Who's The Real Idiot?

There's a guy that has been a regular at my meeting since he got sober.  He was an angry guy.  He was so angry that he was tagged by some of our more sarcastic members with the sobriquet "Angry Chris" which - of course - pissed him off.  He's been coming to meetings for seven or eight years and he has gotten a lot less angry and watching these kinds of transformations are one of the great joys of my life.  If someone doesn't use a turn signal in front of him his old reptile brain still brands that driver as an idiot - that's his essential Chris-ness - but it doesn't make him mad anymore . . .  or not as mad anyway.  I love seeing people change without losing touch with the kind of person they are.  He's still Chris but he's "Fun Angry Chris" now.

I think of my own growth in The Program.  I've always had what I call a dry sense of humor and it no longer irritates me when someone suggests instead that I'm sorta a sarcastic pain in the ass because there's probably some truth in that.  That's my essential Seaweed-ness.  If I didn't have a dry sense of humor I wouldn't be me and most of the time I like me just fine.  But what I needed to do was to learn how to make this dryness playful and kind and not cutting and judgemental.  I bet if you heard newly sober Seaweed say the same thing to the same person - the exact same words - that thirty-eight year sober Seaweed would say you'd cringe at the old Seaweed and laugh with the new Seaweed.  Same words - different effect.  Something would be off with the impact of the old Seaweed.  You'd wince a bit.

I feel like what I've been able to do over the years is to rub off the rough edges of the old Seaweed and add some putty and bondo to the underdeveloped parts and come up with a new and improved Seaweed.  Funny and kind Seaweed instead of arrogant and unkind Seaweed.  That's the improvement.  But as weird as it sounds I still retain some of my arrogance and judgemental nature.  That's the essential, the authentic Seaweed.  I still think I'm better than everyone else and I still think everyone else is an idiot.  I think you're an idiot and I don't even know who you are.

The good thing is that I DO know who the REAL idiot is.