Maybe Now It’s My Turn to Show Somebody Else

I think we sometimes forget what it feels like to walk into AA for the first time. Especially after we’ve been around for a while. We know the language. Steps. Traditions. Sponsors. Home groups. Commitments. Higher Power. Inventory. Amends. We know where the coffee is. We know when to clap. We know all the little things that eventually become completely normal. The newcomer knows none of that. They may barely know how they got through the door. When somebody walks into their first meeting, I don’t think they need me explaining the entire program to them. They probably don’t need my thirty-eight-year recovery dissertation. They definitely don’t need me telling them how wonderful their life is going to become if they just follow seventeen suggestions before bedtime. 😂 Honestly, that is exactly what I used to do to people. They might just need somebody to sit next to them. That’s it. I remember what early sobriety felt like. My brain wasn’t exactly operating at peak efficiency. I was scared. Ashamed. Confused. Uncomfortable in my own skin. Half the time I probably couldn’t have absorbed a detailed explanation of how to make toast. And yet we sometimes expect somebody on day one to understand alcoholism, spirituality, the Twelve Steps, sponsorship and the rest of their life before the meeting even ends. Maybe we could give them a minute. 😂 One of the best things somebody can say to a newcomer is: “You don’t have to figure everything out tonight.” Stay. Have some coffee. Listen. If you want to talk, talk. If you don’t, that’s okay too. Just don’t drink for today. Sometimes that is enough. I think those of us with time can accidentally make helping somebody about ourselves. We want to say the perfect thing. Give the brilliant advice. Tell the story that changes their life. We want them to walk away thinking: “That Guy really knows his shit.” 😂 That’s probably not the point. The point is that they walk away thinking: “Maybe I can come back tomorrow.” That’s a very different goal. Sometimes helping means saying less. Listening. Letting somebody be frightened without immediately trying to talk them out of being frightened. Letting them tell the same story three times. Letting them cry. Letting them sit there quietly wondering what the hell they’ve gotten themselves into. We don’t have to fix everything. That took me a long time to learn in plenty of areas of life. There is also something incredibly powerful about simply meeting another alcoholic who understands. Not theoretically. Not from a textbook. Not because they studied addiction in school. Because they’ve been there. Someone can tell you: “I know what that obsession feels like.” “I know what it’s like to swear you’re not going to drink and drink anyway.” “I know what it’s like to wake up and hate yourself.” “I know what it’s like to think you’re never going to feel normal again.” And then comes the important part: “I don’t live that way anymore.” That may be all the proof somebody needs that night. Not that life becomes perfect. Not that they will never struggle again. Just that another way of living actually exists. I also think giving somebody your phone number matters. We toss phone numbers around pretty casually in AA. But imagine what that piece of paper can mean to somebody who has spent years feeling completely alone. Here is another human being saying: Call me. And hopefully meaning it. That doesn’t mean I have to be a therapist. God help both of us if that became the qualification. 😂 I don’t need the perfect answer when the phone rings. Sometimes the answer is: “Don’t drink.” “Come meet me.” “Get to a meeting.” “Stay on the phone.” “Go to bed.” “Call me again in ten minutes.” Very sophisticated clinical intervention. 😂 But it works. Sometimes what saves us isn’t brilliant advice. It’s connection. Knowing somebody else is awake. Knowing somebody gives a shit whether we make it through the night. Knowing that we don’t have to sit alone with whatever insanity is taking place between our ears. I think about all the people who helped me when I was young. The old-timers. The friends I got sober with. The people who gave me suggestions whether I wanted them or not. The people who showed me how to live sober simply by living sober in front of me. A lot of them probably don’t remember every conversation we had. I do. Or at least I remember how they made me feel. Like maybe I belonged there. Like maybe I wasn’t hopeless. Like maybe being twenty-one and completely screwed up didn’t mean my life was over. That matters. After all these years, I still believe newcomers are the most important people walking through the door. Not because those of us with time don’t matter. We do. But we already know there’s a chair waiting for us. The newcomer doesn’t know that yet. Sometimes our job is simply to show them. Sit down. Have some coffee. Nobody expects you to have this figured out. You don’t have to solve the rest of your life tonight. Just stay here for a while. We’ll worry about tomorrow when it gets here. Sometimes carrying the message isn’t giving somebody the right words. It’s making sure they aren’t alone long enough to hear them. And writing this, along with everything else I’ve been writing over the past several months, has made something pretty clear to me. I need to get my ass back to meetings. Not because I’m going to be some kind of savior. Not because I believe that if I don’t go back, I’m automatically going to drink. That isn’t what this is about. I need to go back because I owe it to AA to be there. I owe my life to AA and to the people who were there when I needed them. And after writing this this morning, I realized how selfish it feels to sit here writing constantly about everything AA has given me while barely participating in it myself. I think the truth is that I’ve been selfish with my time. I’m busy. I have a lot going on. There are certainly times when I genuinely can’t make a meeting. That happened plenty when I was going regularly. But being busy is not an excuse to stop going entirely. And I can’t keep writing about newcomers, service, fellowship and carrying the message while choosing not to show up at all. At some point I have to actually live some of the shit I’m writing about. The truth is, I lived in AA for about thirty years. For much of the past ten, I’ve lived outside of it and around it. I don’t think I did that intentionally. I wasn’t trying to prove some point that you can stay sober without meetings. I think somewhere along the way I simply decided that meetings weren’t doing much for me anymore. And maybe that’s where I had it wrong. Because maybe meetings aren’t always supposed to be about what they are doing for me. That’s a pretty humbling thought after thirty-eight years. I still believe I don’t have to attend meetings regularly in order to stay sober. Maybe I’m right. Maybe I’m not. But even if I am right, that doesn’t mean staying sober is the only reason to go. Maybe I should go because somebody sitting in that room with three days sober needs to see a guy with thirty-eight years who is still there. Not because I have all the answers. I clearly don’t. Not because my life is perfect. It definitely isn’t. But because it is possible to stay sober. It is possible to build a life. It is possible to get married, raise kids, become a grandfather, travel, screw things up, start over, laugh, hurt, lose people, survive things you thought you couldn’t survive and still be sitting in an AA meeting decades later. Somebody showed me that when I was twenty-one. Maybe now it’s my turn to show somebody else. It really is where I belong. I belong in AA. Not around it.