I see the things I do in order to stay sane, sober, clean, content and happy, including prayer, meditation, doing the next right thing, living a life consistent with the principles in the Steps, working Steps, having faith in God as my Guide and Protector, as well as being active in AA online as well as going to face to face meetings as I kind of mix that I find works well when all added together.
I have varied the mix over time, sometimes by choice and sometimes because of circumstances, and now feel it is working quite well as I have been quite content, almost continually, for the last few years, and no longer have obsessions or compulsions trying to take over my life, as compulsive overeating was still doing until recently. I have not found that doing all this has become easier, as I thought it would, but it has all gotten more enjoyable over time, to the point where I would probably keep doing it even if I found I didn't need to without going slowly insane. My addictive personality now works in my favor as I do this stuff out of habit now, good ones for a change. I see online and face to face AA as a bit like AA and my religion. They both give my life meaning and aid my spiritual growth and condition, but they are not complete substitutes for each other. I recall a guy who kept getting sober and then obsessed with religion, then drank again. As he put it, "I got so heavenly high that I was of no earthly use." I once was thinking that having AA, NA and the Bahai Faith at least was helpful in that it was unlikely that I would get the shits with all three at the same time. That has not happened with any of them for many years, and I find they work together pretty well. I can find a lot of interesting thinking online, but much more of a sense of fellowship at the meetings I have to travel to. They also have a sort of spiritual atmosphere and sense of empathy that I don't find online. My home meeting seems like family, handy as all my blood relations live in the other hemispheres. I'm still a loner. I belong to some clubs but feel that I don't have much in common with the people there other than the common interest we are there for. Social intercourse there consists of our common interest and the usual niceties. It is only in meetings that I feel I can really get honest about all aspects of my life and feel that we really care about each others. On the other hand, it is only online where I can read about experiences and thoughts from all over the world. It would be hard to think of a problem that someone couldn't relate to here. It is also somewhere I can turn to at any time of the day or night, although I normally just come over to the computer after reading the morning newspaper. My experience online and and at other meetings works together with me doing some cross pollination, carrying thoughts between the two. Thoughts I pick up tend to buzz around in my head for a time while I think about how they relate to my own experience, and then come out in what I say in meetings or write here. I have found someone I can write to almost daily about what is going on in my life, a kind of co-sponsorship with us acting as catalysts for each other's thoughts. This has been going on for many years, including my last years in Japan when I had nobody else I could really relate to in my own language. I would sometimes walk around thinking about what I would write to him when I got back to my computer, although I often had forgotten about it by then. I tend to restrict what I write to email groups to thoughts that seem worth sharing with a hundreds of others and don't really care to read about things like weather in the northern hemisphere, where it is the opposite to here, but I am retired and have a delete key, so I don't really mind going through that to get to the stuff that relates to alcoholism. But then I'm not really very interested in the small talk before and after the meetings I go to here, and don't hang around very long after meetings. I have been a member of AAMen, a men's email group, for over ten years, a real Godsend when I needed a bullet train to get to the closest English meeting and had to push myself out the door sometimes to get to a Japanese one each weekend. I have also been a member of Lamplighter's, the largest AA email group, for over five years and have also found Recovery Realm, with its forums and chat rooms, of interest from time to time. Anyone interested can find all they need to know about online AA by putting "Online AA" into a seach engine. There is an AA site that lists all the email groups. I find speaking at meetings and writing on or off topic here to be a bit different. In meetings, I sometimes feel a bit at a loss to say much if asked to speak first. After I while I have all sorts of themes I have picked up in the meeting piling up in my head to the point where I sometimes have trouble pulling them out to say something about them when and if I am asked to speak. I tend to listen to what is being said and think about them, and other thoughts that enter my head, at the same time, with the meeting going on in my head being pretty interesting even if I have heard what is actually being said a few times before. This seems to me to account for how newcomers and members who have been sober for 30 years being able to sit in the same meeting without one getting confused and the other bored silly. But I do miss the delete button at times. What I say in meetings tend to be things I have said before, perhaps with the wording varied a bit. I think this is because my thinking has to keep up with my tongue and doesn't have time to be very creative. I think of it as just choosing between well worn trails. While writing online, I have all the time I need to really think things out and put down my thoughts as they come to me, fast or slow. I will sometimes write something I hadn't really thought about before, blazing new trails of thought. I can write things I might be hesitant to say at meetings, knowing I can go over it later if I then want to change anything, although I usually just correct a few things as a former English teacher. I usually read what other have written on a topic and then write from my recollection of what I thought about it as a new member, what I have learned about it since and how I see it now. I think I could get by with only online AA or with only face to face meetings, but I feel I get much more by combining the two, with the benefits being more than the sum of the parts. It seems a bit like trying to say if meetings or Steps are more important. Meetings keep me doing the Steps, and remind me when I'm not, and it would be pretty hard to carry the message to alcoholics without meeting of some sort. I suppose we all find our own mix, and would find it hard to stay sober on someone else's. By finding one that keeps me content, I know that it will be more than enough to ensure that I stay sober. If "half measures availed us nothing" it seems clear to me that doing 95% of what it take to say sober would eventually get me drunk. |