Daily Gratitude List 12.11.22

Bill Comes In

I’m grateful my desk isn’t too messy. I’m grateful for a little cold weather finally. I’m grateful for a chance to get organized. I’m grateful for dogs who pose for pictures. I’m grateful the slivers of blue behind the gray clouds. I’m grateful to be sober today.

December 11th is Bill Wilson’s sobriety date. I find Bill’s Story to be endlessly fascinating and incredibly inspiring. I really attribute a lot of my sobriety to finally seeing that Bill’s Story, all sixteen pages of it, could be my story.

Bill finally got “it” when he saw an alcoholic he knew and had adjudged hopeless, standing in front of him sober. Bill was a chronic relapser, he knew first-hand what is like to fight the fight of early sobriety, over and over and over. He knew how hard it was to make it through those first days, trying to put together a week, maybe 30 days. Waking up every day wondering how it was going to be possible to get to the end without drinking. Sleeping on a mattress in the basement to lower the risk of suicide—the shame and humiliation, the sense of absolute futility at not being able to stay sober even for a few days, driving him to the “jumping-off” place.

Bill knew that part of his story and he knew it was Ebby’s story, too. Repeated vows to get sober leading to fewer and fewer days of sobriety with every invocation. And then Ebby showed up and the f***** was sober. Knowing Ebby and his shared hopeless diagnosis was what allowed Bill to come to this pivotal observation:

Had this power originated in him? Obviously, it had not. There had been no more power in him that there was in me at that minute; and this was none at all.

Big Book, p. 11

Bill’s last relapse began on November 11, a day he spent playing golf on Staten Island, spinning out his theory of alcoholism to a new, soon-to-be-horrified friend and then proving his point by having a few drinks. One might think from reading the very pithy Big Book account, that Bill’s conversion was the immediate consequence of his dinner with Ebby. The truth is, it was kind of messy.

Bill continued drinking after that dinner, even made a point of drinking before he would go down to the Cavalry Mission and hang out with Ebby and his sober friends. Kind of like going to an AA meeting drunk, I may know something about that. Bill lived life on a true-alcoholic roller-coaster for that month, knowing in his head what needed to happen, and what would happen if he could just put together a little time and get headed down the right path. But drinking steadily throughout.

Bill made a spectacle of himself, frequently showing up at meetings at the Calvary Mission drunk, but insisting on speaking. Bill was kind of a pest. Bill talked the talk, very eloquently, and then he showed himself to be the fraud he was, over and over and over, every time he started drinking again. But, somehow, he woke up on December 11, 1934 and things were different.

Bill scraped together some spare change, managed to secure four bottles of beer and set-off for Towns Hospital, making sure to chug the beers to avoid going into withdrawal on the way in. That’s the kind of shit us chronic relapsers know to do. Anyone who says that relapse isn’t part of recovery hasn’t read Bill’s Story. You know who would write something like this for the Third Tradition?

The only requirement for AA membership is a desire to stop drinking.

A guy who showed up drunk at proto-AA meetings. Bill knew he hadn’t executed a clean landing, very few of us do, and he fully expected there to be plenty of bounces still left to deal with. Bill knew that the desire to stop drinking almost always pre-dated the ability to stop drinking and that keeping alcoholics engaged in the search for the solution was the most important thing—especially if they were still drinking. He knew all of this, because he lived all of this.

AA is built upon the power of example, attraction rather than promotion. I think it’s easy sometimes to stop at the part where you acknowledge you’re an alcoholic like Bill. What comes after that is a flood of self-knowledge and understanding, the long difficult journey starts to make a little bit of sense, it’s possible to understand a little about how we got here. It’s possible to get glimpses of what life could be like sober, how things could change. But it’s not enough.

That’s the profoundly demoralizing part: You’ve figured out what’s wrong and know there is a way to get better and you just can’t do it. With every possible incentive aligned for me, tons of rewards and benefits, if I could just stop drinking, but I couldn’t. That’s the same realization that Bill came to the night Ebby showed up: Ebby couldn’t do it and Bill couldn’t do it, either. The power that had helped Ebby get sober hadn’t originated in him, it came as a consequence of being willing to believe in the existence of a Higher Power that could help restore him and other alcoholics to sanity.

It took Bill a bit of drinking to get him from his dinner with Ebby to his less-than-triumphant, but entirely appropriate entrance into Towns Hospital for the last time. But that’s what’s important, it was the last time. It was December 11th and Bill was finally coming in.

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