Tortured By Loneliness

What are we likely to receive from Step Five?  For one thing we shall get rid of that terrible sense of isolation 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 the feeling that we didn't quite belong.  Either we were shy, and dared not draw near others, or we were apt to be noisy good fellows craving attention and companionship, but never getting it - at least to our way of thinking.  There was always that mysterious barrier we could neither surmount nor understand.  It was as if we were actors on a stage, suddenly realizing that we did not know a single line of our parts.  It did let us act extemporaneously.

In the next paragraph we have the phrases "the isolation problem" and "the old pangs of anxious apartness."  I like the word "terrible" to describe our loneliness.  I like the verb "tortured."  I know Bill W liked to showboat but these words really hit home for most of us.

Terrible:  Dreadful; causing terror, alarm, and fear.

Torture:   Intentional causing of somebody's experiencing agony.

One of my most consistent dreams revolves around me showing up at a school or university days or weeks late, unsure of the location of the classroom I need to be in, aware that I've done none of the work required up to that point.  I'm convinced that I'm reliving those terrible feelings of not having done what I'm supposed to have done.  That feeling of standing on a stage and not knowing any of my lines while everyone else is perfectly prepared.

I still suffer from too much anxiety although it's a drop in the bucket to what I used to endure.   Paralyzing anxiety is long gone.  Anxiety as a mild irritant is still with me and I'm sure that it always will be.  Alcoholics make way too big a deal out of everything and I think we do it with our feelings of anxiety as well.  Everybody is anxious from time to time.  It's part of the human condition to be mildly anxious.  It can be scary out there.  Sometimes there really is something after you.

At least in dreams when I'm showing up for class late I'm fully clothed.  That would be a whole different set of paranoid anxieties.