How Bill's Story Helped Me Get Sober
I’m grateful it’s November. I’m grateful for a week with a lot of checked boxes. I’m grateful for coffee on a quiet rainy morning. I”m grateful for little adventures and waking up to peace and calm. I’m grateful to be sober today.
song of the week:
I listen to this song—a lot. When I stroll through the cavernous lobby on my way to the office, wearing my nearly ever-present KC Royals baseball cap and making my way through the hordes of fleece-wearing bankers, I’m not sure folks would suspect that this is what is pumping through the airpods right into my brain. I think they think I’m listening to the Daily or some other respectable podcast. Like this one:
Lots of things happening in November—potentially the end of civilization, my golden birthday, and it’s the month that Bill Wilson got sober—90 years ago. You may ask, “TBD, what’s up with the Bill W. nonsense? Why are you such a fanboy?”
Reading Bill’s Story Helped Me Get Sober.
I read the Big Book with sponsors and as part of Big Book Study Groups (6-8 of us reading the book from cover to cover). These are intensely powerful and I wish they were more often utilized. The reading aloud served a really important purpose, it made my too quickly spinning hamster wheel slow down. It forced me to listen to every word, sometimes multiple times.
A funny thing happened. As I really let those words linger in my head, I began to realize that this was my story, too. I began to see that despite the different contexts and eras, the thought process, the distorted view of myself, the fear and envy, these were all things that I knew very, very well. Bill W. expressed himself differently than I would have, but we had a lot of the same realizations:
I realized the power of alcohol and fell in love at a very early age, just like Bill. Also like Bill, it only took a few years (and no disasters) to realize just how deep the bond ran between me and drinking. In that moment, the thing I realized, but only recently appreciated the significance of, there was no way I could stop on my own. Spoiler alert: This is also the gist of Step One, I just didn’t know it at the time.
I knew nothing of the steps in 1980, or of the Big Book or any of this. I just knew that drinking completed me—at least that’s how it felt. I knew that I could do just about anything when I was drinking. But the moment when the fear-dagger pierced me on that black vinyl booth, was the moment I realized that I lacked the power to stop drinking on my own. Drinking might be the aid I need for living, but alcohol was driving the bus and making the decisions.
Of course, I spent the next 45 years trying to disprove that thesis. The idea I had was that I could stop when the time was right. I kept trying my own efforts at sobriety—100% of which failed in relatively spectacular fashion.My efforts to do it my way, to prove that I could maybe even control my drinking on my own? Well, those cartoonish attempts at sobriety seem like vignettes torn from the Big Book. You know how they say life imitates art? Well, my life imitated the Big Book—which I had not read. I think when that happens, it means you’re definitely an alcoholic.
Over the course of the next several readings of the Big Book, my appreciation for the story grew. I began to appreciate the way he constructed the narrative arc, the way he showed himself rather than telling us about himself. It’s the details that tell you everything you want to know about Bill W.—the person who revolutionized the treatment of addiction and recovery—and he didi it the hard way, by being an alcoholic. Details like:
Packing his wife in a motorcycle sidecar for a months-long insane business trip
Living as hobos for at least a month (no hyperbole, what they did in the 1920’s, working on a farm in exchange for room and board, was called being a “Hobo”).
Chartering planes to complete “drinking jags.” In the 1920’s? Did they charter from the Wright Brothers?
He tries to serve a drink to his sober friend Eby.
He was a highly-flawed person, who hurt a lot of people during his time—just like all of us alcoholics. He led this crazy, self-delusional life, just like me. He told himself the same lies, made the same excuses, held the same grudges.
The first revelatory thing about Bill’s story is how it establishes the foundation for understanding alcoholism and addiction through the lens of disease. This is a weirdly controversial topic and people express the view that calling addiction a disease robs them of hope and agency. I just always think of it as being a diagnosis, not an insult.
But when you see a group of people, of varying backgrounds and demographic details, showing the same behaviors, making the same flawed decisions, telling the same lies and following the same self-delusions; You begin to see it’s not the consequence of a bunch of bad choices (oh, bad choices there were aplenty), but as symptoms. You know, if you cough and sneeze like the other people cough and sneeze, you might all have the same thing.
Bill’s story seeped in and I made this crucial realization:
Whatever it was that Bill had, I had the same thing. If I had what Bill had, could what worked for him, work for me?
