Go to meetings and just don't drink?! I never thought of that!

That coffee though...

Meetings and Alcoholics Anonymous.

I have a very fraught relationship with AA meetings. It’s a tough pill for me to swallow…going to these 1-hour plus long meetings, and feeling guilt and shame if I don’t (but I’m getting over that, because if I’ve learned one thing, meetings alone aren’t going to keep me sober).. “Don’t drink…just for today” is a common line of encouragement when you dip into what we call “the rooms” of AA. Getting clean and sober is a trip unto itself…maybe akin to some sort of chemical, but not one of the feel-good ones.

In treatment, that which semi-worked for so long is always ripped away; the chemistry and the balancing and the titrating with various substances that I relied on for so long for a spiritual crutch, a crutch that was not exactly sustainable, but was effective and dependent is now viewed like I am yielding a very dangerous weapon. And then I’m told that trusty chemical concoction can only be replaced with AA meetings and stepwork. Excuse me? Come again? These, in my mind (meetings vs substances), are not ripped from the same cloth. In fact, one is a fleece blanket and the other is a paper bag (I’ll let the reader choose which one goes with which). You’ve effectively parachuted me into the middle of the desert without a solution of equal strength. I did the php’s, the iop’s, the detox’s, the 28 day residential stays. I have made trigger lists until it became so wrote and mundane that I figured after one particularly exhaustive trigger list I could put down just one trigger that would encompass and supersede all other triggers, and that trigger would be…drum roll please… waking up every morning with untreated alcoholism. Which means waking up feeling irritable, discontent (big one), and restless, and it’s also kind of like Groundhog’s Day in the sense that those emotions are always front and center on my first minutes of awakening… I wake up every day with fear…usually about the future and what is going to happen. I am not allowed to make any decisions within the first half hour of the day. That’s a rule I’ve lived by now for a minute, and it’s one I keep in my tool set.

I’ve tried to go to meetings for a long time. There was a time when I was going to sometimes two meetings a day, and the funniest thing would start to happen…I would start to get sicker, not better. If I got a 60 or 90-day chip in my pocket then I am usually not the person you want to be around that day. But the sicker part is, if I could just, you know, sneak away for a bit and use some substances I would become a sweetheart, and I really want to hear about the things you’re saying…I’m interested in what you have to tell me and it’s not a facade. It’s all produced by exogenous illicit compounds. Once you hit detox, that little parade is over and you no longer have the ability to change your demeanor on demand. You’re stuck in self, a place no addict wants to or should be. Those first sober days are a grind. They’re difficult because you’ve just fucked up, again, and the heartbreak and shame and guilt and embarrassment all pile on top of each other, suffocating you while vying for the top spot in your mind to be the one to take you out of the game again.

More on the meetings of AA…

The bad coffee, the lions clubs and church basements, the “old timers” and double digits cult members who were never alcoholic and most likely just hard drinkers where at some point in their drinking career had a situation arise that made them stop...you know like a 2nd DUI or a somestic dispute or some kind of ill health that requires a medication that doesn’t pair well with alcohol (you know,the pill bottles where it has the image of a martini glass with a line through it. Excuse me, I’ll happily consume 9 coors lights then? I don’t even have a martini glass). The simple one-liners (oh GOD the sayings and mantras - most not AA literature approved) tacked to the wall with the “one day at a time”s and “Easy does it”s. It sometimes makes me want to run away and curse God and have a shouting match with him, and proclaim “what kind of sick shit are you pulling here, God? You mean. To tell me. The only replacement or “cure” or medication I’ve seemingly been given to overcome this powerful disease of addiction you have so lovingly, skillfully even, bestowed on me, is to just switch out the substance with periodic hour-long “keep coming back and don’t drink no matter what” speeches? What kind of 3-ring sideshow circus is that?” There has to be a better solution…there must be? What scares me more than never drinking again sometimes is the implicit and strongly suggested idea that I go to meetings on a DAILY basis. “Oh you’re getting worse and not better and you’ve been going to how many meetings per week? 3?? Sounds like you need to up your meetings, sir”. I have heard this suggestion many times and typically dismiss it outright. More meetings aren’t going to save me, God surely knows that. I know that because I have done it. At best, it’s a place I go to to remember how sick and suffering I am, and maybe even a little comparing to others to make myself feel better if I’m being completely honest, and of course the old past time of silently counting and judging “salt life” t-shirts.

