Reverse
“Recovering from alcoholism requires much more than an abstinence from alcohol. It needs a complete shift from how I was living to where I needed to live.”
My name is Bill and I’m an alcoholic. Not everything in an alcoholic’s life is detrimental, not every day was bad, not all of my actions were catastrophic. Yes, I drank too much, I partied a little too hard at times and I even said a lot of unsavoury things. But then I overdid pretty well everything in my life. This is not a justification, it’s just the truth. The pattern of my drinking very much resembled the pattern of my life. It was an all or nothing existence. It was either exceedingly fast or I had come to a full stop. I either drank to oblivion or I didn’t touch a drop.
Recovering from alcoholism requires much more than an abstinence from alcohol. It needs a complete shift from how I was living to where I needed to live. Where I sought to find a place in my life with a little more quiet time, a bit more ‘me’ time and a little more time for the things I once deemed unimportant. More time for those close to me.
Recovery started by putting my life in reverse. Where I had to go back to basics and relearn life all over again. I had to relearn my thinking. I had to relearn how not to mess things up. Reversing a life run on self-will and determination is not easy. Understanding that life needs to be changed from the inside out is a big step towards long term sobriety. It was the key to me staying sober.
But all this takes time. It takes a lifetime, literally. If change happens too quickly, it’s probably not going to last.
It needs to be slow, methodical, systematic, spiritually guided, it needs a good teacher and change needs to happen in manageable bite-size pieces. If change happens in my time it’s less likely to last. If it happens in my Higher Power’s time it will.
Finding reverse gear, accepting that going back to basics is the first step towards going forwards.
It’s not easy for an egotistical, driven, self-seeking individual to accept that where they are heading is going to kill them. But realising this simple bit of authenticity is a beginning; it was the key to starting the process of moving forward. Moving towards a turnaround in a life dominated and controlled by active alcoholism. The rooms of AA are where I eventually started the long march back to reality. The one step at a time walk towards going from a drinking alcoholic to a sober one. But it’s not easy.
Nothing was more important to seeking out a willingness to change, than the pain of my past. But for some, even that’s not always enough. Getting up every day and having a total commitment to my new sober life has been as important to my sobriety as breathing. Getting to regular AA meetings is paramount to fulfilling the spiritual promise I made to myself. Where that commitment was to seek victory over my alcoholism. This was never going to happen, however, unless my commitment was on a par with my need to live a different life. For victory over this mind-numbing, bodily-eroding, life-destroying disease, needed a shift in my understanding: it needed repetitive actions and above all, it needed an inner wish. A wish to never return to a world of degradation, to a world of missed opportunities and to a world of unremitting unhappiness, that I’d only just managed to escape from. In my need to never return to the demoralising life that I’d emerged from, I had to go in reverse.
It’s a contradiction in terms to approach recovery by going backwards to the beginning, in order to move forwards, but that’s what I had to do. In order to ensure I didn’t return to the life I’d been living, I had to do opposites, to commit to learning how to live my life all over again.
Putting my life in reverse not only saved my life, it showed me how to live it with a degree of humility and grace I never deemed possible, but it also gave me a brand new life. I got this new life on one condition only – that I would never give up until the miracle of new life appeared. When it did appear, I needed to hold on to what was on offer, then to strive each day for a little more serenity than I’d achieved the day before. That’s all.
I had always imagined going backwards would be a negative move but today I now find it took me to a place where I could restart my life all over again. It is so simple really.
Bill the Shirt
Bristol