I dove into the Program, did a lot of writing and worked my way through the Steps with my sponsors. I mean, I did a lot of writing. I came to understand how the Program worked, and as I worked through the Steps, I began to see real change. I guess “see” is not the right word.
I began to feel the change.
I felt the fear ebb away. The quiet was no longer excruciating. I let go of things that had never been meant for me, or nor longer were. I let go of a lot of ill-formed (but still mine) hopes and dreams. I read the Big Book every day. I discovered new ways of thinking about things, nearly every time I opened the book. I began to re-discover myself. As I let go of what wasn’t me, what wasn’t mine, I found myself.
Not all at once. But over time, I began to feel the sensation of sinking into myself. Maybe only an alcoholic knows the nearly-intolerable burden of having to invent nearly every moment of every day. I’m very glad for the rest. Watching senseless YouTube vides beats the hell out of the psychotic plate spinning that used to comprise my life.
I began to accept the world around me, instead of trying to make my mark in it. I saw that the real reward was always in the work, the design for living laid out by the Big Book works on a flywheel principle—the more we put into life, the more expansive our own lives become. And I began to see the purpose and the manifest possibilities in every fleeting moment—they prepared me for the next moment.
Once enough of the fear and after-effects of whatever it was that afflicted me had diminished, I finally saw the path in front of me. It was a path marked by kindness and acceptance. Every day I spent on that path was a day spent being true to myself. Some days were good and some were hard. Sometimes it rained, or didn’t at all. Some days I was alone. But every day on that path was filled with learning and wonder.
After years of chasing all kinds of knowledge and fortune and fame, I realized there was a simple key to life and unlocking its full potential took only this:
Treating this moment with gentleness and kindness.
By accepting this moment, for what it is, I approach the next moment unburdened by expectations or disappointments. I arrive in the perfect condition for repeating this action, and accepting the next moment and so on. And soon enough, one has built an entire life (or five years of sobriety) based on gratitude and kindness and acceptance. And probably love and serenity, too.
But where was the stopping drinking part? This is also the other part where my story and Bill’s Story overlap—the alcohol eventually just vanished from life. In the olden days, this was where I called bullshit on the whole story. That doesn’t happen to any real alcoholic. The only thing that really stops us from drinking is death. Well, it’s what happened to that mf’er Bill and I’m here to tell you that it happened to me, too. When I finally accepted myself and found the place in the world meant for me, well, I’m not even sure they serve alcohol there?
And it’s this last little bit that is maybe the hardest. You have to start believing that things can change. The thing that kills alcoholics isn’t the drinking, it’s the loss of hope. The years of my drinking were not halcyon years, they were dark and desperate and the drinking was an effort to conceal a growing conviction that I was irrevocably lost, like a ship crushed by the ice in Antarctica lost. When you lose hope, well, trying doesn’t seem to make much sense anymore.
As long as I maintained my intellectual superiority, as long as I kept up my withering sarcastic commentary, I was safe from feeling and from change. It was when I finally saw that I didn’t have to live this way, that my icy mountain of resolve melted. The Big Book’s design for living requires a commitment to light and willingness. It’ s hard to make the switch. The losses and the pain and the frustration and the grief and the failures become overwhelming, the burden is very, very hard to shoulder.
For me, I worked patiently, waited out a lot of bad days, went to a lot of meetings, but wished at night that this serenity nonsense would just f***** get here. Then one day, I found I had the courage to do things I hadn't done before. I began to see that things could be different. I began to feel life begin to creep back into me; could feel the possibilities begin to creep back into me. As I found the courage to open up more and more, wondrous things began to happen (some sad ones, too), and I realized from moment to moment to moment, things were okay. Things would be okay. *
I believe that’s called serenity.
That really is the outline of my path in sobriety. I mean, I have 42 notebooks filled with bright, literary conversation, but I think this version is a bit pithier. And we all know that brevity is the soul of wit. That’s why Bill’s Story is so important to me, because I was finally able to see myself in the first sixteen-pages of the Big Book.
And if it worked for a f****ed- up, drunken clown like Bill W, then it could probably work for me, too. And then I share my story and someone says, “If that dipshit got sober, I can too.” That’ s called service and it’s how AA works.
That’s how I got sober.
Happy Friday.
