An Alcoholic Walks Into A Church...

A little over two years ago now I walked into my first AA meeting. I was not sober; the meeting was held in a small church, local to my area and had around 30 people sat in a circle. I stumbled in late and personally did not want to be there but my most recent hospital trip led me to the revelation I was in fact an alcoholic. I told my family and partner when I figured it out (it was not a revelation to them) but it was suggested that I do something about it so I thought I would try AA. So, I walked in with the expectation of hearing some self-pitying drunks or some quick fix solution to a problem I had been grappling with since I was a pre-teen. I was however confronted with some brutal honesties about my illness, told to me through the story of another. Something seemed to shift and suddenly I understood that as an alcoholic, I was no longer the outsider I had always felt that I was but in fact in that church hall I was very much an insider.

But feeling that I belonged wasn’t enough to get me clean - in fact feeling ‘in’ gave me a sudden feeling of entitlement. I was entitled to be heard because I had had to listen to others (it took me a while to figure out how AA worked).

The one thing I will remember about that first meeting is the feeling of shame I felt being there - and being there drunk. Once I heard some harrowing stories from AA veterans, I almost felt I had no reason to drink because my life was easy by comparison, I was certainly struggling to understand quite how sharing worked. I vocalised that I felt I didn’t have a good enough reason to drink and it was responded to me that I was an alcoholic and I was sick and that was why I drank. It suddenly became clear why there was no disgust in this room at my drunken condition, they didn’t just know my story - they lived it, they knew the feeling of picking up a drink two minutes after promising yourself never again.

It took me around a month in the meetings and one final hospitalisation to eventually get sober, and about another six months of hard work, service and working the Steps to feel sober. That is something I work at on a daily basis to have a reprieve from my life-threatening illness. So, the punch line to the joke ‘An alcoholic walks into a church…’ is - they get sober. It works, it really does.

MEGAN, Woking