Yets

Yets in AA are things that haven’t happened as a result of drinking, YET.

My own experience proved to me that what I was told about it was true.  AA said that if I continued to drink, things would continue to get worse, and all the bad things that had so far happened to other people would happen to me.

I have six years of drinking in AA to prove to myself that it was true.  It got worse, I did bad things I hadn’t previously done and got into trouble I hadn’t previously gotten into.  My belief that all the rest of the bad things out there will indeed happen to me if I drink is something precious and it is a cornerstone of my sobriety.  I feel sorry for people who haven’t gotten there yet.  Drinking, the only limit on the bad things would be if I killed or disabled myself, or got locked up.

I’m also lucky that I was young when I got sober, so my list of yets is quite extensive.  I’ll list a few.

Drinking, for me, hasn’t yet resulted in

• car accident
• jail
• rehab
• my children seeing/hearing/experiencing me drunk
• lost job
• lost marriage
• bankruptcy
• debt

All those, plus an additional whole world of pain, will be mine, if I’m lucky, if I drink.

What Is AA?

It’s a “self-help” group where completely powerless people help each other overcome a fatal obsession.

It’s built on Twelve Steps which, when they work (are worked), help an alcoholic stop drinking, stop fighting the obsession to drink, make a new start at life, and live following ancient principles of honesty and good works.

The organization of AA follows Twelve Traditions that make it run smoothly and protect is from things like politics, personalities and brand names.  Members give voluntary, very small monetary donations and the overhead is kept to a minimum.

For me, the Steps would eventually enable me to live a life without alcohol.  The people in the meetings helped me understand is and kept me company throughout.  A crucial element of AA is one alcoholic helping another because some of us need to know, in the flesh, another person who has gone through this and who has succeeded.  We need it in order to have enough faith to keep trying over long periods of time.

A vibrant and active AA community has, for me, fulfilled a social need and given me most of my friends.  It’s where I spend most of my social leisure time and spending it there helps me stay away from alcohol.  People share at a very deep level in AA, and most of what I’ve learned about people in general I’ve learned there.  It makes me close to people in a way I can’t imagine I would have in any other setting.  The topic at meetings is life and how we deal with life.  Hearing things I disagree with helps, but with the Steps as a common framework, I agree with most of what’s said and I gain invaluable insight into my specific issues.

AA is a place where I see people who are unable to stop drinking despite horrible and worsening consequences, and where my presence as a sober member who once couldn’t get sober might help them live instead of die.

AA is the last thing in my life that I would give up, because if I gave it up before something else, I’d surely lose the something else anyway.  I was that unable to cope and live life and I don’t feel at all bad about admitting that.  That’s the admission that set me free.

What Convinced You that You Had a Problem?

Convinced is a good word for me.  I knew I had a problem almost as soon as I started drinking.  I understood I was an alcoholic very early on.  I was unable to stay away from alcohol with that knowledge and understanding for a very long time.

I had some small understanding of alcoholism before I ever drank.  I was born in 1962, and I went to good schools in a liberal area of the US.  I don’t know if my understanding came from school or from culture.  I know I even looked into a bit on my own at that young age.  My father had died from alcoholism when I was 6 and he was 33.  I knew a little bit about it and I knew, pretty much as soon as I started drinking, that I had a problem.

I started drinking at 16.  I had a small list of things I would never do while drinking.  One that I remember is that I promised myself I would never drive anyone else in my car when I had been drinking.  Now that was the late 1970s.  No one I knew wore a seat belt, the drinking age was 18, people gave their children and their children’s friends alcohol at their Sweet Sixteen birthday parties, and the bars where they didn’t check IDs were abundant.  I see now that I would be a terrible menace on the road whether or not I had a passenger, but I didn’t see that then.

Anyway I broke that promise.  I drove the car with my friend in the car, as we went to a pet store to do something or other about pet hamsters.  I was a child.  I was very lucky.  But the self-realization was creeping in, even at that early time.

I furthered my understanding as I had contact with AA.  I talked to the people and I read the books.  One memory I have is of sitting at a young people’s meeting.  The topic was the first step, and when it came to me I said I had no idea what they were talking about.  A young woman gave me her phone number because she could relate to that, and she did become my first sponsor.

I grasped key concepts fairly quickly, like it’s the first drink that gets you drunk, or that any number of bad things hadn’t happened to me yet, but still I drank again and again and again and again.

