have sometimes gotten envious of those who seem to get or maintain sobriety easily. Most around here show up at a meeting a couple times a month and don't seem to talk about much else they are doing to maintain their sanity and sobriety. I eventually came to see that, while I still feel that I am doing more than most, I enjoy doing it, and I guess that must be better than doing less and feeling like it is a chore. I went through some of that myself in my 20 years in Japan when English meetings were far away and I had to almost push myself out the door to go to Japanese ones. I still managed to get to one of those a week, partly just to keep the habit of doing so, even though I couldn't see that I was getting much out of them, and went somewhere where I could get to lots of English ones on vacations. The rest of this is actually something I wrote some time ago but am thinking that it still seems pretty relevant. I have tended to think that alcoholism must be about the same for all of us, although we do get sober at differing stages of the disease. Those who drank themselves all the way into the gutter would find that sobriety is better than drinking from day one of recovery, while those who stopped early might find sobriety harder to live with than drinking for a time. Nevertheless, recovery would be almost the same for all. I had thought for a long time that living in sobriety would get easier and require less effort over time, but I found that was not true for me, although I got to like what I feel I need to do to stay sane and sober more over time, until now I quite enjoy it, and would find life pretty dull without it. Most of the discoveries I have made in AA have turned out to be nothing more than what would seem obvious to most. Deep insight into the obvious seems to be my speciality. Since moving here, where we have one meeting a week and the second closest is in another town about a 35 minute drive away, I have found that almost everyone else thinks they are getting by fine on a couple meetings a month, and some of them have been sober a long time. My attitude for a while was that they just weren't doing it right. I wasn't really envious, as I enjoy what I do, but I did get a bit smug, self-righteous and critical. I see now that I may have had the wrong idea and that perhaps staying sane and sober is just easier for some than others, but I don't really know. The problem I see is that those who think they don't have to do any more than show up at a weekly meeting once in a while could be right, but could also be quite wrong. It seems that there is a tendency to for many to mis-diagnose themselves as not needing to do much, and that could be pretty dangerous. For me, I just seem to know about how much I have to keep doing, with life starting to get uncomfortable if I do less, and make sure I keep doing a lot more. I believe that sobriety will be pretty comforable and I will be in no real danger of drinking as long as I keep doing that, but there are no guarantees at all if I don't. It has seemed to me that many of us come to AA with no self-confidence and shortly thereafter have too much. I recall once when I took had a physical exam to see if I could qualify for the pension plan in a job. At the time I may have been a bit too honest at the time in that I wrote on the form I filled out that I had problem with alcoholism but hadn't drank for seven years, even though I had never been medically diagnosed as such or spent time in a rehab. When the doctor saw that, he said I probably wouldn't qualify as there was a high relapse rate for that. I could suddenly see it from his point of view, that I was a statistical risk and that he didn't share my confidence that slips were something that happened to other people. I still don't know if some find it easier and don't need to do as much as I feel I need to to stay sane and sober, but it doesn't really matter as I have come to enjoy those things and feel that my life would be poorer without them. If "half measures availed us nothing, doing 90% of what it takes for me to stay sober would eventually get me drunk and I don't think I would have found the contentment I now find in life, enjoying each moment as it come along, if I was doing less. |