AA

You are currently browsing articles tagged AA.

Some must die that others may live.

July 10, 2011 in Death by Chris | No comments

“Some must die so that others may live” – a phrase meaning it is good that some people drink themselves to death, as this helps scare the shit out of those considering leaving AA.

I’ve never had so many people in my life die as I have had since I came to AA, not counting the late 80s and early 90s when I lived in West Hollywood.  In both cases it is a particular class of people that died; first the gays and now the alcoholics and addicts.  One of the byproducts of having lived through the plague in a place like WeHo is that I became numb.  That was also when I started using drugs.  I checked out mentally and I checked out emotionally and I believe it was out of necessity.  If not necessity, it was at least to find a way to survive. Read the rest of this entry »

when suddenly, and without any warning,

October 11, 2008 in Perseverance, Willingness by Chris | 7 comments

it started to snow.

Snow!

I’m not freaking kidding. And not just a little snow, either. The forecast was for a little rain.  A 40% chance of rain. And we got snow.

It was the earliest snowfall ever recorded here, beating the previous record by two days and 1/2 an inch, and while it has melted off the streets now, my lawn is still holding on to a tattered blanket of the stuff.  Now, of course, it didn’t actually start to snow until three full minutes after I got on my scooter to go home from work. I was smart enough to wear a rubber jacket to work, but I didn’t put the mask on my helmet and I don’t own a pair of gloves, so by the time I got home from work my face was completely red, my hands completely frozen, and I was soaking wet from the waist down. Read the rest of this entry »

The Sunday Spiritual Meeting

September 1, 2008 in Service by Chris | 1 comment

I didn’t have to work yesterday and I got up pretty early with the intention of getting a bunch of chores done. By 10 o’clock I realized that unless I got up and left the house for awhile that nothing was going to get done, There is a Sunday morning meeting here that is very popular and that, being like I am, I haven’t attended in many months, so I thought maybe I’d go.  I got on my scooter at a quarter to 11 and headed over to the Sunday Spiritual Meeting, only to find that it started at 10. Read the rest of this entry »

I Feel So Sleezy

June 29, 2008 in Living in Recovery by Chris | 6 comments

Remember these? High school gym shorts from the 1980′s. Wow. At the time I thought they were pretty hot, at least on certain guys. You had to have pretty great legs to pul[ this look off, but there were always a couple of guys in gym class who fit the bill. I think the poly-knit ones we had in high school were actually a bit tighter, perhaps a bit shorter which was only made possible because the slits up the side were not quite as high. The closet of my youth was filled with the hope of a ‘costume failure’.

No one would ever dream of wearing these today, except perhaps on Halloween. High school gym shorts today are perforated nylon, loose, and come to the mid-thigh. Equally hot, on the right guy of course, if you ask me, but I’ve always thought that men are the most beautiful creatures. Read the rest of this entry »

I don’t want to make this about religion . . .

May 5, 2008 in Living in Recovery by Chris | 12 comments

Tommy: Have you accepted Jesus Christ as your personal Lord and Saviour?
Hedwig: No, but I… I love his work.

John Cameron Mitchell, Hedwig and the Angry Inch

I don’t want to make this about religion because it isn’t about religion. It’s about the same thing everything else here is about. Me. It’s what it was like, what happened (and what’s happening), and what it’s like now. For me. It is my experience, my strength and my hope. It is also a place where I can sit down, slow down, cool down and give the loving Creator of my own understanding room to go to work. It is part inventory, part meditation, all reaching out.

My story is not unique by any stretch. Young men from my home town have gone down similar, almost identical paths. I don’t know all the specifics of Troy’s story but I know he grew up in a similar environment, one fought with pressure to conform to the dominant culture. I can only hope that there was more tollerance in 2006 than in the 70′s and 80′s, when I was his age. In my own case, by the time I was 14 years old I had developed a concrete intellectual bias against every system of thinking which claimed to be the only truth. I carried that bias into every part of my life, judging things which I had never examined.

