I’ve been going to AA meetings since I was almost 3 months sober. I’ve never had a sponsor. I haven’t done a single one of the “12 steps”, at least not intentionally. I’ve never uttered the serenity prayer, nor do I know the words to it. I do not speak at all during any of the traditional readings that are recited at various points of each meeting. Despite my lack of participation, I am very much in tune with the people that are in that room and what they have to say. I treat Alcoholics Anonymous like a safe haven when I begin to feel unsteady, anxious, or needing to remind myself of where I come from. Almost 4 and a half years into sobriety, and I still stand by my biggest discovery: the hardest thing for a human being to do is change. To utterly and absolutely change.
The person that I am closest to in my AA home group is Bob. He has been there since the first time I walked into the dingy, poorly lit room of the Alano Club. I think his sobriety year is 2011. Bob always makes it a point to say hello to me when I walk in. Even if I come late and try to slide into the room without making too much noise (an impossibility with the scuffed tiled floor and beat up metal-legged chairs), he makes eye contact with me and nods his head to acknowledge that we’ve met again. I have never seen Bob outside of AA, but he is the person that I’ve spoken with the most at our meetings. On each of my annual sobriety dates, Bob has been the person that has presented me with the coin with my total years sober engraved on it. This past Friday, I found out that Bob had died.
I have been very conscious of consequences since I have been sober. All of my responsibilities and obligations were waiting for me when I found stability, and if anything, I was forced to reconcile with the fact that I had been reckless with so many situations that were going to have an impact on my life going forward. I am extremely afraid of failing. I try not to look at things through a narrow lens and say something to the effect of “I used to be a self-destructive alcoholic, so anything that happens now is OK because at least it is better than that”. I think that would be doing a disservice to myself. I am not mired in what happened the past decade of my life, I am working every day to make the time I have left on Earth to be journey worth taking. Even those first few months of sobriety wandering through a confusing hellscape of sensory overload, I forcefully repeated to myself, “this is not how things are going to be forever”. There are more than plenty of important things in the present to occupy myself with to keep me from dwelling on what has already happened. I acknowledge it, I certainly will not ever forget it, but it was not the final version of myself.
While I tried in vain to process the news of Bob passing away, a regular attendee of our AA group asked me a few questions regarding my sobriety. When he found out I had no sponsor, and had not done the 12 steps, he was aghast. “There’s only two reasons you haven’t done the steps…pride, and fear.”
I have been asked about how I got sober by those trying to do the same. I don’t think any of the people I have spoken about it with in those terms have achieved sobriety for very long. What worked for me probably is not going to work for you the way you are expecting it to. The scars on my soul are permanent and the self-aware nightmare from my rock bottom is final. The moment when it is time for you to change might not be a conscious decision, but a metamorphosis that occurs when you have accepted that you cannot exist the same way anymore. It washes over you.
I haven’t yet processed the fact that I will never see Bob again.
