The Man Who Tried To Master Fear

There's a story in our main text called "The Man Who Mastered Fear."  To be clear - that is NOT me.  I have not mastered fear.  It doesn't kick the hell out of me all of the time anymore but it's still more the master than the servant.

When I listen to people in recovery talk about their drinking I often feel a disconnect.  A lot of them have some horrific low-bottom stories to share and even more were able to put together some semblance of an adult life with families and jobs and cars.  I can't really identify with the low-bottom drunk or the high-bottom drunk - I was more of the mid-low bottom variety.  My very first meeting featured a speaker who was a really bad-ass go-to-jail-a-lot kind of drunk.  I remember walking out of there thinking: "Now that's an alcoholic."  I had not yet grasped the concept of listening for the similarities and not the differences.  I'm sure today I'd be able to relate to a lot of what that man had to say.

The point is that I can almost always relate to some feeling or attitude that another alcoholic has.  The external wrappers mask a lot of similarities in our internals.  In the story about the man mastering fear he relates how he recovered from a crippling nervous breakdown by doing the simplest, easiest things at first, a little bit at a time.  He wasn't able to jump right back into the fray and take up where he left off.  Near the end of the story he talks about traveling:

"Some of the things that used to stop me in my tracks from fear still make me nervous in the anticipation of the doing, but once I kick myself into doing them, nervousness disappears and I enjoy myself.  In recent years I have had the happy combination of time and money to travel occasionally.  I am apt to get into quite an uproar for a day or two before starting, but I do start, and once started, have a swell time."

This has given me a lot of comfort over the years by letting me know that my uproar isn't a freak show.