Tonight, the chair asked me to read, from the last paragraph of page twenty two to the middle of page twenty three. The passage about the alcoholic who goes back to drinking. If you ask why, he can offer any number of alibis. It compares the drinking to a man who complains of a headache and proceeds to beat himself on the head with a hammer to relieve it.
After the reading, the chair pulled out three words to build the meeting around: lying, denying, and self delusion. He called them symptomatic of the illness itself. Some people shared on the reading, some shared on the three words, but those three words are the ones that sat with me the rest of the meeting.
When it came around to me, I repeated the three words back to the room. My name is John, I’m an alcoholic, and I said I’d had all three, in full measure.
Before I got into these rooms, the self delusion ran deep. I was convinced I had it all together. I was convinced I needed a drink to get through a day at work, to get through a day at all. I told myself I wasn’t hurting anybody, that no harm was being done. All of that was delusion. My attitude changed when I drank. I wasn’t myself, and I wasn’t the man I wanted to be.
Then came the DUI. Because I only had to blow into the breathalyzer every so often, I convinced myself I could still manage a drink in between, that I’d stop myself in time. That didn’t hold up. That was when my wife first really saw that I couldn’t stop drinking when I needed to. She’s the one who told me I needed help, that I needed AA.
Even once I got here, the lying and denying didn’t stop right away. I told myself I only needed the program for a little while, then I’d be fine on my own again. I wasn’t always honest with my sponsor either. The idea is to call before the first drink. I usually called after, once I was already deep into a slip. It took me a long time to actually get the program, not just attend it.
The real lying and denying started with my wife, once the slips began. It would start small, a beer, then bottles snuck into the house and hidden. Denying I’d been drinking. Telling her I was still sober when I wasn’t. That went on across three slips. The first came after about a month of sobriety, the second after about six months, the last after ten or eleven months.
On that last one, I’d snuck a bottle in, drank, and passed out on the couch with the bottle tucked against my side. My wife came home, found me, and had enough. She left. When I came to, the first thing I did was reach for the bottle. It was still there, and for a moment that was all I registered. Then it hit me that her things were gone. Her makeup, her clothes, half the room. I’d been worried about a bottle when I should have been worried about everything that actually mattered.
That was what broke me. And I’m grateful it broke me the way it did, because it’s what let me build myself back up. I’m grateful I get to walk back into these rooms today.
My name is John, and that’s what I got.
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