to the side of the regular crowd stood a handful of guys from BNO. I had never been so happy to see anyone from a meeting. I walked up to them. They stared blankly at me, sizing me up.
“I was at BNO on Tuesday,” I yelled into a guy's ear.
“How much time you got?” he yelled back.
“Six weeks.”
“First six months are the hardest,” he said. “Keep coming back.”
Somewhere in all that mess of fast music and BO I figured it out. These weren't Straight Edgers; these were Clean and Sober Punx. I'd jumped myself into a gang by abusing drugs and alcohol for fifteen years. I gave up my Loner colors, and let myself stand with others.
Get the Fuck Up
We've been there and come back. When you fall in the pit, people are supposed to help you up. But you have to get up on your own. We'll take your arms, but you'll have to get your legs underneath you and stand again.
My advice to you is simple: Get up. You're not going to get any better lying there like that. I know, it hurts, but you have to get up and walk it off. Get up. No one is going to help you. Get up. You have a whole life to live. Right now, you're stuck in the quicksand of self-pity, and you're asking for a rope of acknowledgment. I know it's my metaphor, but that rope isn't going to hold. That self-pity is going to destroy any chance you have at happiness, and it will eventually spiral out and destroy your relationships and your social life.
My advice to you is simple: Get up. You're not going to get any better lying there like that.
Finding a Sponsor
This may be your most difficult task if you are an atheist in a12-Step program. Many sponsors won't put up with your atheist lifestyle; they'll likely read you a part of the Big Book, which, on the surface, seems to condemn atheism. If you read it more closely, it suggests that the road to recovery for an atheist will be more difficult.
Really, though, get a sponsor. Remember that your sponsor is only there to help you work the steps. He or she is not your best friend, your coach, your employment agent, or your therapist. Your sponsor is an equal to you. But your sponsor should be someone who's seen the program work a lot of different ways and has been through all the steps a number of times. The steps are trickier than they look initially; in fact, they're pretty vague.
Your sponsor shouldn't worry about your version of the Higher Power concept. He's not there to debate the cosmic structure with you or tell you to go to church. If your sponsor decides that he's going to give you advice about anything other than working the steps, maybe you should get another one. But be nice about it. He's only trying to help. Conversely, don't expect too much from your sponsor. Your sponsor is there for you, but it's you who has to do the actual work. This is like the rest of your recovery, as you have to take responsibility for your own actions. It's up to you to get your step work done.
Creating a Community
The 12-Step community relies upon stories for the core of its communication. They may call them “shares,” but it's the same thing. The have a beginning, middle, and end, usually with a message. Sometimes it's a long meandering methadone ramble, but usually there's a point.
Feasibly, you can work steps on your own. It's good to have the initiative to do things at your own pace. But to gain the recovery that 12 Step offers, you really need to participate in a community. This is why I strongly discourage people who want to quit using without getting involved in a program. Users usually carry a lot of pain and misery that they don't need. Isolation makes the heart grow somber. Misery loves company, especially company more miserable than itself.
The Big Book Is Just a Rule Book
Monopoly and Risk were the two best ways to spend a preteen Friday night before Nintendo invented Tecmo Bowl and killed the board game industry. There were video games before that, but the best the Atari 2600 and the Intellivision had to offer couldn't compete with the geniuses at Parker Brothers and Milton Bradley. Families everywhere had board games. But while all the games inspired long readings from the rule books as to the exact interpretations of said rules, Monopoly's rules were meant to be broken, amended, and ignored.
No two families played Monopoly the same way. According to the rule book, the Free Parking space gets you no money, when a property is landed on but not purchased it goes up for auction, and when you run out of the toy houses or hotels, that's it, you're not allowed to substitute anything for them. But these three rules seem foreign even to veteran players. The rule book seemed like vague guidelines for play.
That's the way I see recovery meetings. All of them are a little different, but they're all using the same book. Some allow no drug talk, others do. There are speaker meetings, speaker/discussion meetings, Big Book readings, and step studies. There are different types of people in each one, varying in gender, ethnicity, social class, and age. Emphasis on Higher Powers vary from meeting to meeting. If there's something that irritates you about one meeting, try another.
There are as many different types of meetings as there are bars. Just as there are many bars you would never ever go to, there are likely meetings that you will never like either. But just like your favorite bars, if you look long enough, you will find a meeting that feels like home. Once you feel that community of the meetings, you won't miss the bars so much.
My favorite part of the poetry readings I went to back in the '90s were what happened afterward. It was the best place to look if I was looking for trouble to get into later. I loved rolling into some bar with a bunch of crazy poets and tearing the place up. As morose and defeatist as many of them were in their writing, they were lots of fun when they had a few drinks in them. Getting wasted and talking about writing, bad readings we'd had, and gossiping about other writers was a blast.
The meetings have a similar dynamic. Now I get the same feeling as before when a dozen of us all meet up at some restaurant. It's great to walk into a place, say that we have twelve coming, then count them as the motorcycles pull up on the sidewalk and cars pull up with a number of riders spilling out clown-like from the seats.
What Do You Want, a Cookie?
Little victories are the ones you'll celebrate in your first few months of sobriety. You'll pay your phone bill on time. You won't have $300 ATM withdrawals that you don't remember. You'll get to work every day. But no one in the rest of the world will care. You can tell them, “Hey! I've gone a whole week without blacking out!” and they will not understand what a big deal that is. Perhaps someone will say, “What do you want, a cookie?”
In 12 Step, we often have cookies for you, in the back near the coffee. I know that's a cheap metaphor, but it works here. You can stick up your hand and share any of your successes and get legitimate applause. You can also tell other people that you are thirty-three years old and don't know how to work a washing machine, and no one will really question it. They'll help you.
The
