The Terrible Sense of Isolation

"What are we likely to receive from Step Five?  For one thing we shall get rid of that terrrible 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 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."  

The old pangs of anxious apartness.  There are some passages in our literature that - for me - stand on their own merits.  I find them so spot-on that they require none of my fairly shallow explanations.  The above paragraph from The Big Book was a solid two-by-four whomping to the side of my head.  It described how alone I felt before I got sober.  I felt like everyone else had a playbook for life and that I had a child's coloring book or one of those mazes printed on the back of a table placemat at a cheap chain restaurant: "Can you find the treasure?"  Any five year old could figure out how to manuever through the maze to get to the treasure but I had to admit: "No!  I can't find the treasure!  I can't find a pen!  My pen doesn't work!  And the treasure appears to be a bag of French Fries!"  I was lost.  I was clueless.  I was drifting around in a sinking kayak in the Arctic Ocean.

Describing the initial meetings or gatherings in Akron at Henrietta Sieberling's gate house: "The expression on the faces of the women, that indefinable something in the eyes of the men, the stimulating and electric atmosphere of the place, conspired to let him know that here was haven at last."

The buzz of the Keep It Complicated meeting as I walk down the steps into the fairly dingy and ordinary church basement.  It's really something.  It has a positive, excited tone.  It sounds good.  It sounds happy.  I know I was expecting a room full of dirty old men in trench coats.  Living a life of misery where the temporary relief of alcohol was the only thing I had to look forward to and then learning that I had to give that up was beyond terrifying.