You are currently browsing the monthly archive for October, 2007.
Things are going well, generally. I’m still keeping on top of the Uni work, I think, doing a bit every day. For my main project I’ve written about half the introduction, which is good news because the introduction is always the hardest part of a report to write. So there’s nothing to worry about on that score, I guess. I’m still getting to lots of meetings, as well, and the relationship with the sponsor is still a working one. I think we’re finally going to get on with the steps together this weekend; we should be meeting at some point on Saturday so I can get step 3 done and make a start on step 4. I’ll be looking forward to it because it’s way too long since I left my programme at step 2. It’s a good thing I’m looking forward to doing step 3 now – a month ago I wasn’t. So in a way it’s good that my programme was left on a hiatus all those weeks ago. If I’d jumped straight into step 3 after finishing step 2 with the first sponsor, I may not have been ready.
There’s still a bit of fear every time I go into a meeting. Last night, for instance, I felt only a bit less nervous on my way to the Tuesday meeting that I always attend than the first time I went there in July. You may say ‘a bit less nervous’ is a good sign, but it would be nice if I was ‘a lot less nervous’. So I feel like on the social side of things, I’m changing very slowly, and I don’t like it. I was able to share about this last night – the main chair had talked about the socializing after meetings being as important as the meetings themselves, and I forced myself to admit in front of the room that I still didn’t get how to feel comfortable in those post-meeting situations, where everyone is standing around chatting. I talked about finding it impossible to approach people I don’t know very well, so that people have to approach me if they want a conversation with me; I also said that I still can’t always respond when someone does approach me. Being sociable has never come naturally to me, in my whole life, and it’s beginning to look like it will take a very long time for me to learn to feel differently about it.
I’m afraid to say that there is someone in the meetings who is avoiding me completely. It’s not just me avoiding him. So he must in some way feel differently towards me than he did a few weeks ago, when we were friends. I’d love to say that doesn’t bother me, but of course it would hurt me if it turned out to be true that he does dislike me now. Still, I’m not ready to do anything about it. I can’t do anything about it. It’s hard enough for me to behave normally with friends all the time. It wouldn’t be in my nature to go up to this person, take him aside and sort things out. I wouldn’t know what to say. The reason I know I’ve done something to upset him is because I know what he’s like – though I haven’t known him for long, I know him well enough to know he’s just like me, and if it was the other way round, I’d be behaving just the same. I am behaving just the same. We’ve come to feel awkward with each other and neither of us knows how to rectify it. We’re both painfully similar and I guess it’s just as hard for him to deal with that as it is for me.
I’ve actually spent so much time thinking about this, I’m embarrassed. I’m doing exactly the same thing that I’ve done with people before, those who started off friends and quickly became enemies because of the co-dependency issues that I have in my head. Hardly any friendships and none of my ‘serious’ relationships could ever last because I either got too dependent on them or they got too dependent on me. Mostly it was the former, but none of these ‘relationships’ ever lasted long enough to really become important.
My relationships with anyone are fraught with difficulties and awkwardness, insecurity and mistrust. I don’t just get nervous walking into meetings because I’m scared of talking to strangers; I’m scared of seeing people I know, just in case they’re pissed off with me for something I’ve done. Usually no one’s pissed off with me for anything, but at any given time I’ll generally feel awkward with about four or five people in the room, just because I haven’t spoken to them for a while, or I once caught them looking at me in a funny way. All the evidence I’ve got for this particular person’s ‘resentment’ towards me comes from looks that he’s given me recently, as well as the fact that I feel resentful towards him – my feeling resentful towards him makes it easy for me to believe that he must be resentful too.
I haven’t shared about this issue in meetings yet. It would be far too honest and profound. Just thinking about it makes me feel a bit cold. When I get onto steps 4 and 5 with my sponsor I know I’m going to have to tell him about how I can’t be normal with certain people – to tell the truth I’m not looking forward to that part of my programme. No one likes doing step 4 and 5. That’s why they’re the most important steps. This particular problem that I have with feeling awkward around certain people is one of the main reasons I first turned to drink, and if I don’t get it out in the open in step 5 I could eventually turn to drink again. I might feel like I never want to drink again at the moment, but I don’t know what’s around the corner. The programme is just for today, which means that we have to work it fully and refrain from getting complacent every single day for the rest of our lives. The progress I’ve made in the past 109 days may well be greater than I can give it credit for at the moment, but I still have so much progress to make. I was talking about my dreams last week, the things I’d like to have in my life, such as a good job, a partner, and a home of my own – these are not just naïve clichés, they are things that normal people can and regularly do have.
