I recall a speaker in my early days saying he thought of recovery as being like going up a razor back ridge without falling off into complacency on one side or self-pity on the other. I suppose the path up the ridge could be called honesty, and that was in short supply back then. I thought at first that it wouldn't be a problem as I didn't lie, cheat or steal, but I was pretty dis-honest with and about myself, keeping the wool firmly over my eyes. From early childhood, my mother told me to just be myself, but that didn't help much because I didn't really know who or what I was. My head would tell me, without much evidence, that I was somehow better than other people. but, in my gut, I felt worthless. Perhaps the gap between the two was part of why I felt so uncomfortable with myself. I recall that one sign I saw in some of my early meetings was, "Poor me! Poor me! Pour me a drink!" To have to stop drinking at the tender age of 28 seemed like about the worst thing that could happen to anyone back then.But after a few years in recovery trying to work the Steps made sobriety seem pretty good, preferable to anything I'd found in drinking most of the time. One day a mental image of me sitting on a street corner with a tin cup and a sign around my neck saying, "CAN'T DRINK SOCALLY", came to mind. I realised that I would collect much and the my early self-pity was pretty silly. I used to think it was rather strange when someone would say they were glad they were alcoholic. What we have is, among other things, a mental illness, and I have never heard anyone say they were glad they were paranoid, schizo or bi-polar. But now I am glad I have this disease as I couldn't have found AA, God or the sort of life I have today otherwise. If someone was able to completely cure it, even to the point of letting me opt to be a social drinking with the dubious blessing of being able to stop when I start feeling good, I would pass on the cure. I love the life I have today and feel like I'm living in paradise. I really enjoy all the things I do to stay sane and sober and find what remains of the disease in me kind of amusing. I think life would be duller without it. As another member here says, "If you can learn to laugh at yourself, you have a lifetime of entertainment." Or, as someone else said at a meeting I went to this week, getting sober is like winning the lottery and staying sober is like winning a second time, certainly no cause for self-pity. |