I have worked the Steps in my 35 years as an active and sober member, but there are ways in which I have often felt like a heretic, or at least different from others in the fellowship. I have never had a sponsor, mostly because I wasn't willing to let anybody else tell me what to do, although another member and I write to each other several times a week, sharing what we are doing or thinking and acting as a catalyst for each others thinking. There have also been lots of times that my sense of difference has had me wondering, if a litmus test were ever developed to determine if someone was really an alcoholic, if I would be found to be one. I drank too much for too long and couldn't picture living without it, but I'm not sure I ever experienced the kind of craving that others talk about. If someone on the next bar school had ever asked me if I could finish the beer I was drinking, go home and not have another one that night, I would have probably said, "Of course I can, but why the hell should I?" I was 28 and had been drinking for less than 10 years when I got to AA as beer drinker who had a job and had never even been in jail, much less a prison or nuthouse. I had been a pretty heavy drinker, 336lb. as one stage, mostly due to drinking about half a case of beer on weekdays and getting through a couple cases over the weekend, but there wasn't much else to tell aside from waking up in a wet bed with no memory of the night before on a frequent and increasing basis. Still, I would sometimes sit in meetings thinking of stuff I could do to jazz up my drinking story if I had a slip. In my early days, I kept a lot to myself, fearing rejection if I talked about what was really going through my mind at meetings. I would say things if I had heard others say them, thinking that I'd developed a strange mental disease nobody else had, which I now see as what we call alcoholism. I have since sometimes gone to the other extreme, mostly talking about things nobody else does here, partly to see what sort of reaction I get, more disappointed to get none than a negative ones. I thought at one time that I was pushing some sort of envelope, but eventually realising that there was none. I recall one guy suggesting that I try reading the Big Book as I seemed to have never seen one. Still, it seems better to be a bit of a heretic than to parrot what others say or hide behind a drinking story, with mine perhaps too small to do that anyway. Even at the times when I have thought perhaps I wasn't an alcoholic, I wasn't tempted to try drinking, mostly because my life is far better than it ever was before and during my drinking days, and certainly my hellish time in early recovery. That would be like jumping out of a plane with a parachute that has a 2% chance of opening, and I wouldn't even do that one guaranteed to work, recalling a saying from my army days that the only things that fall out of the sky are bird shit and fools. |