I’m grateful for English muffins. I’m grateful for some pretty stirring music. I’m grateful for letting things be. I’m grateful for chances to re-think things. I’m grateful for being able to see just enough. I’m grateful to be sober today.
Happy Friday. Since it’s Friday, that means this happened yesterday and you should read it:
I just won a staring match with the blinking cursor. I’m not going to say how long I had to stare at it to win, the important thing is that I won. We are set to record the second installment of our nascent Big Book Study today and hopefully that will be ready over the weekend. I’m just going to assume you are very familiar with the first installment already and I’m just putting the link here as a convenience:
We got halfway through Chapter 1, “Bill’s Story” last time, so we’ll cover the rest in this episode. These are longer and more of an investment of time, for sure, but for me, if you were to really ask me what finally made the difference, it was studying and digesting Bill’s story. By 2020, when I moved to New York, I had about nine months of sobriety but hadn’t been going to meetings very often, didn’t have a sponsor and was definitely not working the Steps or reading the Big Book.
After a self-initiated tornado deposited me in a place I thought was far from home, when most everything had been stripped away, I finally found the Program. When my Sponsor took me through the Big Book line by line, I finally saw and was able to grasp the answer for my life. I began trying to get sober in 2009 or 2010 and it took me until October of 2020 to celebrate one year of sobriety.1 The reason it took me so long? I kept trying to stop drinking without being willing to read the Big Book or do what it told me to do: Change my life.
I was one of those people for whom the first drink was revelatory. I saw immediately that drinking was the answer to all of my problems today. I realized alcohol was a tool that allowed me to better manage life and I commenced to build a life that basically required me to drink to keep all the balls in the air. The central deficiency in my life was that it lacked a spiritual center. Here’s the funny thing, I went to church all of those years and my life still lacked a spiritual center. Like AA, churches also had an instruction manual that I read religiously, but oddly, didn’t really think applied directly to me.
I’d read the Big Book several times and could quote you passages, if that was necessary. I didn’t believe it applied to me. AA and the Big Book, well, they certainly had some thoughtful ideas and some clever sayings. I liked going to meetings and listening to people’s stories, I even shared parts of mine, saw some of the parallels, but still didn’t really think that most of this applied to me. I clung to the sense I was different, didn’t need to do the kind of wholesale renovation these “alcoholics” had to do. I would definitely say that I was an “alcoholic,” but I meant it in more of a fraternal, solidarity type way. I didn’t really regard it as a diagnosis that required me to take action. I really didn’t think it applied to me.
When my Sponsor took me through the Big Book, my eyes were finally opened. I saw most of what I needed to see just in Chapter 1, “Bill’s Story.” Bill was me, strumming my pain with his fingers. Bill was a really smart guy who always felt a sense of emptiness and apartness. He realized as a young man that alcohol was something of a magic elixir, but one that carried a significant cost and generated a fair amount of foreboding. A series of dramatic falls to illustrate the precariousness of the situation. A series of efforts to remedy the situation, half-hearted, kind and gentle efforts that generated brief respites from the madness, but always failed the first test. A growing sense that maybe there was no way out, the walls closing in making me thirstier. Everything I cared about, everyone I loved, falling away. Even finally realizing that this was really, really going to kill me, well, that just seemed like a really, really good reason to stay drunk.
In Chapter One, Bill gets to the “jumping-off” place:
No words can tell of the loneliness and despair I found in that bitter morass of self-pity. Quicksand stretched around me in all directions. I had met my match. I had been overwhelmed. Alcohol was my master.
Big Book, p. 8
Then the phone rang and things began to change. I finally saw how futile were my efforts to retain control of the flawed life I had built, furiously working to keep it airborne by jettisoning everything I could think of, hoping that if I could just stay stopped for six months or a year, everything would change and we would start gaining altitude and could unbuckle the seatbelts and go back to watching the movie. No, that wasn’t going to happen. That plane was going to crash.
It doesn’t matter whether it was pilot error or a flawed design-it was the same guy. That was the guy who had to go. Bill’s story, when I studied it and was willing to see the parallels, finally showed me that I was going to have to make the same changes to my life that he had to make to his. Fortunately, he wrote that part down, too. There was no other answer than this: I had to find a way to put spirituality and faith at the center of my life. I had to have a spiritual awakening, like Bill.
That’s what I learned from studying just Chapter One of the Big Book. The rest of it is pretty great, too, but once you’ve really gotten “Bill’s Story,” I think you probably have enough to make a beginning. That’s how it worked for me.
Take a listen, if you get a chance. We’re trying to figure out whether there are better formats and would love to make this more participatory. Your thoughts, ideas, suggestions, wishes are all worthy of consideration and we’d love to hear them. In the meantime, Happy Friday.
Thanks for Letting Me Share
When my first temporary Sponsor told me that it had taken him “ten years to get one,” I thought that was about the most f*****-up thing I had heard in a while. Ha Ha Ha. (spacing is deliberate).