So initially, just learning about alcoholism convinced me I had a problem.

What convinced me to surrender to the problem is another story.  That would be six hard years of trying to drink, and six hard years of failing to do it successfully, or even minimally functionally.

Tradition Eight

“Alcoholics Anonymous should remain forever nonprofessional, but our service centers may employ special workers.”

I’m actually not dreading writing about this!  I read the text last night, and I don’t have the book out here on the back porch with me (there are VERY high winds, and my book is VERY delicate – I think I need a new one, I didn’t take it to a meeting the other night because there was a very light rain).  So I can’t quote.  But when I read it, something in the text jumped out at me.

It said, approximately, that professionals have never been able to help us the way we can help each other.  So true!  And so cool!

I know that some of the criticisms of AA center on the fact that AA doesn’t advance medical advances in the treatment of alcoholism.  It’s important for me to say that in my experience, AA does not deny or hinder these advances either.  But if some newcomer were to show up at my meeting and ask about a pill or a therapy or anything else, she would be told that for us in that room, maybe to a person, these things did not help us stop drinking or stay stopped.  I also need to point out (not to the proverbial newcomer, but here) that those things are not readily accessible nor are they free.

But anyway.  Nonprofessional.  I guess the thought is that once someone, anyone, even a member in excellent standing, a certain percent of us stop listening.  And the motives of the paid person don’t stay 100% pure (or nearly).

I think it goes along with the traditions for therapists and counselors to disclose they are in AA, if it fits, but they have to make it clear that they don’t speak for or represent AA, except in their own person.

And thank goodness for all of the paid people through the ages, members and nonmembers, who have kept the business of AA going so that when we needed it, it was there.

in by e.e. cummings (Literature as a Tool)

I hesitate to even post something like this, because my post about “Terence, this is stupid stuff!” gets so many views by, I’m sure, serious English students looking for someone who knows something about all this.  (And how I envy students of today, with the world at their fingertips!)  That’s NOT me.  I was once a (drunken) semi-serious English student, but I didn’t learn all that much, and I don’t have any natural ability or intelligence for it, either.

But I do love, to an extent, to read, and to write, hence the blog.  Through the years some stories, poems and songs have stuck with me and have special meaning to me.  Some have to do with sobriety.

A few are poems by e. e. cummings.  I think he is the first poet I ever loved, back in seventh grade, when I was twelve.  I was just starting on my downward spiral that would end, ten years later, with me finally getting sober.  I still love e. e. cummings though I can feel a little embarrassed about that, if I pause to consider how I might “look” to more literary folks.  But I won’t pause to consider that today.

Instead I’ll share the poem.  My post about the 12th Step and being brave and serene in bereavement was so very heavy.  A lot about my days is heavy, with the ancient critters and my dying neighbor.  But there is a cycle.  I feel it, as I talk to someone newer in the program, someone who still has young children to teach and to mold (as much as a mother can).  I can look back and see what benefited my children, what was obviously good, what worked out well.  It’s the same, of course, with sobriety.  Many of the people who kept the meetings going for me and who helped me and taught me are no longer with us.  But their legacy will be with me tomorrow when I make the blasted coffee so that someone who decided to check it out will find a warm cup there tomorrow night.

in

Spring comes(no-
one
asks his name)

a mender
of things

with eager
fingers(with
patient
eyes)re

-new-

ing remaking what
other
-wise we should
have
thrown a-

way(and whose

brook
-bright flower-
soft bird
-quick voice loves

children
and sunlight and

mountains)in april(but
if he should
Smile)comes

nobody’ll know

~ e. e. cummings

“a mender of things” has always spoken strongly to me of my experiences in AA.  I have seen the resurrection of people from so many different places, stages, situations, that by now I truly couldn’t count.  Otherwise, without the program, “we” surely would have thrown me away.  Society would have, if they were lucky, because I was a burden and, more than that, I was dangerous.

“eager fingers” and “patient eyes” also describes the program in many ways.  There is such eagerness for the new person to “get it.”  AA members go way out of their way to help.  And patience doesn’t begin to describe the long-suffering hope I’ve seen displayed again and again and again.  People gave it to me and they weren’t wrong to do it.  We know so well that all it takes is that final “click” for someone to start down the path of sobriety.

