I'm a health care professional who began attending AA in February of 2022 after existential misery and shamed moved me to finally admit and seek help for my prescription pain medication abuse. 12 Step attendance was a mandatory part of my profession's formal recovery program. I'm (in general
) very willing to follow rules and earn my "good girl" title, so I threw myself into the program. My drug use/experimentation started in 2018, but I now know that my soul sickness originated LONG before that. I was familiar with AA because I have loved an alcoholic, and I knew that drug addicts were welcome at meetings. It was a good fit, and my recovery blossomed in the rooms of AA and in conversations with my sponsor. Still, I truly struggled with fully embracing the idea that ALCOHOL was a problem for me. Afterall, I hadn't been drinking alcoholically........alcohol scared me quite a bit. I had been very hurt by someone else's drinking, so I was always pretty careful about alcohol.
Nine months in, clean and sober and learning, my AV told me that there was really no good reason I couldn't drink one day. And the ONE drink that I
remember taking (I think I drank about 5 units of alcohol) resulted in me waking up approximately 5 hours later. Soul sick and miserable with defeat and disappointment.
But from that defeat dawned UNDERSTANDING of my condition. I now know that my drug use wasn't incidental. My occasional drinking wasn't a fluke. It wasn't a silly choice. It was my subconscious demanding appeasement, ease, relief in WHATEVER form. If there weren't drugs, alcohol would work. If neither were available, lord knows what kind of shenanigans I would have gotten into with shopping or sex or food or love or work.
Accepting, at long last, the discontent of my God-designed spirit, relieved me of the desire to GET OUT. To space out, sleep, run, poison myself, escape. When I pictured my spirit, I could see that it was striking, significant, beautiful, and stuck in a prison of my own construction. At that moment, I became entirely relieved of my desire to trap myself.
Defeat led me to
surrender which showed me
truth and gave me
victory.
At this point, I am ever vigilant, but entirely confident. I am delivered.
For me, as 2022 draws to a close, AA's promises are dawning:
Promise One: We are going to know a new freedom and a new happiness.
Promise Two: We will not regret the past nor wish to shut the door on it.
Promise Three: We will comprehend the word serenity.
Promise Four: We will know peace.
Promise Five: No matter how far down the scale we have gone, we will see how our experience can benefit others.
Promise Six: That feeling of uselessness and self-pity will disappear.
Promise Seven: We will lose interest in selfish things and gain interest in our fellows.
Promise Eight: Self-seeking will slip away.
Promise Nine: Our whole attitude and outlook upon life will change.
Promise Ten: Fear of people and economic insecurity will leave us.
Promise Eleven: We will intuitively know how to handle situations which used to baffle us.
Promise Twelve: We will suddenly realize that God is doing for us what we could not do for ourselves.
I am AWAKE, grateful, humbled, secure, joyful, unashamed, growing, learning, working, and loving. I am a new creation. I understand now why people celebrate a new "birthday" in recovery. Getting clean, originally, was a sacrifice for my family, my friends, and my logical brain's best interest. My new birthday marks a complete change in mindset, motivation and desire. I am clean and sober because my soul's purpose is to be, unabashedly, undiluted, me.
As the New Year dawns, I am floored by gratitude for this change. The promises can come true for all of us. We are TREASURES hiding in jars of clay. Bust out!
-TC