I’m grateful for seeing how different life is now. I’m grateful for the mess of papers on my desk. I’m grateful for the sense of lightness. I’m grateful for the people who keep coming into my life. I’m grateful for a chance to do it differently. I’m grateful for Frosted Flakes. I’m grateful to be sober today.
Alert—I have been recording just the gratitude lists, but today, you can listen to the entire post!!
This has been another busy week here at Sober HQ. I’m very sorry to disappoint you but we aren’t going to be releasing a new episode of Breakfast with an Alcoholic this weekend. It’s August, even alcoholics are on vacation and I’m pretty busy making TikTok videos these days.1 Seriously, we are doing a bunch of re-tooling and trying to make things look better, sound nicer, etc. It’s actually very exciting and I think I speak for the band here. The thing that has us excited is finding new ways to get the message out. We’re all big, believers in AA, but when I sit in an AA meeting I can’t help but think that we’re just the lucky ones in the lifeboat and there is an ocean of suffering alcoholics out there.
The Fifth Tradition of Alcoholics Anonymous (The Long Form) says:
Each Alcoholics Anonymous group ought to be a spiritual entity having but one primary purpose—that of carrying its message to the alcoholic who still suffers.
In 1948, Bill W. wrote about the importance of the Fifth Tradition:
Because it has now become plain enough that only a recovered alcoholic can do much for a sick alcoholic, a tremendous responsibility has descended upon us all, an obligation so great that it amounts to a sacred trust.
The Language of the Heart, p. 82
Fortunately, all this requires is that I share my experience, strength and hope and describe how it was, what happened and how it is now. Just in a lot of different formats and in a lot of different places. That’s our premise. I sometimes get asked why I’m doing this and I don’t usually say, “Because God told me to one day in the locker room at Equinox.” I usually say something like “I don’t know, I like writing and it helps keep me sober.”
But I know. In 2016, I went to sleep-away rehab for the first time. I was frantically calling friends and family, making arrangements for my dog and for being away from my life for a month, scheduling a haircut, canceling my workout sessions and in every single conversation I broke down and started crying. I cried to my dog-walker, my boss, my ex-wife, the people who worked for me, my friends in the Program, bartenders I liked, the woman who cut my hair, everyone.2 When I broke down on the phone with my friend the Minister he said, "That's ok, that's how you know when God is close."3
You all know about the pennies and the playlists and weirdly, those actually are components of my spiritual life.4 But the real MaGilla are those overwhelming surges of emotion when I realize I've found the path. I remember hiking in Montana a few years ago with an outdated trail map. The trail eventually disappeared in some pretty thick forest and bramble. I started to get a little apprehensive because I didn't think being lost in the Gallatin National Forest was going to be a great experience. Also I didn't have food, extra water or bear spray. I knew the trail roughly followed a stream, so I slogged along the streambed, working my way through the dense brush, beset by an airwing of mosquitoes and biting flies, trying to keep my rising sense of anxiety at bay. Every once in a while I would see what might have been a remnant of the trail and I would convince myself that I was headed the in the right direction and be buoyed for a little while.
I can’t tell you how relieved I was when I got close to the edge of the forest and finally saw the the trail again.5 Multiply that by like a thousand and that's what I feel when I reflect on finding my way out of the darkest period of my life. Alcoholics Anonymous taught me to replace the profane (me) with the sacred at the center of my life and that is what illuminated the path out for me.
I’ve always been pretty emotional and emotions like that were a big part of the reason I drank. I didn’t enjoy them for the most part and found that living my life through an alcohol-induced twilight was easier and more pleasant. We all know how that turned out. Emotions like that used to be expressions of shame, anger, frustration, humiliation for me. Now I see those overwhelming feelings that I couldn’t make sense of—-they were messages to me, an effort to show me that I wasn’t on the path and an effort to help me find it.
I’m going to let you in on a secret. I feel that almost every day I do this. No, every day. It’s the dumbest thing, I’ll be writing this or something else and making some dumb joke in the footnotes,6 and out of nowhere, I'll get all choked up. Sometimes there are actually tears streaming down my face. It's not sadness and I don't think it's God's stamp of approval or anything, I think it is the extraordinarily strong energy that comes being connected the way I'm supposed to be, doing what I'm supposed to and realizing how far away, how lost I was.
I think connecting to the Guiding Force of the Universe is something like the old corporate saw about "drinking from a firehose." When it happens, I'm overwhelmed, but in a good way. A big part of my recovery involved finally accepting that I was placed where I was supposed to be, that the things that were supposed to happen generally did happen and that:
Nothing, absolutely nothing, happens in God’s world by mistake.
Big Book, p. 417
Thanks for Letting Me Share
You don’t think God has a sense of humor?
It turns out that both she and my dog-walker were in our club.
How could you not love someone who would recite Emily Dickinson poems from memory during his sermons.
Although probably not any weirder than the way the Planet of the Apes movies are connected to Breakfast with an Alcoholic. Did you know the Planet of the Apes movies are in the Criterion Collection? Just saying.
Of course you knew it was going to end this way. Do you think that I would have waited this long to tell you about surviving a bear attack or something like that?
Hopefully, you don’t think they are all dumb.
Absolute chills on this one. My post today talks about spiritual connection, too--just not as eloquently! Thanks for having the courage to share. I'm seeing a connection with substance abuse and the emotionally sensitive (and had a conversation with a therapist this week about this). That level of feeling can be a blessing and a curse.