aa-a-gogo.com

Well I suppose I do need to tackle this topic and get to typing up my story. Or in other terms, my pitch, or as I like to refer to it, ‘The AA Anti-story”. There will be NOT ONE LIE in this story. I will review and re-read every paragraph to look for exaggerations and trim them down to the facts. I will do my best to leave out my opinion as much as possible - only placing them in the story to explain a decision I made. Otherwise I will work hard to tell this story with only what happened as much as I can. Bare with me; this is sixteen years plus of my life I am telling. It is not going to be finished in 6 paragraphs.

This post will be is about year one. Its one of the few years that will get this much writing so don’t freak out – you aren’t going to get 16 times this amount of writing to read.

YEAR ONE:

December 7th 1989 is my sobriety date or AA birthday or AA anniversary. It is the only one I have ever had, I have not gone “back out” since first getting sober. I am still sober today.

On that day I woke up in a rehab’s detox hospital room in Redondo Beach, CA. I went running to the rehab the day before; having had all I could take of the paranoia, psychosis and general madness that hourly cocaine doses and around the clock drinking can produce in a person in a 24 month period, I went running to help as fast as I could.

I had been a drinker and drug user since the age of 13. Most of that time, things went on as a normal life does. But after graduating college and getting a full time computer programmers job at a national corporation, things shifting into a high gear and the good life changed into the party life changed into the 24 hour party life changed into hell. I wanted it to stop and hospitals and rehab centers were all I knew about where to get help. So there is where I went. At that time, I never knew anything about AA and never even heard the term ‘the 12 steps’.

After the detox hospital stay is over, I then go to a 13 month rehab program. The first 30 days its five days a week 5 hours a night; then for a year its 2 days a week. And the rehab center is who introduced me to Alcoholics Anonymous. The detox hospital gave me my Big Book but I didn’t even use it until I got to AA.

My rehab, like all US rehabs, used the 12 step program as their model of recovery. My rehab required a minimum of two meetings a week for the whole time you are enrolled in the outpatient program. At first I only did the minimum. Then came the time when I wanted to go to AA meetings, when I felt the need to go to meetings. This began at the four month mark. I began to listen to what was being said at the AA meetings. And soon I began to hear what was said.

By the time I got my 9 month chip, I am attending over a dozen meetings a week. Yes PER week. And I have a sponsor, I am working on my 4th step, I am going to big book and 12-n-12 meetings and already hold meeting commitments of coffee maker and GSR and have spoken on a panel.

For you people completely unfamiliar with AA and such 12 step fellowships, what I just said was this:

• I have found a mentor who is experience in performing the 12 steps , and is guiding me as I do mine,
• I am currently in my 4th (of the 12 ) step of writing down all my past digressions, resentments and personal fears,
• I go to the meetings where you read, study and analyze the text of AA’s official books,
• at one meeting I am the person who makes the coffee and at another meeting I am the person who reads the AA announcements
• and I have also participated on a panel of several AA members who visit a rehab center to tell the patients about the AA experience

There is one other thing to mention about what I am doing about my life after 9 months of AA: I am now praying every evening before bed. Beginning at the eighth month mark I get down on my knees each evening and I ask God to help me through the next day, to help me make the right choices and to understand his will for me. So that’s where and me and AA were in that first year.

But of course the year just wasn’t me and AA. There was work to deal with that first year. I have written about that in this AA a Go-Go: Year 1 at the workplace
postng.

Harry