In that sense, it doesn’t matter how old or close to death someone is.  I know that the past, last, three years of Phyllis’ life were made much better by her association with AA.

I don’t have as clear a concept of the last part of the poem.  Some of the “if he should Smile” and “nobody’ll know” could relate to the seeming randomness of who recovers and who doesn’t.  And I say “could,” meaning, in my own reading.  I’d be shocked if e. e. cummings had AA in mind.  I think it’s a safe guess that he didn’t.  That’s not the way I read literature, to try to get at the “author’s intentions.”  I’m writing only about the personal meaning I give the poem, that causes me to enjoy it.

So, the “mender of things” could be Jesus, and in a certain frame of mind, I can see it that way.  But I don’t need to by any means.  I certainly believe that the force for good in the world that Jesus was, and is, fits perfectly.  But there also seem to be other forces at work.

And the ancient critters have had good, good, long, long lives.  And they will make a space, ultimately, for others – maybe not yet born.  My part of the world is filled with unwanted, unloved, healthy animals that get killed because there’s no room.  I have no room today, but maybe tomorrow.  And my daughter has already taken in two pound purries, so that part of the child-rearing thing has worked out.

a mender of things

Sanity

How it works for me, today.

The books tell us that sanity means soundness of the mind.  Sound means –free from injury, damage, defect, disease, etc.; in good condition; healthy; robust: a sound heart; a sound mind.  AA’s definition is doing the same thing over and over again, expecting a different result.

The ultimate insanity for me was trying over and over to drink successfully, despite all I knew about alcoholism and the obvious fact that over time, my drinking got worse, never better.  Just like they told me would happen.

Now as far as trying something, I will say I’ve moved a step beyond even the understanding of “if you do what you did you will get what you got.”  Not only should I change the things I do in order to get a different result, I should also let go of the results, and not expect anything for certain.

When my mind is sound, and healthy, and I’m mostly sane, I think I have as clear a picture as I can of the world and my place in it.  Sanity to me means knowing that no matter what, my gratitude list is far longer than any list of complaints I could assemble.

It involves seeing “my part” as much as I can, and accurately appraising people and situations.  It means being humble and “right-sized.”

I don’t know if I ever was “sane” before I started drinking, and returning to sanity may be just trying to get back some of the good sense I was born with.  My actively drinking life was total insanity, and I guess I do need to consider that it takes a certain kind of person to do what I did.  I hope that the memory of that can make me gentler with others who still suffer.

February 21, 2010 (this day)

A lot about this day has to do with this dog.  At the same time, she both enriches my life and she causes me pain.  I cause myself pain because of the wrong-headed ways in which I think about her.

Carole left today for a few days, so I was alone with the animals.  Our temperatures are getting a bit above freezing and our snow pack is finally shrinking a bit.  But only a bit.  Everything is still covered with snow and ice, but now dripping and slushy as well.  The sun shines only once in a while.  It’s still quite cold.

I realized the other morning that before this weather started in, my morning routine was to get up, get dressed, walk the dog, eat breakfast, read something recovery related or religious and go to work.  For weeks now I’ve gotten up, fed the animals, maybe eaten something, maybe not, and battled the elements.  The cars constantly need to be scraped and dug out.  The weather forecast is constantly ominous about what our drive will be like, filled with peril.  Accidents abound, roofs are collapsing from ice and snow,  and everyone has had enough.  My son has needed medical attention and I took my daughter last Friday to have her wisdom teeth removed.

But I avoid facing how my day has been.  I have a slight cold that’s sort of on my chest.  I haven’t been sick for a long time and I really think this will be mild.  I fed all the animals twice.  I took out the recycling, loaded, ran, and unloaded the dishwasher.  I ran up and down the stairs 13 times with the dog.  Slowly, because of my chest cold.  I have ushered the older dog (and so both dogs) out the back door to the freezing slush many times today, so far avoiding a pee pee accident by the older dog.  I tried and failed to follow a pattern to make a scarf.  I cut that loose and started a simpler scarf.  I put more music on my new computer, read my message board, read the blogs I read, and I’m writing here.  Oh yes and I also watched the Dog Whisperer and brushed the dog.  She loves that.

My day is consumed, though, by the feeling that I haven’t and never do enough for this dog.  I know I haven’t come anywhere near satisfying her exercise requirements.  I also really suck at discipline and training.  I’m A+ for affection but that is only because she is so very mild mannered, and doesn’t take advantage.

