I’m grateful for a sponsee with a year of sobriety. I’m grateful for the way he’s helped keep me sober. I’m grateful for people who share honest and authentic stories. I’m grateful for a very good coffee/music combination this morning. I’m grateful to be sober today.
I want to brag on my Sponsee, S. for a little while longer. He qualified at a meeting yesterday and I kind of wish there was a way to record and distribute really, really great qualifications so that they could be shared with more people. That’s for another day. Why was S’s qualification so great? It came straight from his heart. He didn’t do any of the “then there was this time at Band Camp, I was so wasted,” stuff that secretly (?) glorifies drinking. He talked about how his drinking had been driven by what he felt and how coming to understand those feelings helped him see things in a different way.
The part that made me get tingly was when he described how doing the work was what had changed his life. He acknowledged that in his first nine months of sobriety he had gone to a lot of meetings, done a lot of fellowship, talked to his sponsor regularly, but had kind of mailed in the work—studying the Big Book, doing the thinking and the writing and then taking the prescribed actions. S. thought he had a pretty solid, sober foundation until he found out he didn’t, while he was buying a handle of vodka at 8am at a grocery store.
When S. came back, we got to work and this time he did everything, even multiple drafts of things. I know he didn’t really enjoy it, but he did it. That’s also when things started to change. That’s the difference between reading the Big Book and studying the Big Book, the difference between being able to recite the Steps and actually putting them into practice; actually learning to use those principles to organize life.
The great thing is that these principles are kind of lovely: Be honest, be true to yourself, help other people, do the next right thing, have faith in what you can’t prove, approach life with humility and willingness, understand you’re a part, not the whole. As my grandmother used to say every Christmas as she opened gifts, “There’s nothing wrong with that.”1 The hard part is giving up the life we have so carefully constructed and you can see why: That life is twisted and dark, full of secrets and lies, it’s built on a foundation of shame and misery, marked by little self-humiliations and fear that somehow solidifies into this dark, horrible mass that just can’t be moved, a life that is literally consuming itself a glass at a time.
Any rational, sane person is going to choose what’s behind Door Number One. We alcoholics and addicts can’t not pick Door Number Two. Every single time. We know it’s that stupid, f****** jalopy back there, we know full well that we’ve given up the really nice living room set from Broyhill or the trip for two to…..Hawaii.2 The whole audience in their stupid get-ups is shouting “Door Number One!” The spouse is tugging on sleeve and whispering furiously, “Door Number One, Door Number One.” And every single, f****** time what came out of my mouth? A very bold, very confident, very pirate-like: “You know what, I’m going to take Door Number Two.”
That’s the life I created and presided over. For a long time, it was my Alamo.3That’s what had to change. That’s what I had to be willing to give up— this life that was based entirely on my own self-conception. That’s why this sentence is one of the most critical in the Big Book, and certainly to early sobriety:4
It was only a matter of being willing to believe in a Power greater than myself. Nothing more was required of me to make my beginning.
Big Book, p. 12
That foundation of willingness is what takes you through the hard work of studying the Big Book, working the Steps, putting life on a different footing. Once you’ve done all of that, the last eight words of the Steps take you right back to the beginning:
To practice these principles in all of our affairs.
When S. was finishing his qualification, he said that’s exactly what had changed his life, had produced a year of freedom from drinking—practicing these principles in all his affairs. Studying the Big Book, thinking how it applied to his own life and then having the courage to change the things he could. That’s how it works and that’s a very, very beautiful thing.
Thanks for Letting Me Share
It’s a period there, not an exclamation point, because that more accurately reflects how it was said.
The life I was meant to lead: Game Show Host. The Game Show Host I was meant to be: Monty Hall.
Yes, this is a reference to a recent footnote about inspirational speeches given to 6th Graders.
Did I quote this yesterday and the day before? Hmmmm.