When the Hard Part Came
Happiness is a daily choice
I was a teenage alcoholic. I should have known that something was different about me. At the age of six or seven, when all the other kids were playing house and arguing over who wanted to be mom or dad, I always wanted to be drunk. To this day, I have never seen either of my parents drunk, so I have no idea where I got the idea that being drunk meant being happy. It was just always with me.
By the age of fourteen, I knew that alcohol wasn't working any more so I added any substance I could to make the alcohol work better. By seventeen, I was lying half dead in a hospital bed from a suicide attempt. I had been trying to commit suicide since the age of twelve rather than live the way I did, and the doctors told me that this time I had almost gotten it right. Ten more minutes is all that I would have needed. They also told me, and my parents, that I had a problem with alcohol.
I entered AA without ever having a legal drink. I was seventeen years and three weeks old and had already graduated to being a full-blown, desperate alcoholic.
I was always really good at learning. So, I began to work the program . . . sort of. My first thoughts were, Yeah, I know I'm a drunk, but I'll quit later when I'm old, like twenty-five. A few months later, a doctor told me that he didn't think I would make eighteen at the rate I was going, never mind making twenty-five. So, in typical alcoholic fashion, I set out to prove him wrong. I toasted him with diet cola on my eighteenth birthday.
I started working this program with the same fierceness that I had set my mind to drinking. People in my group said it would work best that way and they were right. I got a sponsor, made and served coffee, cleaned ashtrays, spoke when asked, and listened to everyone. I showed up at my sponsor's house day and night, and she always let me in. I don't think she knew firsthand about the peer pressure that you face when you stop drinking with your high school classmates and still have to face them every day, but she took me seriously.
She was there for every difficult time in my life. When my home burned down, she had the grace to tell me that I had not awakened her when I called at 3:00 A.M. She held me as I grieved many tragedies, took me on Twelfth-Step calls with her, and to the central office to answer phones. She also led me and walked with me through the Steps twice per year. This is how the first sixteen years of my sobriety went.
Then the hard part came.
I thought that if I got through the first ten years, nothing could faze me. I was sure of it after fifteen years. How was I to know that life wouldn't just stop happening because I was sober?
I was laid flat with an illness that disabled me. It affected my speech, balance, and strength, and caused fatigue. I started walking with aids and a brace, and used a wheelchair for long distances. I needed help with almost everything. It was then that the insidiousness of alcoholic thinking began to take hold again. I began drowning my sorrows in self-pity: Hadn't I worked the program well? Hadn't I offered the hand of AA anytime I could? Why was this happening to me?
I had trouble making meetings because I had lost my driver's license and my group did not have handicapped access. Someone took me to a new group. I was terrified to walk in -- who would've thought that would happen at seventeen years sober? I staggered and slurred, petrified that everyone would think that I was drunk. My Higher Power told me that this was my ego out of control. But I knew that I needed to be at that meeting, no matter what they thought of me.
I had never quit practicing prayer and meditation, and at times it seemed that was all I was capable of doing. I felt the same awful uselessness that I had felt when I first joined the program. I prayed to my Higher Power for a miracle.
"I'm only asking for a diagnosis, surely a small miracle for you," I would say. "I could be asking for a cure, you know!" I couched it in very pretty words at times, but, at one meeting on Step Three, it suddenly came to me that I was trying to coerce God. Again, the alcoholic personality in me was rearing its head, and I hadn't even been consciously aware of it. I had not been asking for God's will for me, but trying to make him come to mine.
I immediately changed my prayer to, "Please give me the tools and the strength that I need to get through the day and best do your will." I felt a change the very moment I said the words. I was no longer going to feel useless. My Higher Power would find a way to use me, disabilities or otherwise.
I began to live the Promises again. I felt happy, joyous, and free for the first time in a very long time. Three years later, I went to the Mayo Clinic where they found a vitamin deficiency was at least part of the problem, and I received the miracle of a cure. However, I had found my healing months before when I began to ask for God's will for me instead of trying to impose mine upon him.
Through this, my Higher Power also showed me that we all have a choice of whether or not to be happy. We all decide that each day, and many times during the day. For me, as an alcoholic, it was really a hard thing to choose when I got mired in self-pity. But with practice it got easier. "Act as if, and you will become" sure worked for me in this case!
This experience also proved to me that we never graduate from this program. I only have the twenty-four hours that I'm living in. The past cannot be changed and I don't know what the future will bring. "Today" is the greatest gift that this program has given me. For more than twenty years I've had "todays" free of alcohol and full of the Promises. I need to remember to live every day like it's the only one I'll ever have, or else I fall into complacency (which my alcoholic thinking thrives on!) or self-pity about what I wish I'd done, or get lost in what I plan to do. When this happens, I miss the gift that is today, and all the chances to be useful in it.
Today, I am a grateful alcoholic in a way that I never was before. My miracle is this twenty-four hours.
C. S., Winnipeg, Manitoba
Copyright AA Grapevine, Inc. April 2006
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