THREE WORDS FROM HOW IT WORKS

I want to start this blog the way I actually started thinking about it: at a beginners meeting on a Monday night, listening to someone read from How It Works.

It’s usual for our chair to run that meeting a certain way. He has someone read a passage out loud, a little at a time, and in between he stops and asks if anyone wants to share on what they just heard. We got about halfway through when three words stood out to me. Honest. Fearless. Absolutely. I spoke up and shared exactly how those words affected my life. I want to share a version of my share here, because it feels like the right way to open this space, and because somewhere out there is a newcomer reading this who needs to hear.

HONEST

The passage points out that the people who don’t recover are usually people who cannot or will not be honest with themselves. I noticed that word shows up three times in one paragraph, because my own sobriety didn’t start with a decision. It started with a moment of honesty I’d been avoiding for many years.

Before that, I was good at hiding. I hid bottles. I lied to my wife about drinking, and eventually she left because of it. Every time a doctor asked me when I’d last had a drink, I’d shave the truth down to something manageable. Months ago, I’d say, when really it had been days, sometimes hours.

I decided to quit drinking and truly meant it this time. A couple of days later I was throwing up blood. My mom drove me to the hospital. A doctor asked me the same question every doctor had ever asked me, and my first instinct, the old instinct, was to lie again. But something reached out to me. It felt like a nudge from somewhere behind me that was unseen yet noticable. I asked the nurse to bring the doctor back so I could tell her the truth. All of it. How recently, how often, how much.

She told me my liver was in the final stages of cirrhosis. Terminal. Six months, maybe, unless certain things happened. I had to keep going to AA and get my attendance verified at every meeting. I had to work with the doctors and follow their instructions. I had to raise money to meet what my insurance wouldn’t cover. If I did all of that, there was a chance, a small one, that I’d get on the transplant list in time.

That moment of honesty, and on the hospital bed moments later, is where my sobriety actually began. Not the day I decided to quit. The moment I told the truth. That’s where I spoke to God or sometimes referred to as a Higher Power, and asked to please remove the obsession I was still feeling at the time, and stated that if I got through the upcoming challenge and recovered, I offer up the remainder of my life in exchange to do with as my Higher Power wished. I honestly didn’t believe I had much of it left after all the damage I had done to my body over the years, yet I am writing this down just over a year and a half after being told I had six months to live, and I have stayed true to my offer to the best of my ability ever since.

FEARLESS

The book asks us to be fearless and thorough from the very start, and I used to think I already knew what fearless meant. When I was drinking, I thought I was fearless. I didn’t back down from anything, didn’t let anyone push me around, took every challenge head on. I wore that like a badge of honor.

What I’ve learned since is that I was avoiding the one thing that truly required real courage, which was changing. Real fearlessness wasn’t the swagger I carried through a bar. It was sitting in that hospital bed and handing my will over to something bigger than me, and then doing it again every day since. I had the fearlessness backwards for most of my life.

LET GO ABSOLUTELY

The last part that stuck out to me was this line: some of us tried to hold on to our old ideas, and the result was nil until we let go absolutely. Lying in that hospital, I had to learn what that actually meant in practice, not just in theory.

I couldn’t control how skilled the surgeons were. I couldn’t control whether a liver would become available in time. I couldn’t control most of what mattered most in that moment. What I could control was showing up to the doctor’s visits, making the calls, taking the medication, attending the AA meetings, doing the daily work in front of me. So I separated the two piles, what was mine to carry and what wasn’t, and I let go of the second pile completely. I asked God to take it. At meetings we read the Serenity Prayer at the start of every meeting, but now I was actually practicing it.

That was new for me. I’d always believed I needed a plan, a destination, a clear picture of where my life was headed. Letting go absolutely meant giving that up too, trusting a direction I couldn’t see yet, aiming only at something like joy and freedom instead of a fixed point on a map so to speak. I made it through the surgery. I’m still making it through, one day at a time, and I’ve come to understand that the place I was let go into wasn’t a location at all. It was a place inside me.

That share is why HensleyArt exists. Every piece I make comes out of nights like that one, sitting in a room full of people trying to be honest, trying to be fearless in the way that actually costs something, trying to let go of what was never ours to hold. If you’re a newcomer reading this and you’re still in the lying part, still hiding the bottles, still shaving the truth down to something manageable, I want you to know there’s a moment coming. Mine came in a hospital bed. Yours might look different. But when it comes, take it. Tell the truth. It’s the only way forward.

That’s what I’ve got for now. More to come soon on a regular basis. Thank you for letting me share and participate in my own recovery. If you’re new to my journal and my story, thank you for taking the time to read this. I look forward to sharing more with you as time progresses in hopes that it reaches both those that really need to hear it themselves, those who know someone else going through this challenge and are having trouble understanding what they might be going through, and anyone who is simply just interested in general. Glad you’re here, keep coming back.