Tonight was a newcomer meeting, and we actually had a newcomer in the room, along with a handful of others still pretty new to the program. The chair had someone read from page twenty five, the section that opens by saying there is a solution, and it runs almost the whole page. One part of it stuck with me while I sat there. It gets to a point near the very end where it lays out that for someone whose drinking has gone the way ours has, there are really only two paths in front of us. Keep drinking until we drown out our own consciousness for good, or find some kind of spiritual help. I sat with that for a while, read it over a few times in my head, and about halfway through the meeting I knew I wanted to speak.
I opened by welcoming the newcomer, said I was glad they were brave enough to walk through the doors and see what this is all about. Then I got into how it was for me, which is a long story. I started drinking young, and it followed me for years, staying low level for a long time before it really turned on me in my thirties and into my early forties. For a long stretch I didn’t understand what was happening. I thought I was just dealing with depression. I wanted to fix everything else in my life first. Stopping drinking was the very last thing on my list of things I thought needed to change. So I kept drinking to drown out what I was feeling, and it kept getting worse.
That passage was exactly where I ended up. A book written in nineteen thirty nine had me figured out better than I had myself figured out. I’d tried the program once before and couldn’t quite get it to stick. I had a little bit of sobriety, then broke my wrist at work. Looking back that injury was probably the worst thing that could have happened to me, and also the best, because it’s what eventually pushed me back into working a real recovery. At the time I was home on leave, still drawing pay, and alcohol used the pain to get it’s hooks back into me. I relapsed. My wife had already grown tired of watching me black out, and she left. Everything came down after that. I drank heavily for months straight until I finally reached the end of it. I had about three quarters of a bottle left one day, and something in me said this has to stop. I poured it out and rode out withdrawal alone for days until my health gave out and I ended up in the hospital. That’s where I was finally honest about the last time I’d had a drink, and where I learned how serious things had become. I won’t go into all of it here since I’ve shared it before, but it came down to a liver transplant list and a prayer in a hospital bed that if I got through this, I’d give everything I had left to staying sober and helping others. However you want to explain it, I got through it, and even the people treating me were surprised by how it turned out.
Once I was out and healing, I got to work. I leaned hard into my sponsor, got connected with people in the rooms, and put myself fully into it because I understood by then that it was what was keeping me alive. I learned quickly that sobriety isn’t only about not drinking. There’s mental sobriety and emotional sobriety too, and these rooms and these steps teach you everything you need to work on it all. So I did the work, and I kept doing it, and that’s how I got from there to here.
I closed by telling them that’s what gave me the strength to get through all of it, and it’s why I keep coming back and telling my story. If my story can give someone else the hope that they can do it too, that if I made it through that, they can make it through what they’re facing, then it was worth telling, and why I keep coming back.
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