Our Hats Are Off

Sometimes when I'm just sitting here I'm being productive.

I believe that The Program allows you to become the person you were always meant to be.  It takes a while.  When I was getting sober you couldn't get me to say anything in a social situation and now you can't get me to shut up.  I believe that today, more or less and for better or for worse, I'm the man I was meant to be.  Very satisfying and very terrifying.

Good leader at the morning meeting today.  He's a man I met when we first moved to SoCal.  I liked him immediately while simultaneously thinking: "I don't think this dude quite understands what we're trying to accomplish here yet."  I was right - he went back into the gloaming, drank for a while and staggered back in with an earnest vengeance.  He's cooking with gas right now.

For those of us bedeviled with anxiety alcohol was a tremendous discovery.  It worked - it really did! - even while I vaguely sensed I was being none too smart.  It's like shooting a syringe full of novocaine into the damaged knee of a running back and telling him to get back on the field.  He could do it but it wouldn't work out well for him in the long run.  It takes a lot of diligent effort to overcome our anxieties like . . . you know . . . normal human beings.  It's not helpful to overwhelm them with drugs and alcohol and simply pretend that they don't exist.  That's just nudging the problems further down the road and hoping that they magically absolve themselves all on their own.  Sometimes waiting is a good strategy but often it is not.

When I drank I was tired all the time but slept poorly at night.  I had to drink to doze off - which was less and less effective the longer I drank - and then the hangovers made me lethargic the next day.  A good strategy for being miserable all the time.  Today I sleep like a dead man and I'm disturbingly chipper when I'm awake.

Don't worry about saying good things in a meeting.  No one is listening to you.  They're thinking about themselves.  They're formulating their remarks.  You aren't as important to them as they are to them themselves.  One of my earliest leads at a meeting was at a halfway house in Cincinnati.  I was standing on a dais in front of 50 or 60 guys.  At the time I was even more terribly impressed with myself than I am today, also a disturbing thought.  I was going to rock the crowd with my profound insights on recovery.  The scales were going to fall from their eyes and everyone would get sober.  They'd talk about this "amazing guy who told me what recovery was meant to be" for years and years.  What I didn't realize was that attendance at the meeting was mandatory.  If it had been voluntary there would have been about 5 people there.  So when I started to share it was immediately obvious that no one was listening save for a few dudes in the front row.  And I don't mean they were politely sitting there - people were talking, sleeping with their heads down on a table, reading the newspaper, playing cards.  I was really knocked off my feet for a couple of beats before I remembered that the lead was for me - it was me telling my story so that I could hear it.  Me staying sober was the only important thing about that lead.  I am always hopeful that someone likes what I say but the important thing is me staying sober.  When I say that I'm an alcoholic it isn't for your benefit - it's an auditory reminder that I need to hear often.

"If anyone who is showing inability to control his drinking can do the right-about-face and drink like a gentlemen, our hats are off to him."  Big Book, More About Alcoholism, P. 31.

I need to remember that I'm not in charge of saving anyone.  We shouldn't tell someone that they have to stop drinking.  Because they don't.  But if they want to stop drinking then we can show them a Program that has had some pretty good success.  I'm happy to talk to someone who has been dabbling in Alcoholics Anonymous but I draw the line at initiating the contact - if you're drinking, fine, but you're on your own.