When you’re on vacation, you know what’s a great idea? Going to AA meetings.
Traveling for work, what keeps you grounded? You guessed it, meetings.
Visiting out-of-town relatives? Are you fucking kidding me? MEETINGS!
I’ve attended AA meetings in Greece, Hawaii, Los Angeles, San Francisco, Spokane, Boston, and New York — at least, that’s all I can recall offhand. Especially when I’m traveling alone, the rooms feel like home. In Athens, Greece, for instance, I walked more than 2 miles from my hotel (which featured a lush tropical bar) to track down a small AA symbol partially obscured by ivy on tower centuries old. Climbing to the room, I was met with posters of Bill and Bob on the walls along with the 12 Steps & Traditions, in English.
|
|
|
That meeting united accents from all over the globe, but the first share came from a weeping American woman who feared for her job. A flight attendant, she’d screwed up the landing cross-check and inflated a slide, delaying the next flight by half a day. ‘Coincidentally,’ though, she’d been my flight attendant. Chucking the cross-talk taboo, I spoke up, recounting for her everything she’d done right on that flight, along with all the extra demands placed on her as the only attendant fluent in Greek. Tears streamed down her face as she listened, and she was certainly not alone in that.
Just three months sober at the time, I’d not planned on sharing. But the that experience — along with the fellowship afterward at an outdoor cafe where the whole rollicking group wrote on my tourist map about where to go and what to see — cemented the meeting policy that has served me to this day: JUST GO.
At 22 years sober, I still go to meetings out-of-town. Yes, I have an awesome life. The craving to drink is long gone. Parts of me blighted by alcoholism have blossomed. Scars from childhood are healing in the sunlight of the spirit. Whereas it used to suck abysmally to be me without alcohol, drugs, and/or the highs of obsessive infatuation, today my mind and heart feel like a comfy, cheerful place to hang out.
Hokey as it may sound, I’m just back from a travel adventure commonly known as a college reunion. Thirty-five years ago, I was lucky enough to have parents who sent me to a “seven sisters” college (Vassar). This past weekend, I was a lucky enough to get a reunion “scholarship” to revisit the place. So off I flew to New York.
The vast contrast between who I was at 21 and who I am today struck me every minute I was there. For example, only a few of my friends showed up, which in the past would have posed a disappointment. Today, it meant a chance to get to know classmates I recognized but didn’t know personally, all of whom had aged, of course, but also matured into better selves — without 12-step work! “I get nicer every year,” remarked one of my normie friends, reflecting on the effect of life’s losses and tears, “and I hold back less.”
I re-explored the grand library’s “secret” spiral staircases, subterranean stacks, and lofty tower with a new friend, giggling and chatting about the fertility ordeals by which we got our kids. With another, shopping near campus, I shared the shock and pain of lost relationships. I’d somehow imagined that everyone else from Vassar was living ideal, tragedy-free lives, but was reminded yet again that being human is painful for all of us.
To me, as an alcoholic, growth is a huge deal: trusting others with the truth of my inner experiences was, in my youth, a risk beyond my limits. Trapped by self-conscious awkwardness and social fears, 
I needed alcohol to cut me loose. For 14 years, daily drinking halted my emotional growth so thoroughly that by age 34, when I finally hit bottom, I was still literally going to keggers at which I tried to act cool.
For me, the difference between the selfishly miserable person I was for so long and the outgoing, happy person I am today comes down to one factor: god.
It’s my awareness of a god that loves me no matter what, the one I found in AA, that grants me the courage I need to reach out to others — courage that has emboldened me to live large and build a beautiful life.
An Alcoholics Anonymous meeting was posted in the reunion schedule for Saturday afternoon, competing with four tempting lectures (on Vassar’s art, theater costumes, diversity tactics, and… Trump). I skipped ’em. I went to the meeting. I’d set an alarm on my phone. I left all my friends. There was no question in my mind as I crossed campus to find it.
Sure, booze — free booze, mind you — was flowing everywhere, and friends unaware I’m sober were constantly offering to grab me drinks. But that’s not why I went. Saying “no thanks” is as easy for me as turning down arsenic. Rather, I went to the AA meeting because that’s where my god shows up.
The fancy parlor held five of us – two newcomers, two with 20-plus years, and an Al-Anon with two. Hearing the shares of the newcomers — their feelings as if they were walking
a balance beam of their commitment to life and integrity while their old tactics of escape clamored for them to hop down, and their amazement that they were actually doing it, miraculously passing up drinks — reminded me that I am still and will always be missing the crucial piece that god provides. My wholeness is granted to me one day at a time by a power outside me.
Normie friends, for the most part, can’t understand this. One chalked up my lengthy sobriety to “grit and determination.” The fact is, I tried “grit and determination” about 1,753 times, and it never worked! But god has. That connection is all I jones for these days, and I know I can always find it at meetings, no matter where I roam.
work for hours, chat with clients – I’m great. Before the kids get home, I’ll zip out and have another. Maybe one before dinner and bed. NEVER do I have two! I’m just calm, smooth, efficient – doin’ my thing for weeks and weeks! But then one day, I’ll get bombed and mess everything up. Then I come back to AA.”
for himself, an acceptance of his trying past, including all the suffering that had forced him to change and grow. The chip on his shoulder melted away. His shares in meetings emanated that elusive calm that evolves only from gratitude and humility. When he spoke, people listened.
has survived over 80 years despite being neither professional nor organized is something many outsiders can’t grasp. We charge nothing, and nobody is in charge. Rather, our cohesion results from lived experience of our shared plight and solution. Extending these principles into our lives means that we not identify with the roles or labels we tend to pin on ourselves, that we lighten up and take ourselves less seriously. Eckhart Tolle writes about the diminished experience we suffer when we identify with a role, class, or even personality. Living truly awake means seeking to be maximally open to experience right now, not hemmed in by limiting self-definitions.
And yet we try the unknown thing. We step out into air. There’s something in AA meetings, some energy we can’t identify that keeps us coming back. My brain told me emphatically that AA would never work, yet my hope, my heart, and somehow my car keys carried me to meeting after meeting, where I heard people speaking authentically of ruined relationships, self-loathing, wild emotions, relentless fears, and pain-filled loneliness just like mine – that no longer ruled their lives. I could see it in their eyes, hear it in their voices: they were free.
Three steps forward, two steps back, I’ve progressed through life’s vicissitudes and cycles of stepwork to reach my own intimate experience with a god that I now love with everything in me. Today I can see how god – that energy of love powering every element of life – is in you. I can love you with no self-interest – no more than I have in loving a robin, or a birch tree, or a puffy white cloud shifting across the blue expanse of sky. Look at you being you!
I was busy. She was hopeless. Just eight minutes and I’d be outta this dump, back to the fresh air and my nice, clean life!
has its ups and downs, riches and ruins. The quality of our sobriety varies with our connectedness to god and our fellows, depending on the rigor with which we cultivate both. Many of us long to be gung-ho about sobriety all the time – and we can be! It’s just that what gung-ho looks like is going to change over time, which is why I like the analogy of seasons in sobriety.
Stay out of his life. Pray that he receive all the love and happiness you couldn’t give him.” When I objected, trying to explain step 9, he reared up powerfully: “This amends would be more for you than for him! He has a new wife! Let him be!”
