I Was Heard
FOR as long as I can remember I never quite felt like I belonged. At home, at school, among friends, everywhere I went there was this nagging sense that everyone else had been handed a manual for living that somehow never arrived for me. I filled that emptiness any way I could – food, fantasy, keeping busy, anything to quieten the noise inside. Looking back, I can see I was searching for something I couldn’t name. Some people call it a god-shaped void; for me, that’s exactly what it felt like. Then I found alcohol, and it was like I’d arrived. For the first time in my life, the world made sense. The anxiety lifted, the self-consciousness dissolved, and I felt, finally, briefly, like myself. I noticed quite early that I drank differently to other people. They could take it or leave it. I could only take it, but I pushed that thought aside and got on with it.
For years I managed to keep things together. I was, if such a thing exists, a functioning alcoholic. From the outside, life looked perfectly respectable, but here is what I know now. I took a drink, and then the drink took me. Slowly, then all at once, everything that mattered began to hollow out from the inside. It wasn’t the obvious wreckage that finally broke me. It was the spiritual bankruptcy. The realisation that I had spent years as a master manipulator, and that the person I had manipulated most successfully was myself. I reached the point where I couldn’t live with alcohol, and I couldn’t imagine living without it. I felt completely trapped, and that is where my story turned. I didn’t walk into a meeting; I picked up the phone and called the AA helpline. It was the first honest thing I had done in longer than I could remember. I had simply run out of ways to fool myself.
What happened next is what happens when one alcoholic talks to another. I was heard, I was understood, and for the first time, I was pointed towards a way out. That was the beginning. Since then, I have worked the Steps, found a sponsor, and given service wherever I can. I have sat in Rooms with people who share my illness and discovered that the thing I spent my whole life searching for, that sense of belonging, of being enough, was there all along, waiting for me in those Rooms. My life today is beyond anything I could have imagined when I made that phone call. I have a freedom I never knew was possible. I once believed that giving up alcohol meant giving up everything. What I discovered is the opposite. I gave up one thing, and in return I gained everything. If you are still suffering, please know this. It gets better. Pick up the phone.
PHIL, Wivelsfield