Tortured by Loneliness

Isolation: The state of being away from other people.

My friend Willie send me a few pages from a book called "Transforming the Steps" written by an orthodox Catholic priest. I'm not sure if he found the thinking helpful personally or he's so appalled by the state of my Program that he's doing whatever he can to get me back on the beam. Whatever. Both work for me. I can use all the help I can get. The important thing is that I mention his name. Dude would kill me if I used something from him without due credit.

I include a few excerpts here. I've found it fascinating over the years seeing how learned people from religion, from the medical community, from the legal system and psychiatry and from just about everyone who has to deal with active alcoholism and drug addiction, frankly, have adapted and absorbed the stuff that Bill and Bob wrote down, stuff that was mostly appropriated from spiritual literature of all types and colors written over thousands of years, stuff that was knitted and synthesized into a easily digestible paste that alcoholics could swallow. I mean: find God and help your neighbor? C'mon. Bill and Bob didn't come up with that.

"The feeling of total isolation experienced by the alcoholic, though not necessarily recognized by him, includes areas where normal people would not even think it possible to be isolated. For regular people, being conscious may not always be a wonderful experience, but at least it can be relied on. For the drinking alcoholic, becoming unconscious starts to be a welcome alternative to the pains of living. However, in the course of time, the unconscious mind of the drinker also becomes tainted with the pain and insanity of the conscious world. Closing his eyes no longer keeps the pain away, and there seems to be no way of keeping the insanity out."

Contrast this with an excerpt from the Big Book: "For one thing, we will get rid of that terrible sense of isolation that we've always had. Almost without exception, alcoholics are tortured by loneliness. Even before our drinking got bad and people began to cut us off, nearly all of us suffered that we didn't quite belong. . . . . There was always that mysterious barrier we could neither surmount or understand."

I believe that Earth People think that alcoholics drink because they want to have fun. Maybe it's like that at the start but eventually it becomes a job, a requirement necessary to stop feeling the pain of being alive. The desire for unconsciousness becomes overriding. That's why I didn't go out and I didn't put any food in my belly that would hinder my metabolism of the alcohol. I wanted to go to sleep. Many of us felt that we were placed on earth without the basic instruction manual that everyone else had. We were fucking clueless.

Who would want to give that up?