Daily Gratitude List 10.13.22

Revisiting a Fifth Step

I’m grateful for a quiet evening. I’m grateful for the chance to look back and make sense of some things. I’m grateful I wrote it all down. I’m grateful for the chance to make peace with myself. I’m grateful for a pretty solid cup of coffee. I’m grateful to be sober today.

I have been reading through my old journals and I think I would use words like “harrowing,” “excruciating,” “sad,” to describe the contents and the process. I’ve always kept journals and was pretty sporadic for a lot of years, but there is a fairly extensive written record of the struggle. I think my first AA meeting was in 2010 and I got my first sponsor in 2011.¹ I did a Fourth and Fifth Step in the fall of 2012 at a monastery near Dubuque, Iowa.

I’ll tell that whole story another time, but reading my notes and my journal entries about the Fifth Step I did with Brother Xavier was revelatory. He barely spoke during our time together, when I sat down with him he simply asked me “Tell me how you found your way to AA?” The story of the last few years spilled out, he listened patiently for the gush to subside and then asked his second question:

“Tell me the secret of your childhood”

I know that’s not how I expected my Fifth Step to go. I didn’t have a prepared answer and more stuff came pouring out. It was an incredibly moving experience. I remember going back to my tiny room and collapsing on the bed and sleeping for a couple of hours—very unlike me. It was a monastery and everyone staying was invited to the services conducted in the chapel every few hours. My notes reflect that I went to evening vespers around 9:30pm and afterwards, I copied this down in my notebook:

The Son of Man came eating and drinking and they say “Here is a glutton and a drunkard, a friend of tax collectors and sinners…”

Matthew 11:14

And then this:

Come unto me all you who are weary and burdened and I will give you rest. Take my yoke upon you and learn from me for I am gentle and humble in heart, and you will find rest for your souls.For my yoke is easy and burden is light.

Matthew 11:28

I think I managed to not drink until around the end of November that year. The next several years were marked by cycles of 30 or 60 days of sobriety and relapse after relapse after relapse. It was a pretty disheartening and bleak time, I just couldn’t find a way to stop drinking. My journal tells me I knew the right, general direction, but it took a long, f****** time to find the trailhead.

I knew back then where the answer resided, but like so many golf balls from that era, knowing roughly where it was did not help me find it. I wonder why it took me so long? I wish it hadn’t. So many people could have avoided so much, I could have avoided so much. I guess I always knew there would be a point to all of it, that’s why I wrote it down back in 2012 and 2013, etc. It’s surreal at times, trying to reconcile the me of 2012 with me a decade later. So much happened. So much changed. The biggest of all of those changes: I’ll have three years of sobriety on October 22.

I’m not sure what the 2012 version of me would have said upon learning the news that his sobriety date was still seven years away. One thing I take away from all of this—those days of 2012 seem so remote and far-away and foreign—because the me of that time is so far-away and foreign. It was a long trip back. I can see now just how much changed, how much needed to change and that’s pretty important to just take in sometimes.

Thanks for Letting Me Share

1. He was a friend of my Dad’s and also a professor at the University of Iowa.