As many of you know I’m sober. I haven’t had a drink nor a drug in well over 13 years. I was one of those who, although he tried to, could never control my drinking. Once I started I never knew where I would end up. I continuously tried to balance a working productive life with a drunken mess. If I had to work then I just couldn’t drink. If I could arrange a few days away from work I was off and running on another bender. It was exhausting.
When someone offers me a drink today I kindly say thank you and ask for something non-alcoholic like a nice club soda with a twist, or glass of unsweetened ice tea. If they persist and say “come on just one” I politely reply with “Have you ever met someone who couldn’t handle their liquor? Well I’m that guy so let’s stick with something else.”
Getting here wasn’t easy. I thought my life was over and I’d never have fun again when I realized to my innermost self that I could not go on the way I was living and reached out for help. Fortunately I knew someone who didn’t drink because he’d previously had such an issue. He offered to pick me up for lunch. When he did he said that we would get to lunch, but first he had to show me how he did it and proceeded to drive me to an AA meeting. I did not want to go but went in with him as I didn’t know what else to do.
I don’t remember much about that first meeting except that I felt safe there. The people were accepting of me and friendly. They seemed to understand the pickle in which I had found myself. I know today that they did understand me as they had once been exactly where I was in that very moment. My hangover was horrendous and I’m sure I still reeked of used booze. I kept coming back to those meetings, and in fact some 13+ years later I still attend 3 meetings a week because now I want to.
There was an issue for me early on and that is the 12 steps use the word god and the literature talks about finding a higher power. God was an issue for me. I grew up in a church that told me that god would doom me to hell because of who I loved. I had left that church for I wasn’t going to stop being who I was. Then there were those nasty people with their signs on the corners and bullhorns regularly told me that god hates me and I was going to burn in hell as they preached on street corners at pride parades, comic-con and even outside of Padres baseball games.
God didn’t want me, and I sure as hell didn’t want god.
But stay in AA I did because I knew to continue drinking meant a slow agonizing death for me, or even worse it may have meant death for someone else might they meet my car being driven drunk by me at an intersection some unfortunate night. I did my 12 steps with a sponsor and a spiritual awakening I did have. However my spiritual awakening was with a power greater than myself that wasn’t that judgmental god preached by so many religions, but a great power that I could acknowledge was greater than me and I could work with.
A few years into my sobriety I had been asked to come lead a predominantly LGBTQ meeting that I had never attended. I was told to come up with a topic and share my experience on that topic. I was at a loss but figured I’d find something in our literature. Several days before that meeting I heard someone in a meeting I was attending say the words “Love is god”. I’d never heard it in that order, always the reverse. As that person continued to share my mind ran with it and I replaced the words “god”, “him” and “his” in the 12 steps that were posted on the wall in that room with the word “Love”. Suddenly my previous spiritual awakening was deepening in that moment, and was something I could only describe as out of body. While I had made it through the steps believing that I wasn’t the center of the universe and that something was greater than me, in that very moment I had a higher power I could Absofuckinglutely work with. My higher power was Love.
That would be my topic, Love and sharing Love as a higher power. I started my share at the LGBTQ meeting where I’d never been, in front of people I’d never met, by reading the 12 steps aloud just as I had re-read them in my mind that previous meeting.
1) We admitted we were powerless over alcohol – that our lives had become unmanageable.
2) Came to believe that a power greater than ourselves could restore us to sanity.
3) Made a decision to turn our will and our lives over to the care of Love as we understood Love.
4) Made a searching and fearless moral inventory of ourselves.
5) Admitted to Love, to ourselves, and to another human being the nature of our wrongs.
6) Were entirely ready to have Love remove all these defects of character.
7) Humbly asked Love to remove our shortcomings.
8) Made a list of all persons we had harmed and became willing to make amends to them all.
9) Made direct amends to such people wherever possible, except when to do so would injure them or others.
10) Continued to take personal inventory and when we were wrong promptly admitted it.
11) Sought through prayer and meditation to improve our conscious contact with Love as we understood Love, praying only for knowledge of Love’s will for us and the power to carry that out.
12) Having had a spiritual awakening as the result of these steps, we tried to carry this message to alcoholics, and to practice these principals in all our affairs.
The entire room of some 60 people including myself were in tears at the end of my reading. We were a group that find the word god divisive, as that word is often used against us. Love however was a power we could work with. Many other alcoholics have heard me share about my higher power since that day, and many have shared with me how Love has changed their lives, as Love is something they too can work with.
Today my life is beautiful, fun, fulfilling and meaningful. I’m never sick with a hangover. I also get to regularly share my experience, strength and hope with other just as that friend I reached out to did with me. Mine is a good life filled with Love. 💕
Fearsome Beard 