Page 17. Big Book of Alcoholics Anonymous. Original copyright 1939.
The part that I highlighted is simply [and stunningly] beautiful. This roughly 80-year-old book is often regarded much in the same way the Bible is, which is truly amazing. Moreover, even though Big Blue is basically a done-deal, it will never cease to astound me how many awesome & clever poetic lines that I still continue to discover today. When we attend AA meetings these days, we often will discuss ways to circumvent falling out of the program. However, it’s also very important to remember not to stray away from our fellow AA brothers & sisters, too. I think I, myself, have been doing a better job of networking more during meetings lately, thus enabling me to make strong connections with fellow AA members. I know internally that I NEED to do that because we ALL need each other, one time or another in our lives. I can clearly think of times in the last few years when this sentiment rang true for me. I needed somebody’s shoulder to cry on. I was struggling, and all I wanted was a living, breathing human being beside me, willing to listen, willing to maybe hold my hand, offer his or her shoulder, and just let me ball my eyes out. Per contra, considering I was essentially detached from humanity for those couple of years before 2014, I of course had absolutely no moral support.
I had no friends when I was using drugs. Well, at the time, I told myself that I had really close friends. Of course, they were definitely not real friends — they were plastic, fair-weather “friends.” When it became excessively difficult for me to scam my parents out of money, which meant I had no money myself since I was certainly jobless, nobody wanted anything to do with me. And, when I went away for a couple of days to detox, a lot of people actually thought that I’d joined forces with the P.D, naturally! Since I wasn’t seen for several days, that just had to have been the explanation for my real world absence, right!? Well, after I got out of the hospital, I actually did try to use again, since those first few days were so rocky and the most difficult. I learned that a few of those “friends” thought that I was an informer when I showed up at one of their houses looking for stuff. They wouldn’t hook me up, and wouldn’t tell me why, but they did drop hints. I never used, and my sobriety continued.
I should have gone to a meeting, though. Now that I think about it, that evening, I should have attended a meeting in the area, since I was not sure what to do with my time. Moreover, I should have hooked up with a viable sponsor right then and there and gotten to work. It took me a little while to get to work in that department because I was lacking motivation. Now that I think about it, though, I really should have used that evening as the kick in the a*$ that I subconsciously needed.
We all need to join forces. One final quick story: A good friend and former golf buddy of my father’s, and I don’t mean to come off like my dad’s some golf-playing rich dude, he is absolutely not rich! He just loves golf! Well, one of his friends from his annual golf league was an alcoholic in recovery. He’d had years and years of sobriety thankfully, so I was told. Well, the next part in the story is that the holidays of this past year came and, naturally, as we all well know, life started getting extremely difficult for his friend mentally; we’ll call him Mike. Mike started drinking; it’s set off his craving, and that was followed by a real bender, one night before New Year’s. He got into a terrible fight with his wife; she was so mad and frustrated with Mike for not only drinking again, but for drinking so much, and apparently being so belligerent, as well. She kicked him out of the house that evening. If anyone reading this lives in the Northeast U.S, and you remember what the weather was like those few nights…it was beyond frigid out, and I can remember it was also windy, too. Completely intoxicated, Mike decided to sleep in his truck since he couldn’t go back into his house to sleep. Well, it was so cold out that he never made it to morning and he froze to death. I absolutely was shocked when my parents told me the story. This is so unbelievably tragic. I feel so bad. It was what happened to Mike that really made me think, we all need to have multiple people within the program that we can fall back on from time to time. We need to maintain strong relationships with each other. I think we would all be happier and better off in the long run. I am so glad that I now have a home group that is close to where I live. My next goal is to GET more phone numbers, and actually to DIAL instead of FILE!!
Calling All Addicts 