In my own experience, gaining hope in the second step that a “Power greater than myself” could restore me to sanity, and then gaining enough faith to turn my will and life over to the care of that power, as I understood it, was only possible because the message was delivered to me in a way that I could hear. The men who guided me left the specifics of their own conception of a Higher Power at the door, and instead shared what happened that made them willing to seek that relationship and what that relationship had done for them. At no point did they ever tell me that they had the one truth. They carried the message by strictly adhering to the instructions on page 93 of the book Alcoholics Anonymous which says, among other things, that I could choose any conception of a Higher Power I liked, as long as it made sense to me, and that there was no use arousing any prejudice I may have against theological terms. I was willing to believe in something, so long as you didn’t tell me what to believe.

The meetings I attend most regularly have now been completely invaded by a group of not very Christlike Jesus people who call on themselves to share at meeting level to watch out in the rooms of AA. “There are forces of darkness in these rooms that are marking Christians and taking them out of here.” If you point out to them that there is a way we do things in AA and a reason that we do it they just say, “Then we’ll disagree.” If you call attention to the fact that when they share the way they share, that newcomers and young people get up and leave the meeting, visibly upset; that the way they are sharing does not help to carry the message, they say that they are merely sharing the truth as they understand it.

The program, however, has nothing to do with looking at them, with judging them, and everything to do with looking at me. What part of me is so prideful that I need to be ‘right’ on this point? What within me makes me refuse to accept these people as they are? What is the origin of the blind spot in my faith that makes me think that as a group, the 2nd Tradition won’t see us through this or that the people being driven from the rooms won’t find their way back when the time is right? What am I so afraid of that I cannot seem to find it within myself to treat these people with the same pity, patience and tolerance with which I treat people who can’t stay sober or people to only identify as addicts or people who talk about taking steps they have never taken. Why do I only see that they are not helping the program rather than seeing that the program could help them?

In my 5th step my sponsor pointed out that he though I had a lot more work to do in the area of God and religion. I actually blew him off. “No. Really. I’m so completely OK with all that,” I told him.

No. Really I’m not.

Grand Illusion

March 23, 2008 in Hope by Chris | 11 comments

swc-index2.jpgThere is a light at the end of the tunnel.
The light is not an illusion.
The tunnel is.
-unknown

I noticed this sign above the door of a meeting I occasionally go to and it just struck me. It seemed profound enough, but it wasn’t till I woke up this morning and read Sweet Pea’s post where she said, “secrets. they thrive in the darkest recesses of my mind and heart,” that I began to see the truth in the idea that the tunnel is an illusion.

I don’t know very many people, even the most spiritual or religious people, who come into the rooms of recovery, that have something resembling a useful and healthy relationship with a power greater than themselves that they understand to be infinite love. That was definitely true for me. I came in with a pretty traditional Judeo-Christian understanding of the Celestial Father, the one I hear some people call the ‘bearded, bean counting, lightning bolt throwing bastard in the sky’. Sure, He was loving and merciful to those who groveled for his forgiveness, but there were things he wouldn’t forgive and I was pretty sure it was me – radical faggot political activist drug addicted rebel that I am. In the difference I perceived between me and everything else I perceived darkness and isolation.

Though it was never said in so many words, I was under the impression that God didn’t like little boys who wanted to grow up to be Mahalia Jackson and to bury their face in Parker Stevenson’s arm pit, which is a shame, really. People like me especially need God. In a world where getting love and acceptance from the closest members of your family is problematic, God can mean the difference between life and death. As a youngster I didn’t understand that my church turning it’s back on me was not the same as God turning His back on me and I responded in kind. I turned my back on God and began to move farther into the illusion of separateness from All that Is.

