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Web Exclusive: A Better Life

A young writer chases his dreams into a bottle and finds his way to AA

On Monday mornings in high school I would appear in my classes haggard and disheveled. I was secretly proud of the fact that I was worse for the wear after a weekend of hard partying. I had always been good at school, and was enrolled in many honors classes. Being in honors classes meant that I was smart, and drinking meant that I was cool. Looking around at my fellow students I was sure that I was better than any of them.

Needless to say I had an incredibly large ego. I knew for sure that I had all the answers, which made it all the more painful when nothing in my life ever seemed to work out. I was crippled with self-doubt and insecurities. I couldn’t interact with girls. I disliked most of my friends and I hated myself. At school I was often a ball of rage. Drinking cured this anger, in a way. At its best, drinking allowed me to be confident and happy, bigger than myself. At its worst, drinking was all that made life bearable. Sometimes it hardly worked at doing that; often when I drank I was sad and mopey, filled with self-pity. Still, it was better than sobriety.

I began drinking when I was 14. Like many of us, I showed absolutely no ability to moderate my drinking from my very first drunk. I progressed very quickly from those few beers to, at the age of 16, drinking vodka every day, throughout the day. I kept a small flask in my leather jacket. In hindsight, I have a hard time recalling where all of that vodka came from. All that mattered was that it was there. To keep my flask full, I begged, snuck and stole.

I commonly passed out after I had been drinking. I had many stories of waking up in absurd places or situations, and I fashioned these experiences into elaborate stories I used to entertain my drinking buddies. They were hilarious, so I thought, and they always seemed to be popular.

As I progressed through high school I quickly developed a pattern of getting into and out of trouble. I would get in trouble with either the police or my parents (usually both) and, just when things looked their worst, I would somehow talk my way out of any serious consequences. My parents are both non-drinkers, and they were confused by my actions. I was a skillful manipulator, always saying just the right thing and making just the right show of effort for long enough to get the folks “off my back.” In this department it helped that I was a decent student. I could always point to my grades and academic accomplishments as a sign that I didn’t have a problem.

I made it through high school and after a summer of very heavy drinking moved to Oregon for college. At college I was free to fill my life with alcoholics and alcoholics only. Within two weeks of arriving in the dorms I had found the group of friends I would remain close with for the next two and a half years. With these individuals in tow my alcoholic life truly began to seem the “only normal one.”

Everyone drank at college, it seemed. And if that weren’t enough of an excuse I was also an artist, an aspiring writer. All my heroes were alcoholics, and I was determined to follow them. I had a plan. I would be an alcoholic writer! I would meet an alcoholic girl and we would almost kill ourselves with drink. Then I would get sober, sometime in my 30s, and I would write a best seller about the experience.

Over time it began to seem like alcohol wouldn’t give me that much time. My hangovers got worse and worse, practically incapacitating me even after nights of relatively moderate drinking. While still a good student, my life seemed to collapse into school and drinking. I was either at school or thinking about school or else I was drinking or thinking about drinking. If I was having a busy week I could put off drinking until the weekends (weekends being defined as beginning on Thursday or late Wednesday), but the longer I was abstinent the harder I would have to drink when I finally started drinking. Even writing, which had been so important to me, fell by the wayside. In the months before I got sober I hardly wrote anything. I was spending incredible amounts of money on alcohol. Most of my friends were little more than drinking partners, and I wouldn’t think twice of sneaking drinks from them if I thought I could get away with it. What friends I genuinely cared for were either going to jail or descending quickly into drug addiction and death. One close friend died at the age of 20 of an overdose. While I had always known that the lifestyle I led was dangerous, I always imagined the consequences coming years later, maybe in my 40s or 50s. But here were twenty-somethings dropping, it seemed, all around me. Those stories of drunken misadventure I told could still make people laugh, but to me they just weren’t quite as funny anymore.

I had been exposed to Alcoholics Anonymous before. Once or twice in high school and then again when I was 19 and had accompanied a friend. When I was 20 a run-in with the law forced me into a court-ordered treatment program that required attendance at AA meetings. I would go, occasionally, in order to lie better about all the times I was not going. I enjoyed the meetings and the people, and more than once took a “24-hour” chip, even though I had no interest in staying sober. It was fun. People clapped for me and nice old ladies gave me hugs.

