I’m grateful for another bright, sunny morning. I’m grateful for new plants in the garden. I’m grateful for the way even the dust dances in the sunlight. I’m grateful I’m grateful for breathing easier. I’m grateful to be sober today.
Spring, meet New York. I try to keep this on the down low, but New York City is a highly underrated place in the early Spring. I say this as someone who lived in DC, where locals pride themselves on how beautiful the Springs are, what with the dogwoods and, of course, the Cherry Blossoms. I think New York City is a pretty gorgeous place in the Spring—maybe it’s the contrast between the beautiful things blooming and the trash piled neatly on the curbs. Anyway, it’s nice here.
Speaking of nice places, here’s another one, the “Anyone Anywhere Meeting of Alcoholics Anonymous.” We started out as a Big Book Study Group, but then we finished the Big Book, or at least the 164 pages of the “Basic Text.” We pondered what to do next, because we all enjoyed reading the Book aloud to each other and the discussions that ensued. Someone suggested the stories in the back of the book, and a new tradition was born!
If you have slogged through enough of these, you might know that I would regard the best possible use of my granted talents as being in the Game Show field. I have a number of semi-quirky, Higher Power-ish connected beliefs; first, that it is possible I was some kind of retriever in a previous life; second, that when my previously dog-inhabiting soul was being repurposed for this trip through the Universe, the “Designator” took a look at me, assessed my mix of skills and talents, considered carefully where I might be placed to be of maximum service to the overall effort, and then muttered, “Game Show Host.”
Anyway, this is actually relevant because we have added (mostly inadvertently) a bit of a game show element to our meeting of Alcoholics Anonymous. Namely, the selection of the story that we are going to read. Note: There are a shit-ton of stories back there. Our merry Tuesday night band has been doing this for a while and pretty diligently and we still have a long way to go. Which is good, because it’s the journey, right?
Anyway, here are details. If you’d like, I’m happy to send you a calendar invite, that can be accomplished by simply sending me an email:
"Anyone Anywhere" AA Meeting Tuesday, April 16 · 7:00 – 8:00pm Time zone: America/New_York Google Meet joining info: https://meet.google.com/dpt-zrog-btv Video call link: Anyone Anywhere Video Link
The format is pretty simple, we choose a story, take turns reading aloud (this is voluntary) and then we discuss it. I like to say that it’s kind of like a Alcoholic Book Club, but without the wine. Anyway, there has been talk of someone devising some kind of a wheel that could be spun that could select the story for the evening. That has remained in the “mostly talk,” category of things, but it could definitely happen.1
Also in the category of things that could happen, you could choose to join us. You can even leave your camera off and listen, if that’s what makes sense for you. We’d love to have you there.
Here’s a spoiler alert: The stories all turn out the same. Which is actually kind of the remarkable thing, these stories sound like mine. Uncannily like mine. And also uncannily like everyone else in the meeting. I’m going to say we are a pretty diverse group and we pursued our respective addictions differently—but it was basically the very same story.
If you were watching a science fiction movie, and suddenly millions of people were having the same exact dreams about encounters with aliens, you would immediately conclude, “aha, millions of people are having the exact same, but super-weird, dream about aliens—I think there are probably aliens involved.” And then the aliens do show up and it turns out they are involved in the kinds of herding and livestock businesses that no one wants to consider.
Point being: What convinced you of the existence of the aliens was the sameness of the dreams.
Now, that’s connected to alcoholism exactly how? Well, I think for many of us, and almost all civilians, there is still a fair amount of doubt that there is really such a thing as “alcoholism,” or “addiction,” it’s really just some bad choices. To be fair, even a lot of the curriculum in treatment centers still focuses on volitional stuff; taking us through “Consequences” sessions and such. The problem is, if you don’t believe that there is such a thing as addiction, and by that I mean, it’s a disease that can’t be controlled by just willing it away, well then, the upshot is that you can’t logically believe in “recovery” either.
One of the tactics of the Big Book is to promote identification by sharing the stories of lots of alcoholics. This alcoholic finally got on the right path to sobriety when I realized that my story was pretty f****** similar to Bill’s Story. At first, I thought it was conceited to say that I think I thought like Bill, but now I just see it as another symptom.
When you read a gazillion stories from the back of the book, the sameness jumps off the page. By “jumps off the page,” I mean literally leaps like a panther out of a tree, knocks you down, grabs you by the neck and shakes you until finally see that the stories of alcoholics from the 1930’s haven’t really changed that much from the 2020’s. That the stories of the young and the old aren’t that different. That there is much more common ground between men and women than you would ever think.
This is a revelatory thing, realizing that the way I thought about things was also the way that other alcoholics and addicts thought about things. The way we were all able to lie to ourselves about what was really happening; how we could all lie to ourselves about our ability to control things, when it was finally and truly “necessary.” The reason this is revelatory is because the sameness of our stories (our symptoms) promotes a belief in the sameness of the cure. What worked for them, might just work for me.
To me, the real power of AA is not in the lofty proscriptions emanating from the many-yeared sober oracles, it’s the sharing of the stories, seeing more examples of how things happened to someone else and how they recovered. If you think this is just my spin on things, read the second sentence of the Big Book:
To show other alcoholics precisely how we have recovered is the main purpose of this book.
The italics are in the original. When Dr. Bob let them italicize something, that meant something. Even though the prescription might be similar, following the regimen of AA need not produce a series of Stepford-like, “living 10-11-12” robots. My sobriety and my recovery may be very different than than the next addict, but that doesn’t mean only one of us really recovered. It means I found the life I was meant to lead by working the Steps and following the Program. And so did they.
The spoiler alert from earlier isn’t really that much of a spoiler. I mean, every story does end with the person being sober. But that’s not the most important part; even the soberiety-producing routines are not exactly the same. The most important part of the common denominator is that at the end of every story, the alcoholic/addict is happy. That’s all. People always assume that the hidden words at the end of the italicized portion of the second sentence of the Big Book are “from this terrible disease.”
I think the secret, invisible, hidden words that come right after “precisely how we have recovered,” are:
“the life we were meant to lead.”
Based largely on my understanding of advancements in game show technology.
Please join us!