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On February 12th, 1994, I was 17 years old and living in a halfway house in Opelousas, Louisiana, when I decided to do something different. I wasn’t deciding to stay sober for the rest of my life; I didn’t even think I had five years in the future as a certainty. The day before, I was drunk and getting a 24-hour coin from an AA meeting, and I just knew that I couldn’t stop drinking even though I wanted to quit. And I had wanted to stop before, but this was the time that seemed to last – for 30 years at least.

I couldn’t picture a 47-year-old me then. I couldn’t even picture myself as a 27-year-old. I wasn’t imagining myself staying sober. I didn’t think it would work for me or that it would be something I wanted. Life wasn’t enjoyable; it didn’t feel natural or that I was doing it right. The treatment center counselors would tell me I would die if I kept doing what I was doing, and I shrugged because that seemed like a pleasant consequence, not like the consequence of living still and having the booze not working for me anymore. I wasn’t fearing death; I was fearing life continuing. 

For some reason, I just tried this thing. I don’t think I was very good at it, and there were aspects that wouldn’t make sense till years later, but I didn’t have a fight left in me anymore. I had run out of ideas. I’m not saying I’m that smart, but all my resources had been exhausted, and while AA didn’t represent what I wanted, I didn’t want what I had anymore. 

Getting sober that young had its challenges. I was 17; I had just four-ish years of using and drinking. I didn’t have the long list of things that I lost. All I had was years and years in front of me where I would gather those things. There were a lot of people in AA that didn’t like teenagers coming to meetings. 

I was also facing growing up and reaching milestones that previously would have included alcohol and or drugs. I turned 21, went to college, got married, and went through birthdays, funerals, and other celebrations sober. I never had a legal drink. 

It was also hard because being young meant ego and self-esteem in a different way than when you were older. It was hard fitting in and trying to be hip still. I lied about my story. I either made up stuff to make me look tough and didn’t talk about the stuff that made me look less than or weak. That made it hard to make real connections with my peers when I was full of shit and being so scared of fitting in that making something up made more sense.

I know that I did more damage in AA than I did while drinking. Drinking is no excuse for bad behavior, but not even having being drunk as an excuse made cleaning up after myself so much more complicated. 

Telling the truth and opening up to the fellowship changed everything. I felt free. I realized I was fine the way I was and didn’t need to be something I wasn’t. I was so ashamed of some of the things I had done but realized that these were things that other people had gone through, too, and that I could be helpful to others who were coming in full of shame.

AA was also a challenge in itself. It was tough to do the god thing. I never met god growing up; I wasn’t raised religiously, so the concept was very foreign. As I got older, it seemed more and more impossible that something conscious of pulling strings and giving some people parking spots closer to the door and other people with terminal cancer. If you know anything about the steps in Alcoholics Anonymous, the god thing is essential. 

It was hard to figure out the god thing, and it took several years to learn from my mistakes. I have found a way to be agnostic and still get the spiritual aspect of the 12 steps. I sometimes refer to myself as a superstitious agnostic. I use prayer and meditation, not as this conversation with deities, but as a way to set my intentions of being a better person.

AA meetings are also kind of cringy if you aren’t into it. They are very culty, and especially the younger crowd meetings can be Christian youth group-y. There are prayers, chanting, and a whole culture that one has to learn. People use alien terminology and love to talk about themselves. Every area has cult-like personalities, and sometimes several in more prominent places. AA is also very insular, so breaking into the crowd or having different ideas can be challenging. 

Don’t get me wrong, I am very protective of Alcoholics Anonymous since it saved my life. I sometimes have to remember that the AA that rescued me when I was 17 is no more and that this AA is just as good and still saving people. I can have a hard time remembering that. Just like anything that we loved in our youth, we think it’s better then and sucks now. I love bashing it, but at the same time, it is something that has done nothing but make my life better and more fulfilling.

There is a sadness that I feel with 30 years. While there are still people I knew when I got sober that are still in my life, there are so many, thousands probably, of people that I cared for that are gone. A lot of those people are dead. I feel like there is a kind of loneliness. I don’t feel survivor guilt anymore, but for a long time, I did think that a lot of people better than me were taken out. 

