Step by Step
Wednesday, Dec. 11, 2013
"For most normal folks, drinking means conviviality, companionship and colorful imagination. It means release from care, boredom and worry. It is joyous intimacy with friends and a feeling that life is good. But not so with us in those last days of heavy drinking. The old pleasures were gone. They were but memories. Never could we recapture the great moments of the past. There was an insistent yearning to enjoy life as we once did and a heartbreaking obsession that some new miracle of control would enable us to do it. There was always one more attempt - and one more failure." - Alcoholics Anonymous, 3rd Edition, 1976, Ch 11 ("A Vision for You"), p 151.
Today, if I am one of those who started drinking to deal with emotions and people I could not handle, I must ask if this first narrative even applies to me. Did I ever find "release from care, boredom and worry" or a "joyous intimacy with friends and a feeling that life is good?" I did not. In the beginning, alcohol was never a social luxury for me; instead, it was a way to oblivion so that I didn't have to deal with what I could not or did not want to face. "...(T)he great moments of the past?" If I am to be completely honest, the worst moments overwhelmed any good ones. With that memory, then, why do I want to reclaim any moments of my drinking past? I don't. The Program gives me the ammunition to deal with and face what I once could not. I don't need alcohol now, and I don't want it. In sobriety, I'm making better memories. And our common journey continues. Step by step. - Chris M., 2013
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