Today is my 35th AA birthday. On my other birthday next month, I will be 64, so my time in AA is about 60% of my life now. I didn't really want to stop drinking when I got here and was reluctant to get involved with something to do with stopping, but I didn't know where else to go as I knew booze had become a problem. Stopping for even a month so I could sort out my problems seemed pretty extreme, and I wasn't sure I was THAT bad yet. I now see both my drinking and my efforts to stay sane and sober as having a lot to to with my perceptions of the world around me and thus my ability to accept and adjust to reality. For my whole life until I'd been sober for a while, I saw that world through fecal brown tinted glasses, and the places I got into with my unmanageable life weren't much to look at anyway. I saw the worst side of everything, made mountains out of molehills and mole hill out of fearful imagination, as well as feeling that the world was unkind and just didn't understand me. My mother often told me to be myself but I didn't know what that was. My head somehow found reasons to think I was better than others, but I had a gut feeling of worthlessness. I was foolish enough to think that having a feeling of doom meant that doom was impending like a Monty Python boot ready to fall out of the sky, not understanding that it just meant my feeling were screwed up and unreliable. Alcohol gave me a feeling of well being, temporarily cleaning the much off my glasses and even giving them a rosy tint on occasions. And I was again foolish enough to buy that, feeling that things weren't really so bad that they couldn't at least be amusing with the aid of my sarcastic sense of humor. As a medic in Vietnam, I proposed that we have chaplains give the clap shots, one in each hip, so they could preach, "Kill for Christ." and "Turn the other cheek." at the same time. The worse things got the more I needed to drink, even though it wasn't working as well as temporary relief. After I got to AA, the Steps looked like mental gymnastics of the sort I failed a as a kid at the church my mother sent me to, and just substituted addictions from alcohol to meetings, going to an average of about ten a week for the firs three years. I felt pretty uncomfortable in my job and apartment and meetings were the only place I felt safe. My head would slow down, mountains would shrink vback into molehills and my head would slow down enough for me to walk home, read a bit of literature and try to get enough sleep to face classes of forty boys each the next day.I still tend to think they WERE out to get me at the time. After the novelty of waking up in a dry bed with a clear and painless head and remembering the night before passed, along with a compulsion to drink, I found myself living in the same place and facing the same job cold sober, and that wasn't easy. I would often walk to work singing the Serenity Prayer (tune: Ode to Joy) in my head bracing myself to try to get through another day. The knowledge that all would seem OK when I got to a meeting that night replaced a similar feeling about what would happen when I got to the pub. I thought for quite a while that other members were telling me that the problem was alcohol and the solution was sobriety, although I still wasn't sure that, for me, that was much of an improvement. Most of the stories I heard were much worse than mine and many seemed to talk as if getting sober was the answer to their problems, but I felt like I had acquired a new mental illness after I stopped drinking, with mood swings, fear, anxiety and a lot of rough edges like nearly uncontrollable anger appearing. I can now see that solving my problem with alcohol brought the alcoholism that had made drinking so attactive in the first place back to the surface. I had been self-medication and went off my medication. I wasn't all sure I belonged here but there seemed to be more hope in staying sober than in going back to drinking as I tried that as answer to my problems for long enough to know it didn't work. I eventually learned that, although I had solved my problems with alcohol by not drinking the stuff, staying sober was about living so that sobriety did not become rotten enough to drive me back to drinking. Thing have gotten a lot better since then, so that I now live in almost continual happiness and contentment. The glasses I see the world through now stay pretty clear and even a bit rosy. I often feel like I am living in paradise, with nothing around me that seems lacking or not up to my standards. I don't dwell on the unpleasant things in life, but am aware of them. My sarcastic sense of humor has been replaced by an ability to laugh at myself. I am able to sustain gratitude instead of taking my blessings for granted. I find that easy does it as long as I keep doing it. I like reality, as I see it now, and feel no need to ignore or escape from it. I am able to accept and adapt to whatever comes along. I don't write or talk about God now, as I'm still not very clear on what He, She or It is. I don't think I will ever understand the essence of God, but feel that I am doing what I should most of the time as my conscience doesn't seem to get too restless these days and I feel happy joyful and free most of the time, as opposed to restless, irritable and discontent in early sobriety. I recall hearing an Aboriginal lady on a tape saying that one morning she woke up in a rehab and here first thougth was that God must have made a mistake. She said she eventually came around to understanding that God doesn't make mistakes, and that she was pretty much where she should be with the people she should be with, and I have too. Staying sober is not hard in the sense that anyone can do it as long as they keep doing what they need to do to maintain their sobriety. It seems a matter of honesty and persistance. I think the main reason I am still here after 35 years is that I never felt that I no longer needed to keep at a mixture of meetings, prayer, meditation, living in accord with the Steps and trying to do the next right thing each day. I have no fear of drinking again as long as I keep doing those thinks. Sobriety could turn rotten again if I didn't but have no fear that I will fail to maintain my good hard wired habits as long I find that I am still enjoying doing them even more as time goes by. |