I feel like Rutger Hauer at the end of Blade Runner when he says, “I’ve seen things you people wouldn’t believe. Attack ships on fire off the shoulder of Orion. I watched C-beams glitter in the dark near the Tannhauser gate. All those moments will be lost in time… like tears in rain…” I have seen things you wouldn’t believe in the rooms of AA and just in my life. I have met so many characters and influential people that I don’t know if I will ever see them again. Sometimes, I will think of a random person I met just one time decades ago and think about what that person said or did and wonder, where are they now? Sometimes, I remember their face but not their name or vice versa.

The loneliness and sadness are also because I am far from where I spent most of my sobriety. I have made some great friends here and feel cared for by many people, but there needs to be more history. History comes with . . time, and there hasn’t been a long time yet. Most of my story is in Oregon. It is in the meetings in Portland. I was known by many people there, which is good and bad. There were deep roots there that I don’t have here yet.

I had a health scare last year where one of my scans came back with a possibility of cancer returning, and I remember being so scared of being here in Rhode Island dealing with it when I had dealt with it back in Oregon, surrounded by so many supportive people. I felt like I was about to undergo a colossal undertaking alone. I know this was fear talking, but I had already surrounded myself with good people who would have helped me walk through it. Luckily, it was a false alarm, and I am officially in remission. 

Mental health has also been a considerable part of my recovery journey. There have been times when I relied a lot on therapy, and there have been times when I didn’t. It can be tiresome to be working on my mental health continuously. I wake up sometimes with the pressure of life on my chest, and it feels like I’m at the bottom of the ocean. I am being crushed by depression and crippled by anxiety. I have let the traumas of my life overtake me and cripple me. If it weren’t for the therapy I have done, I’m confident I would not be sober anymore. There are things that the 12 steps can’t change or help. There are things that we can’t do alone. It is good to get help. I have fallen for my toxic masculinity and felt that I could shoulder my problems, but this has caused so much harm to myself and others. 

This list of “promises” happens after a person starts doing the amends step, Step Nine. One of the “promises” listed is “we will intuitively know how to handle situations which used to baffle us.” I have found that I am baffled more often than not. Life is baffling. It was pointed out to me that another word for it is a childlike wonder. I want to be confused by the world around me, just to be amazed that things are growing out of the ground, that there is just a vast infinite space around me that is also still expanding. I don’t want to be just sure of anything. I desire to find the world exciting and know I have not run all my races.

I think a lot about the guilt and shame I felt for a lot of the things I did, drinking and drugging. I also felt a lot of guilt and shame for things I did while sober. I read somewhere about the difference between shame and guilt and remorse. Shame and guilt is the idea that I am a terrible person, that I am a fuck up, and I don’t deserve love and understanding. Remorse knows that I did the best I could with the information I had at the time and how I can learn from that so that I may make better decisions in the future.

I came into the rooms of Alcoholics Anonymous, a boy who was afraid of his own shadow, who hated himself, who didn’t feel like he deserved anything good, and who was not sure that putting down the drink would solve anything. I grew up, and I grew up slowly. I made every mistake under the sun, except drink again. I embarrassed myself so badly that the idea of walking into another room of Alcoholics Anonymous seemed too much for my self-bruised ego to handle, but I did it anyway and stayed. Those bruises all became my experience. 

Those bruises that became lessons also made me ready to deal with when life hands me lumps instead of me handing myself lumps. When I was diagnosed with cancer, I knew what I needed to do and that I was going to have to rely on resources beyond my own. I had to allow myself to be helped, loved, and supported. I don’t know if I would have trusted the process if I had never dealt with my mistakes and walked through those lessons. I was ready when I was ready.

I’m thirty years sober, and I still don’t believe in god. I believe that Love is a pure and absolute power, and if I take actions based on love instead of fear, then I have a good chance that everything will be okay. Most of the time, everything is already okay.