A few people in the meeting last night talked about becoming ‘normal’ thanks to their programmes and how happy that had made them; I really want to be normal too, because once I am normal, I know that the things I want will really start to come to me. At the moment my head isn’t normal, it’s ill. I don’t love myself. So I can’t expect a partner to love me. In the past the partners I’ve been with had such power over me, because I gave it to them. I was never on an equal footing with anyone. As for jobs, I had no power there either because I wasn’t really choosing the jobs properly, I was just taking anything that came along. In the future I want to go about these things differently, but can I really do it better next time? Could I really choose the ideal job and partner and be happy with them? These things seem very uncertain, which is, I suppose, what has always scared me about them. I’ve said it a million times, but life is uncertain, as well as strange, and difficult, and complex. What’s happening to me in recovery is that I’m finding out so many truths about life and I’m beginning to accept them; I’m slowly exposing myself to the real world, to honesty, and to love. This process of opening up, which I practice a little bit every time I share in meetings and speak to my sponsor on the phone, is bringing me forwards into the world and, I hope, making me a little bit more normal.
Not so much to talk about today, just that the greeting went well this afternoon. Almost ironically, I was nervous beforehand – not as nervous as I probably would have been three months ago, I might add. I say ‘ironically’ because I knew full well that this was a role I had chosen to take on. I could have continued in the fellowship without a commitment; some people wait a year before they take AA duty on. The reason I put my hand up to volunteer last week is that it seemed the right thing for me to do. It was definitely one of those moments when taking action just seemed right. I only have to greet at the Sunday meeting every other week, meaning I can continue with the voluntary work on the alternate weeks. My first sponsor suggested to me that greeting would be the best role for me, because it would take me out of my comfort zone by forcing me to be sociable on a regular basis. When he first said that all those months ago, part of me was like: ‘As if I would ever want to be a greeter!’ Now look at me! When I got there this afternoon I weirdly felt like an AA veteran, as I was able to recognise pretty much everyone walking into the room. I said ‘hi’ to them all and kept a smile on my face, even though those nerves never quite went away.
The nerves came entirely from that old fear of responsibility, which also makes me nervous every time I head out for a Food Chain shift. This very old fear tells me that I can’t do it, and that asking for help with anything will make me look stupid. The great thing about greeting is that it’s not very difficult, so I didn’t end up having to ask for help this afternoon. And as I said, the nerves weren’t quite as powerful as they might have been, which is I guess good news.
The meeting began at 4 and once inside I sat down surrounded by friends. The main chair’s story was good to hear; as always I was able to empathize sincerely. He talked about AA being the best thing that had ever happened to him, as it was somewhere he could truly fit in for the first time. I knew what he was talking about. In AA everyone is the same – I’ve probably said it before, but the similarities between us far outweigh the differences. The life circumstances and backgrounds change, but the feelings don’t. I would like to have shared today, but for some reason I couldn’t think of what to say. Perhaps just getting successfully through my first ever greeting ’shift’ was enough for today. After the meeting I resisted the urge once again to go for coffee, which was pleasing. I definitely think that I was doing coffee too much before. Once or twice a week is enough - I don’t want tagging along to the coffee shop at every opportunity to become another addiction.
Aaaaarrrrggghh!!
Sorry. I needed to get that off my chest.
It’s been one of those days. Nothing much has happened, to be honest. In fact, nothing at all has happened today, and that’s the problem. I spent the day waiting for an important parcel to arrive in the post, and it never came. I tried contacting the company sending the package and couldn’t get through to them. It was supposed to arrive between 9am and 5pm; by about 4 I was losing my mind with boredom and worry. I’d taken the day off University specifically to be here for the parcel. I could have got loads of work done at home regardless, but because I was so bored I couldn’t get myself to do anything useful all day.
By the evening it was clear that the parcel was never going to come, so I forced myself to go out to the AA meeting that I usually go to on Fridays. Normally I like that meeting a lot but today I wasn’t in the mood for it. I didn’t want to be there, I didn’t want to see or speak to anybody. I just wanted to go home and wallow in some more self pity. To make matters worse I was rather tired for some reason, and the room in which the meeting was held was exceptionally hot, so that halfway through I was beginning to fall asleep.