After I fly to Hawaii and back without fear, I plan to seriously attack the problem of my attitude with this dog.

But meanwhile.  The picture is of her and our 19-year-old cat.  They don’t really seek each other out, but if they end up on the couch together, Xandra lets him stay there rather than biting his head off.  And he enjoys a warm spot very much.  She is the sweetest dog I have known and we were so incredibly lucky to find her.

She was unspayed, filthy, and had pneumonia when we found her at a very high-kill shelter.  The cat came from people who ran a crazy foster cat organization, and I use that term loosely.  His mother had been left, pregnant, when her people moved away.  I chose him over his sister because I thought the cat I already had might take more kindly to a male cat than to a female.  She didn’t, but he likewise turned out to be just the sweetest cat ever.  As long as you don’t have food around.  Then he’s the lion from Daniel’s den.

I have work tomorrow, and more medical appointments for my son.  I have a new hair straightener I feel unmotivated to try tonight, even though I know that everything is better with straight hair.  Everything.  A friend in the program slipped again last night.  Another told us yesterday that he has cancer.  The world is frozen, and gray, and I need to update the Menopause Chronicles.

Remembering My Last Drunk

I always want to chant with this phrase:  “Remember your last drunk, to keep it holy.”  Like the commandment.

My last drunk has power to help me stay sober.  My last drunk was the last because I sank lower than I thought I would ever go.  I crossed lines I didn’t know I would cross.  I achieved the level of hopelessness that enabled me to stop drinking.

My last drunk happened six years after I had admitted and understood that I was an alcoholic, and six years after I had tried to achieve abstinence through AA.  I had attended AA that whole time and I had gone to many, many meetings.  I reached 18 months of sobriety at one point, but that was it.  I couldn’t make it longer than that.

During my last drunk, I drunk dialed God knows who all night long, until 2 or 3 in the morning, at which point I set out to my grandmother’s house, 30 minutes away.  I was so drunk that I was mostly blacked out and during my lucid periods, my driving would get all wonky.  I’d come to further down the road.  This occurred in the very busy and dense borough of a major city.  Only luck got me and others who shared the road with me safely to my grandmother’s house.

I ranted and raved drunkenly at her all night long about everything that was wrong with my life, from before I was born until way in the future.  When I drove myself home in the daylight of that morning, I felt a helplessness that I hadn’t felt before.  I felt like there was no where else to go.  I wanted to die and would have killed myself if I had been braver about death.  As it was, I figured I would stay sober for just a little while, while I made plans for the rest of my drugged up, helpless, useless life.

I was afraid of mental institutions because I guessed that others would be in charge of my drugs, and of course they would never give me enough.  I didn’t think my mother would support me and my habit indefinitely, and I didn’t want her to.  I couldn’t see supporting myself or convincing someone else to support me.  I really saw no future at all.

Finally, I was realistic!  There was no future the way I was going.  Clearly seeing that bottomless pit helped me get sober and stay sober from then until now.

I want to add that I don’t know if the people of AA talked about me behind my back during all my years of struggle.  I’m sure they did, but I don’t know if it was in a kind way, or a way that put me down or made fun of me.  Probably both.  I know I could be a heart-breaking person to care about during those years.  People poured their time and energy and good intentions into me only to see my fail again and again.    But no one made me feel bad about it or about myself.  People did express their fears for me, and their thoughts that I wouldn’t make it the way I was going.  But they did not call me names or make fun of me that came to my attention.

I’m writing that because recently, someone new to the program told me she was surprised to hear others making fun of someone in their group who was in and out again.  These people called her a bad name and laughed.  That happens all the time but it isn’t right.  I hope and think that the people of AA do this less than other groups of people do.  I know that our program tells us not to, and that we’ll study those ideas again and again as we work and rework the program.  Had it come to my attention that people were doing that to me back then, my story could have had a different ending, and anything good I’ve done since then might have stayed undone.

To my face, the people of AA welcomed me yet again.  They were the only people I had left to turn to, and I am profoundly grateful.

Our Whole Attitude and Outlook Upon Life will Change (promises)

As I sat here waiting for the computer to reboot so I could write about my new attitude and outlook, my old attitude and outlook have clouded the warm, sunny air of this warm, sunny day.  Not my old old attitude and outlook.  Not the one from my drunken, 16-21 year old days.

