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I saw a very funny meme on an Instagram account named Alanoneofyourfuckingbusiness. (Great name for a social media account, by the way!). Here’s a LINK.
It’s two cartoon photos stacked on top of each other.
In one picture, a cartoon guy is standing in front of a crowd and asking, “Who wants serenity?” Everybody raises their hand.
In the second photo, the same guy says to the same crowd, “Who wants to work the steps?” Nobody raises their hand.
I sooooooo understand this. I absolutely want serenity. Do I want to pay the price that it takes to achieve? No, not really. As it was with drugs and alcohol, I want a quick fix, and I don’t want to pay anything at all.
And when I say “pay the price” it costs for serenity, what I mean is that I work the steps. That I go to meetings every week. That I have a sponsor and I sponsor people. That I read basic recovery literature books at least once a year.
If that all sounds pretty reasonable as the cost of serenity, it is. I have done all of those things for pretty much my entire recovery. But I also have some experience with what I would call the recovery drive-through window. That’s a version of sobriety where I don’t work the steps for a year, sometimes longer. Or, I had one stretch where I did not have a sponsor for a few months. Or, I have a span of about five years where I didn’t go to meetings where we read sober literature, which meant I didn’t read some of the key guidelines of the program for a longgg period of time.
Even this year, I was talking to a guy who mentioned he was sponsoring a bunch of people, and he asked me how many people I was working with, and I said, “One.”
He immediately said, “Dude, that’s not good enough. You have a lot to offer as a sponsor. You gotta get your hand up at more meetings and offer to work with others.” He was right.
And when it comes to the steps, I have gone through the steps a few times formally and a few times informally. I’ve also been working the steps with sponsees. That meme indicates that the path to serenity is through the steps, and I think that’s true. I have found the steps to be an essential in jumping up a few levels in recovery.
As with most things in recovery, though, I think there are people who probably did the steps once when they got sober and then just did spot-checks later on. Or maybe they did the steps themselves once, then worked the steps with sponsees after that. There are so many different ways to get sober and stay sober.
But maybe it’s time to kick the tires on me going through them again. It’s an interesting question that I don’t think the founders of 12-step recovery directly answered, which is, How many times do I have to do the steps? I definitely don’t think it’s like a high school diploma, where you do it once and you are done. I think the answer is that the steps—for me—are tools to use all the time, not once every 10 years. I have found tremendous value over the years in doing micro-stepping, like where I will work a strong fourth and fifth step for a week, or focus in on character defects by reading Drop the Rock with other sober people. I’ve definitely gotten a lot out of that.
So I guess the bottom line is, there might be a way to serenity that isn’t a direct line through doing the steps over and over again. I’m not really sure I want to wander around the woods looking for it, though. I’d rather take the straightest path possible… which sure seems like 12 steps.
This newsletter is a place of joy and laughter about the deadly serious business of sobriety. So, as I will often do, let me close with a joke:
“Now that I’m sober, I no longer wake up in the morning, roll over and introduce myself.”
(Credit: AA Grapevine, June 2002, Anonymous)
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