From as far back as I can remember until I'd been sober for some time, my head would tell me I was better than other people and my gut would tell me I was worthless, unable to handle life the way almost everybody else seemed to do naturally. In recovery, I have come to see that I am far from useless, but not very special either. Self-esteem is a good thing if grounded in reality, not just an inflated ego. That just seems to invite some sort of prick to come along and pop it. It can also mean that a newcomer gets to AA in desperation, willing to do anything, but soon thinks that the problem is solved when he wakes up every day in a dry bed, with no hangover and a clear memory of the night before, and thinks he is almost cured with even a weekly meeting being too much bother, with the Steps just being a wall decoration at them. For me, the first three Steps looked like feats of mental gymnastics that still looked too hard, so I transferred my addiction from alcohol to meetings and went to them every day as they were about the only places I felt safe and I couldn't think of anything else to do sober except to go nuts alone in my flat. I also spent some time hanging out at a little rehab near where I lived as it was one other place I could go sober. One day the father of one of the kids I was teaching came there and volunteered his services as a hypnotist. I told him that I thought I lacked self-confidence, walking to work each morning singing the Serenity Prayer to myself and hoping the building would disappear and they would keep sending the checks. He hypnotised me but I seemed to be conscious throughout and thought nothing had really happened. But at the school I taught at the next week I turned into more of a tyrant, kicking butt and taking names. It crossed my mind that, if this was self-confidence, it didn't seem to be much of an answer. Many years later, someone at a meeting mentioned hypnotism and that experience came back to mind. In hindisight, I could see that being totally screwed up, as I was at the time, is bad enough. But being totally screwed up, with self-confidence, is even worse, charging through life and banging into walls, sure of myself even though I didn't have a clue what I was trying to do. Over time I have come to understand myself better and have a pretty clear understanding of my own worth, seeing that real honesty and humility come from being able to adjust to and really understand reality as it is, not as seen through the warped, brownish lenses I saw things through when I got here. I recall at guy at a meeting who said he had a magic mirror. Instead of telling him who the fairest in the land was, it told him his defects on a daily basis, and was his wife. Not having one of those, I may have been slower than most in elimination blind spots in understanding myself. I have also sometimes felt that time in sobriety may have made me a bit too tolerant of the defects I still see in myself, tending to accept them and even find them a bit amusing. As one member of my home group says, "If you can learn to laugh at yourself, you have a lifetime of entertainment." |