deflation and that licking.
Clearly, the sense of being special, of being “something,” has its dangers, its drawbacks for the alcoholic. Yet the opposite, namely, that one is to be a nothing, has little counter appeal. The individual seems faced with being a something and getting drunk, or being a nothing and getting drunk from boredom.
The apparent dilemma rests upon a false impression about the nature of nothingness as a state of mind. The ability to accept ourselves as nothing is not easily developed. It runs counter to all our desires for identity; for an apparently meaningful existence, one filled with hope and promise. To be nothing seems a form of psychological suicide. We cling to our somethingness with all the strength at our command. The thought of being a nothing is simply not acceptable. But the fact is that the person who does not learn to be as nothing cannot feel that he is but a plain, ordinary, everyday kind of person who merges with the human race—and as such is humble, lost in the crowd, and essentially anonymous. When that can happen, the individual has a lot going for him.
People with “nothing’’ on their minds can relax and go about their business quietly and with a minimum of fuss and bother. They can even enjoy life as it comes along. In AA, this is called the 24-hour program, which really signifies that the individual does not have tomorrow on his mind. He can live in the present and find his pleasure in the here and now. He is hustling nowhere. With nothing on his mind, the individual is receptive and open-minded.
The great religions are conscious of the need for nothingness if one is to attain grace. In the New Testament, Matthew (18:3) quotes Christ with these words: “Truly I say to you, unless you turn and become like children, you will never enter the kingdom of heaven. Whoever humbles himself like this child, he is the greatest in the kingdom of heaven.”
Zen teaches the release of nothingness. A famous series of pictures designed to show growth in man’s nature ends with a circle enclosed in a square. The circle depicts man in a state of nothingness; the square represents the framework of limitations man must learn to live within. In this blank state, “Nothing is easy, nothing hard,” and so Zen, too, has linked nothingness, humbleness, and grace.
Anonymity is a state of mind of great value to the individual in maintaining sobriety. While I recognize its protective function, I feel that any discussion of it would be one-sided if it failed to emphasize the fact that the maintenance of a feeling of anonymity—of a feeling “I am nothing special”—is a basic insurance of humility and so a basic safeguard against further trouble with alcohol. This kind of anonymity is truly a precious possession.
Truth
August 1973
The words “ye shall know the truth and the truth shall make you free” have echoed through time for two thousand years. Hands to ears, humanity has fled them ever since they were spoken.
If you don’t believe me, hold a discussion meeting on the subject of truth or honesty or communication, and see what happens. Unless your group is highly unusual—and you are highly determined—within minutes the discussion will bog down in the comfortable rut of cash-register honesty.
“… Seven years later, I sent that bartender a check,” someone will proudly say in concluding an anecdote.
“Not me!” another will reply. “The liquor industry got enough out of me—I’m not repaying a cent!’’
Unless the discussion is reined in sharply, it will canter lazily back to the barn without much benefit to anyone, you realize. So you suggest more emphasis on truthfulness per se, rather than fiscal responsibility. Immediately, someone will point out that truth must be used discreetly; someone else will offer, as an illustration, his anger over a truthful but harsh remark; and—presto!—you are not discussing truth anymore, but resentment.
You try once again. “But don’t you think being honest in all our dealings is important?” you ask desperately.
The clamorous response to this even awakens the drunk sleeping it off in the back row. Everyone is furious, the assumption being that you have demanded a mass orgy of public confession during which their darkest sins will be revealed for group vilification. If you are lucky, someone will bring up the Fifth Step or the anonymity Traditions before you are lynched.
I have only gradually come to view truth as the most beautiful and accessible aspect of Harmony, or It, or God. This mass fear of it would surprise me more if I had not once felt the same way. Before AA, I had a go-around with psychiatry. I frequently complained that, although I arrived at the doctor’s office with green eyes and pink cheeks, after a tearful bout with truth I left with pink eyes and green cheeks. “And for this, I’m paying you!” I would conclude furiously.
I felt then, as many of us do, that the full revelation of “the real me” could result only in total rejection by those who saw it. I remembered a film version of Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray , the story of a man who makes a pact with the devil, in return for which he lives on unchanged forever, while his shrouded portrait bears the visible ravages of time and depravity. At the conclusion of the black-and-white film, Dorian draws back the curtain and the picture of a monstrous, barely human creature is revealed in color, unbelievably horrible.
Although Dorian presumably practiced every form of evil for a long period, and I was barely thirty, I was convinced that I, too, harbored within me a Dorian Gray who, once displayed publicly, would end forever my chance for acceptance. Gradually, however, in the course of therapy, the curtain began to slip aside, until finally the truth of “the real me” was revealed. When I mustered up the courage—and it took a lot—to look fully at the self I had run from all my life, I saw, not Dorian Gray, not Ilse Koch, not even Madame Defarge, but an average American housewife! My relief was overwhelming. True, as I began to look more closely, I noticed serious flaws: I was an alcoholic; I was neurotic; I was brimful of character defects. But these were things that, in time and with help, could be dealt with. No longer did I have to run with nightmarish terror from an inner monster. I had seen the truth, and the truth had freed me to do less hiding and more seeking.
The effort to escape from truth is the father of anxiety. Consider the man who lies awake at night wondering whether his chest pains are the result of indigestion or heart trouble. If he fears going to a doctor to find out, he is carrying a burden he may not have to carry at all. Even if he finds that it is his heart, he is free to deal with reality and take precautions that may save his life. Truth has not hurt, but healed.
A world where truth does not shine is a world filled with fog and cobwebs, a gray miasma through which we run blind and lost and terrified, tripping over roots we do not see, dodging the threat of looming shapes, remaining separated from our fellows in the dripping, fear-filled darkness.
The world of truth is the world of what is, the world of the Spanish lime tree outside my window, wearing sunshine like a halo. It is the room I sit in, the sleeping kitten, the job that must be done, the pleasure to be had or planned for. It is here. It is now. It is what is. It is my world, my truth, my reality, and in it I am no longer “a stranger and afraid/In a world I never made.”
True, this world of mine contains ingredients I do not like—pain, grief, anger, fear, tragedy, But these are the things I must accept, because they are part of the totality and I cannot change them. I wasted years escaping into the unreality of alcoholism. Until I faced the truth that I could not drink, I was alone in the fog and the silence.
Before I learned to love truth, I had to learn to recognize it. Truth is not an immutable absolute, a granite peak, eternal, unmoving, hiding its head in a nimbus of clouds. Truth is a ballerina tracing arabesques in a pattern of color and music,
