stay sober early on; the pain was still fresh and it provided enough motivation to stay away from the first drink. The pain was newer, the scar tissue wasn't as thick, so I was easier to scare. The bottom wasn't as low emotionally, spiritually, or in terms of consequence, so there was a much more positive "dead cat bounce" from just stopping the alcohol intake. And consequence here isn't really a term referring to jail or divorce or unemployment or bankruptcy. I mean it in terms of how much of my soul I'd lost. By the end, the relapses were really turning me into something I didn't recognize, and each time it was much harder to feel like "I can change back to <what I think of as the real me>". I started to feel like "welp, now you've done it, you might as well see it all the way down" (and that thought will be with me, lurking, until the day I die; it's waiting for something truly catastrophic to happen so it can say "you tried, it didn't work, you can finally give up").
Also, my attitude was good but misguided, too. I might have SAID "I"m sober today, that's all that matters" but in my heart of hearts, that wasn't how I was approaching it-- I still treated the days like I was entitled to good and bad ones and the bad ones called for all my the intentional manufacture of misery that I had learned as a drinker. I mistook serenity for happiness; I thought that when I felt positive, I was serene, and if I felt negative, then I had to follow those emotions forward because they were obviously genuine. That's why somewhere in the PAWS peak of 90-180 days, I got really vulnerable.
Glad that at least in that regard, maybe our journeys are different.