For most of the one and a half hours I was so lost in my troubles I could hardly raise my head and listen to people; at various points, however, I would catch someone saying something that seemed relevant to my situation. I heard other people saying that they too didn’t want to be there tonight; they were simply forcing themselves to speak as they knew it would help. As it started to draw to a close I knew I had two options: I could finally open my mouth and admit to the room how I was feeling, or I could go home as miserable and angry as ever, completely isolated by my own actions.
Despite knowing the former option would be better for me, I simply couldn’t think of what to say. So I pulled my coat on as soon as the meeting had finished and walked straight out, saying a quick goodbye to a couple of people. I was in a rush to get out partly because I knew that if I’d stayed a moment longer I would have given into the temptation to go for coffee, and in that state I almost certainly wouldn’t have enjoyed the social gathering tonight.
The first thing I did when I was out of the vicinity of the building was phone my sponsor. I somehow knew what to say to him, telling him that I’d had a shitty, pointless day and felt crap at the end of it. I didn’t need to say anything more. I guess I’d hoped he would have something ingenious to say which would miraculously make me feel better; unfortunately he seemed busy when I called and we could only speak for a few minutes. His advice to me was to go to a meeting tomorrow and share about what’s happened today. It was nothing unexpected. I don’t want to go to a meeting tomorrow, but I knew before I got to tonight’s meeting that I’d probably end up needing to attend another one tomorrow.
My sponsor reminded me not to drink before hanging up the phone. I suppose the one positive about tonight is that I don’t want to drink. I did a pretty powerful Step 1 in the beginning – I know I’m powerless over alcohol and that it makes my life unmanageable. In the past three months there’s only been one occasion when I was seriously tempted to drink, and that passed in the space of a night. I haven’t got to worry about being hungover tomorrow, so you could say my programme is still working well, even though I feel like shit. I think, unfortunately, that when I’m feeling this way I’m actually being a dry drunk. In AA they talk about being ‘dry drunk’ all the time and I think I’m experiencing that tonight. I’m not physically drunk but the feelings I’m going through are the exact same feelings I used to have all the time when I was pissed.
The reasons for me being dry drunk right now are quite clear. I haven’t done the right things today. I stayed indoors by myself all day, I didn’t do any work, I went to a meeting and didn’t speak to anyone, and I didn’t share with the room when I really needed to. I didn’t hand it over. Of course, by writing all of this down I’m doing something positive, but I could and should have said it all earlier on. Maybe I won’t want to drink ever again but I keep coming back to the fact that being sober is about more than just not drinking. Whilst I’m living dry drunk I’m not living sober. My head isn’t clean at the moment. I desperately want to do the programme properly and hand all these things over as soon as they come up, but the act of handing it over, of talking to somebody honestly, still isn’t natural to me. When I have to tell someone truthfully how I feel it’s like being in the driving seat of my life and letting go of the steering wheel. By trusting others in this way I stop taking care of myself and let them take care of me. And I know I keep going on about how much I hate feeling vulnerable, how much I need the love and support of others but can’t accept it because it leaves me so vulnerable, all the while failing to make any progress with the dilemma. Most of the time it’s impossible to see myself making any progress, because with just three months of sobriety behind me I cannot help feeling as if I have no sobriety whatsoever, compared to the vast majority of people I know in AA who have years and years of it. They talk about the same anxieties and issues, even those who’ve been sober for ten years; part of me wonders what the point really is if I’m still going to feel like this in ten bloody years from now.
Occasionally I might take an objective look at the difference between my life now and my life three months ago and I’ll spot some important changes, such as the lack of hangovers, the exceptional amount of writing that I’ve been able to do, and the new friends I’ve made; but most of the time I just can’t believe it will last. All I have to do is look to the near future, to remind myself of how hard it’s going to be to get the other things I want out of life, the really important things that take years of hard work. I’m not expecting life to suddenly become perfect, but it would be nice to think I could leave University next year and get a job relatively quickly, before I’ve sunk even further into debt. At the moment, I’m fast losing faith in the possibility of everything being all right next year. I have no idea what job I could do, let alone what I’d like to do. To start building a life for myself and set off down the road to achieving my dreams, getting a job will undoubtedly be the first and most vital step for me. For reasons which are probably obvious, I’ve never held down a job for more than a month. I haven’t a CV to speak of and the vast majority of employers scare me. All I want is a job that I can do and enjoy at the same time, but for many people my age, the existence of such a thing is apparently coming to resemble gold dust.