I realize now that experiencing this separation is part of the human condition; that “our stories align at the core, if not in the sorry details.” The book talks about alcoholics and addicts being extreme examples of living according to this illusion. It talks about self-will run riot, of problems being of our own making and arising in our selves, of a spiritual malady that centers in our minds. It also suggests that people like me reaching out for help need to choose between God being everything or nothing; at a certain point we have to accept spiritual help if we are to recover.

Many forms of spiritual instruction and many forms of religion inform my journey, one of them recently being A Course in Miracles. I am attracted to the course largely because at it’s core it talks about what we talk about in AA and in similar, almost identical, terms. It talks about God being everything. It says that what blocks us from God is a barrier created out of our own mind. It says “a cloud does not put out the sun.”

The tunnel is an illusion.

The light is not.

The tunnel is made out of me. “Above everything, we alcoholics must be rid of this selfishness. We must, or it kill us!”

I found God in AA. I found God when I was finally “beaten into a state of reasonableness”; when I finally got still enough to listen. And that is where I continue to find Him; in the quiet space in between the demands of living a “productive” life in the material world. Demands on my time have increased and finding, or setting aside, enough time to get still has been challenging recently. I experience it as anxiety, frustration, sadness. I experience it as separation; as the tunnel. I wonder what people want from me and I wonder how my needs will be met. I forget that the real question is “what does God expect from me?”

As you already know, I am not particularly Christian. The God I have come to know through AA is described to me most perfectly in Hindu tradition as “the unchanging, infinite, immanent, and transcendent reality which is the Divine Ground of all matter, energy, time, space, being, and everything beyond in this Universe.” But the symbolism of Easter is not lost on me. It really is the sacrifice of self that leads to eternal life, freedom from bondage, salvation and enlightenment.

Happy Easter, friends.

Choosing the Difficult

February 25, 2008 in Courage, Faith by Chris | 9 comments

This post was originally published Feb. 10, 2008 and was taken down pending adjudication of another case. Now that has been done and I am restoring the post.

The Man With the StarTo choose what is difficult all one’s days, as if it were easy, that is faith.
W. H. Auden

They tell me I seemed relaxed; that I did not seem bothered or distressed by the situation. On some level they are right. The outcome was in God’s hands. I was there to play the role He meant for me to play. I was meant to be accountable. Accountable is not a role I have played often. In fact, as I was having breakfast with my father yesterday morning I observed that this is probably the first thing in my life that I have taken accountability for without being forced by some external power. Going to court to account for my probation violation was all mine. Accountability – justice – is, after all, the essence of the 9th step and I did say that I am willing to go to any length for victory over addiction.

My violation was significant. They call it absconding from supervision. Of all possible violations this is the one they frown on most. They like those of us who are supervised to stay supervised. Most people who abscond from supervision compound the problem by also picking up new charges against them. Most people who abscond from supervision continue living the way they lived before. Most people who violate their probation and are sent to prison will tell you that the reason they are in prison is “they violated me”.

After the prosecution argued for imposition of the sentence underlying the original criminal conviction for which I am on probation, after my attorney argued on my behalf and after I addressed the court, the judge said very frankly that when he walked in to the courtroom he had intended to impose my sentence.

If anything, anything at all, had been any different, I would be in prison today. If I had not been sober for over a year. If I had been charged with any new crimes. If I hadn’t completed an in-patient treatment program. If I didn’t have the support of friends and family demonstrated by over a dozen letters and the presence in the courtroom of 8 people – 8 people! who took time off work to show that I matter to them (my sponsor, my sponsor’s sponsor, my roommate, a former employer, 2 friends, my aunt and most importantly my dad, who came up from Las Vegas to support me). If I hadn’t been able to demonstrate my commitment to 12 step recovery with attendance cards. If I didn’t have a job (even at McDonald’s). If when I posted bond to get out of jail I had done anything besides go directly to an AA meeting. If I hadn’t taken the 12 steps and if I hadn’t placed this at the top of my 9th step amends work. If I hadn’t been the one to initiate the process. . . if any one of these things had been different -and if I had anything less than a great attorney who believes in me- I would be in prison today.

