The First Step, Again
I was having dinner with a friend recently, a seriously OG alcoholic with an amazing story and an uncanny ability to match newcomers with sponsors. He was teasing me for being a “candy-ass alcoholic,” since I mostly drank white wine during my drinking career, specifically sauvignon blanc. Side Note: Trust me, you can definitely earn a membership in AA drinking a few bottles of white wine every day. Anyway, I started talking about my ten years of drinking and going to meetings. He asked, “What was the longest amount of time you had?” I told him that maybe I got to six months one time. He looked at me, squinted, “How long did you do that for? Ten years,” I said. He shook his head and his eyes got sad, “Shit, that’s fucking hard,” was all he could say.
I spent those ten years bouncing in and out of rehabs and IOPs and trying a string of therapists and treatments. No matter what, I kept drinking. There was no pleasure in it for me anymore—it was an integral part of my day, every day. When things were bad I was drinking at The Commissary at 8:00 am, waiting for the bartender to walk away before trying to take my first sip so she wouldn’t see how badly my hands shook.
There were lots of relapses. Too many to count. 13 one-day chips are the fossil record of my alcoholism; but the true number of relapses? I really couldn’t even guess at a number. I used to go to meetings, day after day. I listened to the shares and nodded in agreement when people said important things. I took in the stories I heard and knew I wanted to be sober, prayed that I could be sober. But I usually left early and went somewhere to drink. One meeting I frequented started with someone reading “How it Works” from the Big Book. Whenever there was a chance, I would volunteer because I loved reading it out loud. I think it’s incredibly moving and powerful and every time I read it out loud to a roomful of alcoholics, I felt like it was aimed right at me:
If you have you decided you want what we have and are willing to go to any length—then you are ready to take certain steps. At some of these we balked. We thought we could find an easier, softer way. But we could not. With all of the earnestness at our command, we beg of you to be fearless and thorough from the very start. Some of us have tried to hang onto our old ideas and the result was nil until we let go absolutely.
I read that and listened to that over and over and prayed it could happen for me. But I knew this passage pretty much had me pegged:
Those who do not recover are people who cannot or will not completely give themselves to this simple program, usually men and women who are constitutionally incapable of being honest with themselves.
When I walked out of the DuPont Circle Club, headed to whatever bar I was going to drink at that night, those words rang in my ears, at least until the third glass of wine.
When I arrived in New York last September, I was unencumbered by relationships, a job or friends and it was still the middle of the pandemic. I moved into a sober house on the Upper East Side to take what I candidly thought was my last crack at getting sober. I was tired and didn’t have any fight left in me. The First Step says
“We admitted we were powerless over alcohol and that our lives had become unmanageable.”
I think it was pretty clear to all involved that in the power struggle between alcohol and me, alcohol had won pretty decisively. But I always kind of choked on saying that my life was unmanageable: It was certainly chaotic and a lot of bad shit happened, but I kept a big job going, my kids went to college, the mortgages all got paid. To me, it seemed like I was managing. Relapse after relapse after relapse eventually taught me that maybe my life was “manageable,” but what it wasn’t was sustainable. When I replaced “unmanageable” in the First Step with “unsustainable,” things made more sense to me.
I have come to recognize that one of the things that kept me drinking was the inability to believe there could be a life that didn’t run on alcohol. My dad was a mathematician and taught statistics at the University and I tend to think of a lot of things in term of equations. I realized that the old equation of my life—all of the stressors, the resentments, the character defects, the people and places and things, when you put that all together, the equation didn’t work, couldn’t work, until alcohol was added to the mix.
I realized the task ahead was not to simply abstain from alcohol for as long as I could. The mission I had to accept was to craft a life that didn’t require me to drink, a life that I could sustain. A life that could be lived in accord with my principles and with self-honesty. I began to re-examine literally everything and tried to think about what was really important, what was necessary. And that’s when “How it Works” really hit home, this sentence, in particular:
“With all of the earnestness at our command, we beg of you to be fearless and thorough from the very start.”
Bill W., with so many relapses in his story, who got to the place where there is finally no hope left and still kept drinking, literally begs the reader, begs me, to do the hard work that has needed to be done for so long. To do the hard work necessary to save my life. I saw the 12 Steps weren’t magic spells, capable of changing my life simply by uttering them; every step required concrete action. Step One required me to fearlessly abandon all of the old ideas, the narratives I had authored, the resentments, the poisonous thinking patterns, all so carefully constructed and intricately woven together with my drinking. The First Step required me to try and appraise myself honestly, to see what I really was and what I was really doing to myself and to everyone who loved me. That was the first step of finding a way of living that didn’t require alcohol.
My life is different now. I had two years in October. I think about maintaining balance and I pay close attention to my motives and my narratives. I’m not interested in writing any more stories that end with me sitting on a barstool with a glass of Sauvignon Blanc in front of me. The cornerstones of my life are connection and gratitude, service and friendship. I look for ways to practice humility. I came to realize that maybe the most important words in the Big Book are these:
“Here are the steps we took, which are suggested as a program of recovery.”
I guess I’ve been at Step One a jillion times during my recovery, but I think I finally came to understand the Step and what it requires. I’m grateful for the courage and faith to take that step every day. I’m grateful for the Third Tradition and for sitting in all of those meetings trying to find the path. I’m grateful I found the willingness to try and save my own life before it was too late. I’m grateful to be sober today.