It's A Day Or Two More

30 minutes...30 days...30 years - actually, it’s a day or two more but let’s not split hairs. If anyone had suggested to me back in 1991 that I’d still be a (fairly!) regular AA attendee today they would have received a very surprised look. If there is such a thing, I was your fairly typical alcoholic - to the outside world someone who liked a drink and sometimes overdid it a bit but managed to function ‘normally’; to my family and close friends someone they frequently did not want to be with - self-centred, selfish, often ill-tempered and more often, of an evening, simply slumped in a chair interested only in what was in my glass and how I could avoid any distraction from my then primary purpose of drinking; to myself, outwardly confident but inside a very frightened and insecure middle-aged man scared to death by the realisation that drinking was ruining my life but not knowing how to stop. That was the really scary bit. 

Although still convinced I could stop if I absolutely had to, there was a little voice at the back of my brain saying “No you can’t”. It was getting louder and in my rational moments, I knew what it really meant was “You have to give up alcohol”. Alcohol was my crutch, my soulmate, my refuge of last resort - how could I possibly give it up and, more to the point, how could I possibly live without it? They say it is a simple Programme for complicated people and boy, did I make it complicated. No local AA meeting for me, sneaking in the back door of a church hall looking over my shoulder in case I was recognised, even though I had friends I respected who went and somehow drank no more. 

No - I wasn’t an alcoholic, simply someone who occasionally drank a bit too much. To this day I don’t know how sense got through the fog and I realised that I had reached my personal ‘rock bottom’ but I still needed the discipline of a mental hospital (politely, nowadays, ‘treatment centre’) to put me on the right track. It’s a pretty simple one really, once you accept the reality of what has gone before and start to take some responsibility for the future. The message is don’t take the first drink and keep coming to meetings, but the real crux is the mental bit - get your head round the fact that you cannot do it on your own, that you can with a combination of your own efforts and the help of others and that those others are mostly to be found in the Fellowship of AA - and it all suddenly falls into place. Once it does, and over time, something else I would not have believed develops. 

Even if there was a silver bullet that allowed me to use alcohol the way my non-alcoholic friends do, I don’t believe I’d use it. Today there is no need to clench teeth and fists to resist the pull of alcohol - it simply is not part of my life. I don’t mind having it around me or others drinking in my company but it’s not for me. There is plenty of living proof around and I’m a small piece of it - thirty years ago the odds were that I would be a statistic by now. Today there is more than a fair chance that I will go into my box sober. 

Anon
Nairn