A sober friend said recently
that he tried to quit drinking for years, but if he was being
honest, he wasn't trying that hard. This struck me as significant.
A lot of us tried for years, or
are still trying, and think we were/are trying hard. Were we? Are we? It sure
feels like it when you're struggling to stay sober and keep backsliding and
drinking.
Another friend, who has been
struggling to quit for years, and is still struggling, told me that a
woman at AA told her she didn't really want to be sober or she would be. At the
time, that comment struck me as incredibly, horribly, unforgivably mean. I
still think it's mean. But underneath the meanness, something significant
lurks.
A few people in my online group
recently have commented with impressive honesty about how they are not really
sure they want to stop drinking. I've been thinking about that for the past few
days, and my friend's comment about in truth not trying all that hard made
all the thoughts come together.
Between the time I first had
the thought "I drink too much" and the time I quit for good, I didn't
really want to stop. What I wanted was to be a social drinker. I wanted to be
able to moderate. I wanted to be able to go out and have drinks with everyone
else and feel like an ordinary person and not someone who had this label. I
wanted to come home after a hard days work and pour a glass of wine or three
and numb my feelings. I wanted to run a hot bath and soak in it while drinking
a glass of wine and chilling out. I did not want to go to 12 step meetings and
be preached at. I did not want to drink club soda when everyone else was
drinking wine and either make up some bullshit excuse about why I wasn't or
tell people I had a problem. I did not want to be The Other.
I wanted to stop having hangovers
and making an ass of myself, but I did not want to stop drinking. I wanted –
and this is one of the three things that Buddhists say cause pain – things to
be other than as they were. I wanted to be the kind of person who had two
glasses of wine and no consequences. I didn't want to stop drinking. I wanted
to be that person again.
At some point, something
shifted. I turned a corner. I wanted the madness to end more than I wanted to
be able to have a long hot soak in the bath with a ginormous glass of Pinot in
my hand.
Wanting to do the work of
recovery came later. And it was only after I did the work, and received the
gift of having done it, that I started really wanting to be sober instead of
wanting to be able to drink moderately.
So no. At the beginning. I
didn't really want stop drinking. I was angry that I had to stop drinking.
Resentful that I didn't get to drink anymore. It was doing the work of recovery
that allowed me to transcend that resentment, to be grateful for sobriety and
recovery.
At some point, I stopped
fighting against the resentment that I couldn't be a moderate drinker. At some
point I became willing to try something new and see what happened.
Became willing. That's Step 2.
Almost everyone here has done Step 1, admitting that their lives have become
unmanageable. But Step 2? That's a hard one. Becoming WILLING to believe that a
power greater than ourselves can restore us to sanity.
For me, that power wasn't God.
I've had issues with the higher power thing. For me, that power was the program
itself. I saw my father and all these other people living happy, fulfilling
lives in sobriety after following the program, and I became willing to try and
see if it would work for me, too.
That was the key for me. Not
willpower, but willingness.