The 12 steps of Alcoholics Anonymous are steps I have done over and over again, ad nauseum, with little result. I am not saying the steps don’t work. They just haven’t for me yet. They say the steps are a design for living; a spiritual scaffolding to rebuild one’s life in the pursued image of a God of your own understanding. I think… and that may be the crux of my problem. AA is a self-proclaimed simple program that seems to work very well for simple people…that’s a hard judgement and judging IS one of my character defects. But I’ve seen it time and time again. It’s not just some perspective I came to my first AA meeting ever in 2010…if you’re rocking skecher shoes, my money is on you to have the steps really work for you. I’ve been down in SE Florida a while now (the rehab capital of the United States) and have seen the types of people where AA works the very first time. And more often than not, it’s working on people who tend to have never been in any kind of existential crisis…people who don’t spend days wondering about the deep mysteries of life. Why are we here? What are we supposed to do? How does electricity really work? (of course I am generalizing here but there is a kernel of hard truth lying underneath it all and in most cliches or generalizations); there’s a lack of a kind of personal and worldly perspective. Let’s just say these people who get it right off the rip don’t tend to overphilosophize or complicate their lives too much. And I am not saying that in a bad way. In fact, I am jealous of that kind of disposition and want what they have in some regards. I need to have this program crawl from my head to my heart. But I also don’t want to be captain recovery. I feel like alcoholism and addiction have defined my life too much by now. Surely there’s more dimension to me than just another person in recovery. I’ve tried different, prescribed chemical drugs to combat illicit substance issues. Some of them work…in a way, but essentially all you’ve done is castrated my only connection to ease and comfort.

Admittedly however, the price of drugs and alcohol has, over time, become prohibitively costly; not talking about money but talking about worse and worse consequences as a result of damage done. The truth is (and I’m not saying don’t go to AA, go there) Alcoholics Anonymous is not going to be the fix for me, but it will be a large part of it. I am going to have to do more, which is change as a human being. Alcoholism doesn’t only mean that a person can’t stop drinking during a binge or can’t stay stopped when they’re on the proverbial wagon. Alcoholism is about the state of mind of the individual, and yes, they are usually restless, irritable, and discontent. The drugs and alcohol are the solution to those states of mind, a side effect symptom if you will.

The fact is no one has given me a viable solution to my problem. Psychiatrists, priests, rehab counselors, Mexican shamans, all gave me some knowledge or wisdom. But I walk away from those exchanges as restless and discontent as ever.

I go to 3-4 meetings a week, and I think the main issue with me is…ready for it? I have been to too many of them over the years. Some are great and I hear what I need to hear, but most revolve around 3 ideas that the speaker tries to stitch in there, and then I can almost recite simultaneously what kind of AA jargon they’ll use and which quotes from the big book they memorized to weave into their speech for the nights big “I was WAY WORSE THAN YOU, YOU WANNA HEAR WHAT ROCK BOTTOM IS, MAN?” show.

It’s fascinating and funny to me the cult that AA is. It’s a mixer for retired blackout artists. People rub elbows and talk about their day count and laugh. There is a time for sharing at the end of the speech where you would raise your hand if you happened to want to talk or relate in response to the 40 minute speech you just heard. And I’ve seen it time and time again, where people with a small amount of clean time need to forcefully squeeze their heads through the doors of AA to proclaim how sober and happy they were this week. How much of a spiritual juggernaut they are becoming. We used to play competitive drinking games and now we’re competing to see is the most spiritual. No way you can measure that. Life is stranger than fiction.

I think what it comes down to is accepting the fact, meetings or no meetings, that life isn’t always “happy”. And that most people living in this world can navigate their feelings of doom and unease without reaching for a bottle or razor blade. I’m learning how to get there, but it’s going to take things outside of meetings to do that. I want to keep my life interesting and novel and fresh without the use of drugs.

I am thinking hour long meditations, eventually sponsoring other men, finding my spirituality and defining it for myself by whatever means necessary. And that last part in particular…

…I think I need to get weird with my recovery.