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I love going to recovery meetings more than ever, and I often wonder why. After all this time being sober, I thought for sure I would burn out a little. I always used to worry that I would start to do the bare minimum to stay sober, which is probably about one meeting a week. Instead, I’m at about six meetings per week and I love it.
I’ll catch myself sitting at a meeting, asking myself, “Why do I like this so much? I’m in a church basement with a bunch of drunks and drug addicts, seeing many of the same people saying the same things, reading a passage from sober literature that I have read 50 times already, saying prayers that I sometimes don’t like very much.”
One potential answer hit me the other day. We read from the Big Book and got to the passage where it describes reaching your alcoholic bottom as feeling “pitiful and incomprehensible demoralization.” That might be my favorite phrase in all of sobriety. I think it perfectly summarizes what it’s like during the worst days of active addiction—pitiful and incomprehensible demoralization. What a strong set of words.
What hit me the other day, though, is how that phrase comes to life for me with other alcoholics. Think about what the word “incomprehensible” means. It means you cannot comprehend what I went through! It is incomprehensible to anybody else.
But it IS comprehensible to us. I don’t know all of your story, and it is probably very different than mine. But I know you, somehow. I’ve met people who made it through extremely difficult circumstances to get to the rooms of recovery, stuff that I have no experience with. And yet… on some level, when you were at the pitiful and incomprehensible demoralization stage of your life, I get it. I was there, too.
The more I thought about it, the more brilliant that phrase is, because it is about a feeling, not details. As our program often says, recovery is more about the exact nature than exact details. I don’t need to have ever lived where you lived, be the same gender as you, have the same number of arrests or bankruptcies or car accidents as you. I probably know what it felt like for you, and you probably know what it felt like for me. What a beautiful shared human experience.
Sorry, this is probably one of my least funny entries. But hey, sometimes I can be serious!
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:
An alcoholic’s idea of financial planning is to use credit cards to pay off his credit cards. When he runs out of credit cards, that's called a geographic.
(Credit: Grapevine, June 2008, by Richard M. of Golden, Colorado)
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