Tonight’s reading was from page 23 of the Big Book, on the obsession of the mind. It used the image of a man complaining about a headache who responds by banging himself over the head, trying to cure the very thing he’s causing. I sat with that for most of the hour, turning it over, waiting to see if my thoughts would come together enough to share. Somewhere in the back half of the meeting they finally did, and I spoke up.
I started with the obsession itself and thought back to where my own mind was before I got here. I had done so much damage to my thinker over the years of drinking that it barely functioned. I got through most of life on autopilot. People say fake it till you make it, but I wasn’t making it anywhere. I was just staying in place. So what did that make me at that point, if I wasn’t making it anywhere. Just a faker. That’s really all it was.
I put on a good face and a confident front, and it worked well enough that people didn’t worry much about me. That was the whole point of it. But inside I was a mess, unable to give up the one thing that would have actually changed anything. Even after I first got into the rooms, with people rooting for me, believing I could figure this out, I was still running the same front. I hadn’t changed on the inside yet. That gap between what people saw and what was actually true gave me a kind of imposter syndrome I carried for a while, and it made those early days harder than they needed to be.
The reading also got into the danger of that first drink, the idea that it’s never really just one. That part hit close, because for me the first drink was never actually the first drink. It was already a couple of bottles by the time I was done, every single time, even on the occasions I relapsed after getting sober. That was obsession of the mind in practice for me, not some abstract idea in a book. It was just how my head worked.
Someone had shared earlier in the meeting about fear driving him to quit, fear of the physical toll, a diagnosis from a doctor that made the damage undeniable. That got me thinking about how differently that worked for me. I wasn’t afraid of what the drinking was doing to me. I was afraid of what not drinking felt like. That fear ran the show for a long time. Liquor was fuel in the tank. If I was running low, I needed to top it back up, plain as that
.Even once I finally got sober for a stretch and started working steps, that fear didn’t leave right away. It just changed shape. Now it was the fear of handling daily life without the calm that liquor used to hand me. Every decision, every small challenge, felt heavier without it.
What actually moved me wasn’t fear for myself. It was watching the pain I put on everyone else. I ended up in a hospital and saw what that did to my mother. My daughter had already pulled away from me well before I ever got to AA, because she didn’t want to watch her father go through that anymore. She’s very smart and could see what was happening inside me long before I realized it. And my wife at the time told me straight out that she didn’t want to leave, but she couldn’t bear watching me do that to myself day after day. She had to go. I put her in that position. I was the one who made her witness it. That was the thing that finally settled the decision for me, not fear of my own consequences, but the plain fact of what I was doing to the people who loved me.
Even after deciding, it was hard. For a long while I felt like I was barely making it, just kicking the can down the road one day at a time. That’s genuinely how I got through the early stretch, little by little, baby steps, no bigger plan than getting through today. Eventually I got far enough away from it that my mind started working again. My thinking came back clear. I got better at handling the big things and the small things without reaching for a drink over every excuse that came along.
It kept building from there, little by little, until I landed where I am now. There is nothing in the world anyone could offer me that would get me to go back to that place. I remember exactly where I was, and I never want to see it again.
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