I shouldn’t be surprised to receive a 9th step promise while making a 9th step amends, but I am dumbfounded by the degree to which God has been taking care of me all year. On my own I am not smart enough to conceive of such a perfect storm of good fortune. The only thing I did -the only thing- was that I became willing to place my trust and reliance upon God, a God of my own understanding, an infinite and loving God of all possibilities and to humbly do as I believe that God would have me do, and God has done for me what I could never do for myself.

Shoulder to Shoulder

February 1, 2008 in Living in Recovery by Chris | 4 comments

Shoulder to Shoulder at the Texaco Station - 1930's“You will be bound to them with new and wonderful ties, for you will escape disaster together and you will commence shoulder to shoulder your common journey. Then you will know what it means to give of yourself that others may survive and rediscover life.”
Alcoholics Anonymous, page 152-3

It is very strange to suddenly have a number of sponsees and a couple more men I’m working with in the absence of a sponsor they feel they can work with though we haven’t formalized the relationship in any sort of way. First there was Joe who remains the most willing and wonderful spirit around me. I am seriously blessed to have had such a wonderful experience right out of the gate. Joe was followed in a couple of months by Justin, and two weeks later, Jake. I’ve also taken an interest in Jason but don’t sponsor him because my motivations are not exactly pure. Miss Nikki says the best way to get over crushing on someone is to sponsor them but I don’t want to take any chances. I also don’t want to get over the crush right away, even though respect and good taste require that it remain entirely concealed. I wonder if there isn’t something narcissistic about my attraction the the truly broken ones. And Tyler, sponsored by the IFX and feeling like he’s not getting what he needs there. I have to bite my tongue. It is certainly not my place to judge what is and isn’t good sponsorship for any particular alcoholic. I only know what has been working for me. I’ve learned a couple of lessons pretty quickly about doing this, though. Perhaps the most important, especially in light of the fact that there are suddenly so many requests for my help, is that for my own sanity and wellbeing I should only match their willingness. I don’t help anyone by caring more about their recovery than they do. We commence the journey ‘shoulder to shoulder’. We don’t commence dragging them, kicking and screaming though perhaps, sometimes, I’d like to.

I have also been thinking about sponsorship recently in terms of my experience choosing one. I got sober on January 15th and I didn’t get a sponsor until April sometime. First there was the time in the halfway house while I waited to go to treatment. Then the two rounds of treatment; the one I escaped from and the one that was so incredible as well as a couple of weeks in between. When I got home I almost immediately asked this big dyke to temp sponsor me while I looked for a real sponsor. That lasted 10 minutes because I ran into my old friend John W. at the very next meeting I went to. And then in late July John got drunk.

By then I had been around enough to have met a few people and heard their stories. Even though he intimidated the hell out of me and couldn’t have been a more different man than I, I asked him to sponsor me — I “capitualted entirely” when I “heard the story of some man whose experience closely tallied with” my own (p. 160).

I have reached out for help and reached out to help others and the experience amazes me. If you are reading this you know I reach out in secondary ways as well and I’m adding another project to that avenue. My friend Gary W., who has extensive experience in this field, is producing a multi-media theater piece for the Idaho Meth Project; something to take into schools across the state. He has spent time interviewing a number of us speed-freaks and he’s read most of what I’ve written here and on MethedUp (I need to renew the domain registration – it is down at the moment) and he has decided that my character gets to be the comic relief; the one you can’t help but love in spite of himself. For dramatic impact, because breaking a heart is a great way to drive a point home, he’s going to kill me. I’m delighted. I’ve always wanted to be martyred for show business. To help others recover or to never start I will die for them.

Taken together this is what I pray for. Every day.

God, let me be an instrument of your will,
a demonstration of your power,
a vessel of your grace and
a bearer your love
in the lives of everyone I touch today. Amen.

Two guys in front of Tiger Texico Gas Station, originally uploaded by postscriptedlove.

« Older entries

get userping