Is it unreasonable to want a normal life? Am I crazy to wish for a good paying job, a loving partner, a home of my own? Am I just torturing myself by looking for perfection in an imperfect world? The AA promises speak of dreams coming true in sobriety, following the successful completion of the 12 steps, and so I’ve embarked on those steps with fervour and enthusiasm, counting the minutes until I begin to see changes taking place with my own eyes. At times I see the small changes, which I mentioned before, but as I pile up more and more sobriety it gets clearer and clearer that my dreams, the ones that I’ve had for years, are going to require very, very hard work. And it terrifies me.
The craziest thing is that it’s all in my head. Fear isn’t a real, tangible thing; it’s just an emotion. How can it have such power? How can a mere cognitive process amongst so many others cause one person’s entire life to be halted at the age of eighteen, before the mature changes of adulthood begin to take place? Every time I tell someone that I really think my life stopped at eighteen, they wave it off and tell me not to be silly – of course I’ve changed since I was eighteen, of course important things have happened to me in the last six years – well, yeah, my life has changed vastly since 2001, but not in a good way. Not in the way I wanted it to.
I don’t know what else to say tonight, really. I hope I haven’t bored anyone or said too many inapproptiate, personal things. I know very well that by engaging with the negative thoughts I am torturing myself, and I know what to do to make things better. So I’m not asking for advice. I guess it’s just nice to know there are people out there listening, understanding me.
I think I’ll start by saying that I was being unfair to my new AA sponsor the other day. Although there was a moment last week when I may have felt somewhat distant from him, I’m managing to speak to him every day for about twenty minutes a time, and we’re getting a lot stuff out in the open. He might not be the 100% perfect sponsor for me, but only a crazy perfectionist would be looking for that. Unfortunately, perfectionism appears to be one of the many symptoms of alcoholism. I want the perfect sponsor who understands everything I’ve ever gone through and who is always there when it’s convenient for me, but what’s clear is that at this stage I’m not going to find anyone like that, and to tell the truth I don’t need a sponsor like that. The sponsor I’ve got is just fine.
The anger that I felt on Sunday was, just like all the other times I’ve felt such rage in sobriety, the result of my desire for everything to go perfectly. Because life is never perfect, I don’t like it. Things go wrong, people don’t show up, I don’t always share what I need to share in meetings; life is full of little imperfections and uncertainties, and I should have accepted that a long time ago. Well, most of the time I think I can accept it, it’s just that on days like Sunday when I’m low on energy I tend to slip into old negative thought patterns very easily. As I was spewing forth all of that vitriol the other day I knew perfectly well that I was behaving like a spoilt child, throwing a tantrum because I hadn’t got my own way. I willingly let myself sink into the pit of self-righteous self pity that used to be my home, because it was easy. I was tired of struggling to put a positive spin on everything. I felt like telling the world to f*** off and so, on Sunday, I did.
If my personal welfare is to be maintained, I can’t behave like that any more. I can’t continue to put the barriers up and isolate myself, and I can’t feed the negative thought processes with attention any more. Will I start taking my own advice and make a permanent effort to change my ways? No. I’ll probably feel tired and low tomorrow and allow the black hole of self pity to swallow me again, because it’s always there, waiting for me to slip. What I must remember is that it’s an illness, and the greatest cure is talking to someone.
In other news, my Uni stuff is still going well, though that hasn’t stopped me from worrying about it at times. I’ll occasionally catch myself criticizing everything I’ve done so far, as if it’s all crap and if I haven’t done enough. My rational brain keeps telling me that what I’ve done is good; I’ve dedicated the best part of each day to my project and my head is full of ideas and things to write down in the final report. Surely I’m on the right track with it, because I know for a fact that many of my peers haven’t started to think about their projects yet, and we have to hand in our final proposals in three weeks from now. I know what my project is going to be about – alcohol dependence and a potential link with lack of internal ‘control’ – I know about the previous research in the area, and I know how I’m going to investigate it. Yet there’s always that voice saying I should be doing more, the supervisor won’t like what I bring when I have my appointment next week, and I won’t get the mark I need at the end of it all next year. That voice is part of my illness and I have great difficulty just ignoring it sometimes, as you know.
