Paul

I have learned that it is not a great idea to move during the final week of a class.  I am not done moving.  I am behind on my homework.  I’m tired.

Class got out at 7:40, which meant that I could make it to my favorite meeting.  Behind on everything or no, I have my priorities.  And it was a wonderful meeting about the 2nd step.  The thing about 2nd step meetings generally is that they devolve into 3rd step meetings.  Very few people are able to talk about the second step without talking about the third, even focusing on the third.  Like I said, though, this is my favorite meeting and the people there, with minor exceptions, did share their experience with the second step.

Most people going through the 12 steps come in to the program and do some sort of specific work with their sponsor around the second step, something that helps build hope and that helps the sponsor understand if one is really prepared to do the work they need to do to change.  My own experience is that the 2nd step happened rather unconsciously and all at once.  It wasn’t until quite awhile afterward that I could even see it for what it was or to understand it’s meaning.

Good stories always have a climax, or a turning point, and in that regard mine is no different.  That December night, under the street lamp, when no mental defense against the truth about my condition had any real effect, I could have done what so many do and gone “on to the bitter end, attempting to blot out the consciousness of my intolerable condition.”  That would have been how most stories of addicts and alcoholics end.

It is not how stories of recovery end, though, and whether it happens slowly, as a growing awareness that leads one to decisive action, which is the usual path for most who recover, or it happens all at once, as it happened to me that dark night, something greater becomes operative in our stories. 

For me, that something greater began as the sudden and inexplicable appearance of hope; the idea that there must be a way out, a way out that was available to me, and that in spite of the disaster that my life had become there was a way available to me that would allow me to rescue some happiness in life if I were only willing to pursue it.

I am sure that I could not have seen it at the time, but I don’t believe I had left in me the ability to manufacture hope.  Generating hope was outside of my conscious ability.  Yet there it was, from somewhere beyond my consciousness, and in hindsight I believe it was grace; the product of Divine intervention.

Whatever it was, my coming to believe that a power greater than me could restore me to sanity was, when it happened, this tiny idea that there might be hope for me, and that’s all; just enough hope to motivate me to take action.

On my way home I stopped at the Quickie Mart for a pack of cigarettes.  A long time acquaintance of mine works at that store.  The gay community here is small.  The drug addicted or abusing gay community is even smaller.  Tim was never the addict I was, but he has visited some of the same places, knows some, if not all, of the same faces I know.

“Paul died,” he said, by way of greeting.

“You’re kidding,” I replied, not asking how.  It could have been so many things, all of them tragic.

“It’s not like it’s any real loss.  He was a horrible person,” Tim added.

Two years ago I was a horrible person.  The only difference between Paul and me was inexplicable appearance of hope.