That’s changed completely.  Drinking, I found reality so challenging that I could not cope.  Now, I would absolutely hate to think that I’d miss some of life, even the bad parts, to unconsciousness, drunkenness and black outs.

My attitude is that I am blessed among humans beyond measure.  The bad things that come my way are cake compared to what some people deal with.  I don’t know what I’ll get in the future, but all I’ve received so far puts me way beyond what I could ever hope to deserve.

My outlook is that most people, most especially the ones I come into contact with daily, are mostly good and thoughtful and willing to help.  Even at my age, I have almost unlimited opportunities, and certainly enough opportunity to do what I want to do.  Even in my most awful, trying times, times like when my children are in trouble and the outcome is uncertain, there is something in me that strives to be peaceful and content.

Positive things like fun and love and creativity are abundant in my life and it seems like they will be so in the future.  I can devote lots of my time to pursuits beyond making a living and providing money for life’s necessities.  There is so much to learn I can never begin to scratch the surface.

Tomorrow isn’t promised to anyone, but I’m reasonably secure in the belief that my loved ones and I will have all the resources someone can have to meet any emergency.  My primary relationships are intact to the degree that I envision them continuing.  Sort of happily.  Not 100% on that one.

Upon life.  Yes.  That has changed from when I wanted to die to now when I want to live.  I used to find existence too too difficult to take it straight.  I understand now that straight is the only possibility for me.  And I wouldn’t change that with the magic pill or cure.

No Matter How Far Down the Scale We Have Gone (promises)

No matter how far down the scale we have gone, we will see how our experience can benefit others.

Today is the second anniversary of someone I got to introduce to the program.  That makes me smile just thinking about it.  She and her partner, who is also newly sober, are doing so well.  Phenomenally well.  I know how tenuous that is, and I know that tomorrow isn’t promised to anyone, but for a few more hours today I’m just going to enjoy the fact that today, they are doing well.

They are actually an interesting pair regarding the question of how far down the scale they had gone.  One of them, let’s call her Emilie, retired a few years ago and had sunken to a constantly drunken state by the time her partner, let’s call her Edith, confided in me that there was a problem.  From knowing Edith for about nine months by then, I already knew that Edith had a problem with alcohol.

Emilie, when introduced to the program, took to it immediately and almost completely (wouldn’t do 90 in 90, but I won’t hold on to that.  Much longer).  Edith took eight more months to convince but it was two years ago today that she took the plunge.  Part of the difference for them, I think, involved how far down the scale they had gone.  Emilie wasn’t really functioning any more, where Edith still was.

I wasn’t.  Even though I was so young, I was to the point where I couldn’t function.  It happened quickly for me and I’m really glad.  When I was 16, and first went to meetings, I could relate to a point to the older people who of course had lost much more than I had.  By the time I was 21, almost 22, I had wrecked the years and experiences of ages 16 to 22 and I had gone farther down the scale.  To the bottom of it, really.  I couldn’t go lower without being in a hospital, or being dead.

I hear people talk about these high bottoms, and low bottoms, and I actually hear Emilie describe her bottom as being high.  I understand that the concept can help us accept that our bottom is our bottom even though we will all hear much more harrowing stories than our own in the rooms.  But I personally think of bottoms more in terms of functioning these days.  I did not lose what I hadn’t yet acquired.  Emilie’s partner hadn’t yet left her and so her home, possessions and family were still intact.  But they were on the way out, for her and for me.

So I say I had gone all the way down the scale and had no lower to go.  That doesn’t I mean I don’t realize how very very lucky I was and am.  I do realize it.  I realize only luck stood between me and tragedy and I have no desire to test my luck further.  But considering how my words may have helped these two or any of the thousands of people who have heard me talk about AA and alcoholism gives a different meaning to my most harrowing, humiliating, frightening and awful incidents.

I went to meetings for a time with a woman who was waiting to go to jail for having struck and killed a child while drunk driving.  Another woman I went to meetings with for a long time had been drunk driving and killed her best friend.  Those and many other lesser stories stay with me and through the years they have kept me sober, and have benefited me in that way, plus anyone who could potentially be my victim.

Expanding that concept into my whole life, AA has shown me specific ways in which the mistakes I have made can be instructive for others, and it has taught me to try to have my experience and my life work for their good.