I was drinking more and more in those days. My 21st birthday arrived and finally I was able to drink without all the hassles that accompany underage drinking. I felt like I was becoming a more sophisticated drinker. I drank expensive whisky and avoided the college house parties that dominated my neighborhood on the weekends. As I neared the end of my probation, my fear of getting caught drinking grew and grew, and I was afraid to be seen drinking in public. This led to scenes like the one where I snuck away from a concert to take slugs out of a pint in the bathroom of a fast food restaurant. It became harder and harder to deny that I had a problem with alcohol.

A strange thing began to happen. When I attended meetings, I would feel drawn to the people in them. Part of me, a big part, wanted what those people had. They had quit drinking and they were happy. But there was always that other part if me that said that I wasn’t an alcoholic, that I was just a normal college student, that I would quit once I graduated or else when I started a family.

The overdose of a second friend sent me reeling. Suddenly I could see clearly the effect that drinking was having on me and those around me. I realized with absolute certainty that I wasn’t going to outgrow my drinking, that nothing, not graduation, not starting a family or writing a best selling novel, would get rid of it. I realized that unless I quit drinking nothing was going to change, that my life would stay like it was forever. I realized that I might die. I was terrified, confused and angry.

I attended an AA meeting. It was a Step study. I feel very strongly now, and did then, that it was not my idea to go to that meeting. I believe my Higher Power led me there. My mind was racing so fast that I hardly remember anything that they discussed. All I knew was that I had to ask for help. After the reading people began sharing. Every time someone finished sharing I would prepare to speak, my heart racing, and every time my tongue would catch in my throat. The meeting ended without me saying anything. I felt like a failure and I wandered outside. I thought that I had blown the chance at sobriety that my Higher Power had presented me with.

Later that night I a friend took me to the bar and even bought me a drink. A miraculous thing happened. I turned her down! I was just not drinking tonight, I told both her and myself. Somehow, at that AA meeting, I had grasped onto the concept of one-day-at-a-time abstinence from drinking. That day was almost three years ago and I have not had a drink since.

The next night I attended another meeting, the Tuesday Night Young People’s Group of Eugene, Ore. At this meeting I actually spoke and introduced myself as an alcoholic. I don’t remember much of what I said, but I do remember what happened after the meeting; I was taken aside by several men in the program. They gave me their numbers and a ride to a meeting the following night. By the third night I had a copy of the Big Book. By the end of the week I had a sponsor.

My sponsor said that getting sober was like a window of opportunity. This I could relate to. How many times had I thought it a good idea to get drunk? And how many times had I thought it a good idea to get sober? To the first question I had to answer many times, and to the second almost never. Here was sobriety, maybe the best thing I could ever achieve, and I wanted it for only the first or second time in my life. But I had talked myself out of so many things in my life. Who’s to say I wouldn’t talk myself out of this?

From listening to my sponsor, and to the people at meetings, I realized that if there was any hope for me to stay sober I would have to work the Steps. Otherwise it would be back to drinking and darkness. I jumped into the Steps with the “all the desperation of [a] drowning [man].” By two months sober I had read my Fifth Step to my sponsor, and not long after that I began making amends.

By working the Steps I was able to live, for the first time in my life free of the obsession to drink. By working a Fourth and Fifth Step I was able to leave my anger behind me. In making my amends I was able to see that while I had done bad things I was not the terrible person I had always believed I was. Today I no longer believe that I have all the answers, and I no longer feel like I am in constant opposition with reality. The pressure that used to build up within me, the pressure that only drinking could release is not a part of my days anymore. When those old feelings do come back, I have my Higher Power to fall back on. My Higher Power always helps me, when I am willing to let it. Prayer and meditation have been crucial to my recovery.

In the few years since I got sober I have graduated from college and moved across the country to attend graduate school. In my new home in New Mexico I have been involved with our state’s convention of Young People in AA. I belong to a home group, I attend meetings at a mental hospital and the local prison, and I am my district’s Grapevine rep. Moving to a new place was hard for me, but diving into service in AA kept things from being even harder.

Today I am a happy, sober, 24-year-old geologist. That is a long ways from the alcoholic writer I had planned to be by this age. In AA I have found a life better than anything I could have planned.

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