Looking back can make us grateful
I grew up in an alcoholic home where we could never say, “Dad’s drunk again,” because it might sound like we didn’t love dad. And truly we all loved Dad, so we showed it by keeping silent.
I grew up in an alcoholic home where we couldn’t say, “Mom’s frustrated with Dad’s drinking,” because it might sound like Mom didn’t love Dad. And we all knew Mom loved Dad, so we respected them by keeping silent.
I grew up in an alcoholic home where I could never say, “I’m afraid I’m not good enough to be loved,” because it might sound like there was something wrong with me or my family’s ways. I knew I needed to do what others wanted in hopes of being loved, so I stayed silent… until gradually I forgot how to know what I felt.
As a child I grew to resemble an android navigating templates of what I thought
others wanted me to do. Inside my polished shell, a sea of vibrant emotions and passions raged, a crazy frothing of all different colors longing to get out. I’d been taught to censor whatever didn’t fit the judgements my family held, but as my body grew up, forbidden urges sometimes burst out of me, shameful and bizarre compulsions that frightened me. I hid them. There was no way to integrate my outer good girl and that inner chaos – no way that I, at least could see.
Until here came the magic of alcohol. Alcohol dilated the zillion pores in my shell-like skin so the truth of me could gush out into the world, like it or not! Alcohol dissolved those walls of shoulds and musts, blasted to hell that relentless rubric of inner criticisms. I flowed; I fit; I flourished! Soon life had only two states: drinking, and waiting to drink. Naturally, I could never say, “I’m ill with alcoholism,” because that would cast aspersions on the one thing that made life livable.
Plus it would throw light on a family disease, declare that my father and I were equally ill. And the song we all knew, the chorus we sang whenever we still gathered, was all about how nothing was wrong with any of us – though plenty was wrong with outsiders.
But, as the years passed, my android shell, because it was made of unnatural materials and not grown from within, began to obsolesce – to fall apart. More and more it cracked at the joints – my elbows, my waist – so that my inner mess, which had churned around unsupervised through 
the years until all its vibrant colors merged to a muddy ugliness, began to spew on the sensible arrangements of my life. It smelled bad. It hurt people. But I told myself, “Ah, well! Everybody spews!”
Now the mess for alcohol to clear got heavier – landslides filled with large, trashed objects it had to plow aside to reopen the flow. And given that it had only masqueraded as love, but really grew from self-hate, it began to slack in its duties. The magic grew thin. 
And so I hit bottom. The keel of my consciousness ran aground on the rock of despair. I’d tried all I knew with all that I had and ended here: failure. Existence sucked. And Option B, to abandon ship, began to seem the saner solution.
But, wait… Wasn’t there something I’d forgotten? Hadn’t there been – before the android sealed me off, before my passions turned putrid – something? So distant a memory but faintly recalled – that once there was a time when I believed in… goodness. And now, if all roads were marked with skull and crossbones but one, a path signed “Goodness →,” would I follow it, no matter how cliché and pointlessly breakfast-cereal-box-maze-like it looked?
AA~?! Me, going to AA?! Ha! What a grim joke. These people’s problems were generic. Mine were unique. And yet, among all these stupid, brainwashed nobodies who failed to see the world rightly as my family did, around these cultish zealots with their scrolls of numbered steps and traditions on the walls, was I just imagining it, or was it in the air? Goodness. And maybe from under the floorboards, subsonic, maybe diffused in some elaborate code these people sprinkled through their words, that ancient, sacred radiance I’d long since dismissed as worthless: Love.
A plant with just one dangling leaf may still rejuvenate. Slowly, the love from these strangers permeated the cracked husks of my old armor. “You can lay that stuff down,” they smiled. “If you work these 12 steps and stand up in honesty with all your deformities and wounds exposed, the sunlight will heal them.”
Sunlight?! Of course I didn’t believe in sunlight! So what if I’d never even tried looking up! I saw stuff because it was there – not because of some hokey-ass Light Bulb in the sky! And yet, reluctantly, one piece at a time I shed those dented old plates and cuffs meant to protect me. Then I felt it: something warmed my skin, my face, and before I’d even realized it, my heart – sunlight! Colors revived, my sores healed, and the textures of the world that I’d been numb to for so long became vivid. I remembered how to play.
So began a lifelong inner expedition that continues to this day, bumbling around the dim passageways of my consciousness, discovering how I really feel, what I really love, and who I really am – each step illuminated by my own small lantern of sunlight, which I need to recharge daily. In the rooms of AA, Al-Anon, and ACA, I meet people who grew up in the very same house I did. Imagine that! They’ve given me field guides to flora and fauna to help me to identify those strange creatures I come across in my psyche, some older than I am, spawned by my ancestors.
My father died in regret, and my siblings text that I’m wrong – but I know joy, and I know its source. I’m now loved freely in a raucous, imperfect new family where I like to sing out loud – as you may have noticed!
This is the story I tell in my addiction memoir.
empire of steel, concrete, and synthetics, where nothing natural or charming can survive.
So here’s the quandary. You may hear people in the rooms kicking around the question: “Who are amends for? Me or the other person?” I recall about a dozen years ago hearing a woman announce with contempt, “I’m not making this amends for her! I’m doing it for me!” Something sounded wrong in that, but I wasn’t sure what.
Amends don’t mean you become buddy-roos with the person. And some may continue to lob fireballs at you, requiring you to maintain a safe distance. But when I’ve sat down with people from my past and owned, often with my voice shaking, my very human fuck-ups, I’ve witnessed in almost every one of them the blossoming grace of compassion. Many have spontaneously confessed fuck-ups of their own. And sometimes, in the pool of truth we shared for those moments, I would behold in them a dignity and beauty to which our old conflict had blinded me.
in not laying too much on us at the outset. In chapter 1 Bill W. describes being “catapulted into the 4th dimension of existence,” where we will know “happiness, peace, and usefulness, in a way of life that is incredibly more wonderful as time passes.”
making coffee, answering phones, helping with set-up or tear-down. Reluctant as I was to take on one of these, I found that, strangely enough, during my duties I experienced a sense of ease and comfort I’d never known before without being drunk. I didn’t get why, but I knew I liked it (and still do). Same thing when I started sponsoring other women. I remember marveling each time I closed my front door at the end of the hour, how was it that “getting out of self” felt so damn good? How had those all-consuming morasses of my own problems dehydrated to little flecks of scum in just sixty minutes? What was this lightness, this joy that let me turn back to my own life with love and gratitude? I didn’t understand it.
A Spiritual Evolution 