With my whole final year project focusing on alcohol addiction I can’t help but feel as if I’m getting to the real heart of the problem. I’ve read so much of the research into alcoholism, I now know more about the drug and its effects than I ever did in my drinking days. From all I’ve seen, it seems blatantly obvious to me that alcoholism involves a distinct lack of control over feelings, such as anxiety and anger. I’m sure to end up writing that in my final report but what I have to do, because this is proper psychological research, is prove it. If I can use statistical analysis to show that there is a negative relationship between alcohol use and internal control then my project could be something very important; if my results don’t show anything then it will be back to square one, and I won’t know what to say next year. Thanks to my own experiences with alcohol, you can see why this project already has great personal significance for me.
What the previous research does seem to show is that the wider factors in alcoholism involve more than just a physical addiction. The vast majority of people my age in this country drink alcohol on a regular basis; a great number of those are binge drinkers, just like I was. That means that this is a problem for my generation, not just me. I went out every single weekend to get drunk not only because I had no control over my undesirable emotions, but because everyone I knew was doing the same thing. There is a drinking culture in this country, so engrained that every time I walk down certain streets at certain times I am in the significant minority of sober people. Last night I was reading one researcher’s account of a ‘typical’ weekend night out in a British city centre; it brought back so many uncomfortable memories, I was quite uneasy reading it. The fact is that a lot of city centres are specifically designed for this drinking culture, with dozens of pubs and clubs situated in one particular area so that the only reason you’d ever go to that area would be to get pissed. In these drinking dens there are hardly any tables and seats, because being forced to stand makes people drink more, apparently. When I was going out I always wondered why the majority of pubs had no tables to sit down at; now I know. At weekends the music in these establishments is generally turned up to full volume, because shouting makes people more thirsty. The bar staff serve drink after drink after drink at lightning speed, not taking into account how much each person is buying. The researcher who wrote this account said she had purchased enough alcohol in that one night to kill herself; only because she was giving the drinks out to other people did she manage to survive.
The media regularly gets itself into a panic about this national ‘binge drinking’ problem, but rarely do we see any suggestions being given as to how it can be dealt with. The government makes a hell of a lot of money from the taxes on alcohol, so they’re hardly likely to want to start closing city centre drinking dens down. While things continue this way, I can only see the problem getting worse. I consider myself hugely lucky to have had the foresight to get out of that drinking culture while I was still young. I know a lot of people who still drink in an unhealthy way and I just can’t hang out with them any more because going into busy pubs now makes me very uncomfortable.
My heart goes out to the famous people regularly making the front pages because of their addiction battles. To non-alcoholics, people like Amy Winehouse may appear weak-willed and stupid, but the more I hear about their problems the more strongly I empathise, because I’ve been through the same thing. A lot of these celebrities are the same age as me yet due to the press interest that they have to deal with on top of the addiction, they probably feel a lot older. I know I would. It all goes to show that alcohol is the nation’s favourite drug as well as the nation’s biggest enemy.
Before I go on, I should let you know that I’m really angry this evening. There’s no special reason for me to be feeling this way, I just do. Well, in reality there’s no reason whatsoever for me to be so pissed off, but in my head there are a million stupid reasons. I’ll have a good whinge later on after I’ve brought you up to date on what’s actually happened this week. Up til the start of the weekend I was spending most of my time working on Uni stuff, and it’s paid off as I certainly feel on top of the work at the moment. I’ve prioritized the final year dissertation, but that doesn’t mean I’ve forgotten the other units that I’m taking this semester. I’m generally enjoying University at the moment, which is not something I ever thought I’d find myself saying in this final year. The best thing about this week is that my project supervisor told me on Friday that she liked my ideas. I’d spent the whole week preparing for our meeting and so it was an absolute relief to be told that I was doing well so far. There are a few important things I have to do first before I can go ahead with the actual research, but I’m not worried about getting those things done. There’s just a bit of fine tuning to do, basically, in terms of the precise terminology and methodology that I’m going to be using.
You’d think with my degree going so well that I wouldn’t be so incadescent today; unfortunately my AA programme has suffered a bit of a blow, again. In my screwed up head it has, at least. I’ve been speaking to my new sponsor every day on the phone since Wednesday, and we’ve generally been getting along fine, but he’s not like the old sponsor. My relationship with the new sponsor may turn out to be amazing, but at the moment I’m missing the old one a lot. I felt an instant connection with the first sponsor; we could talk about anything, and I became fond of him quite quickly. I can speak to my new sponsor about anything as well, but for some reason it isn’t the same.
I’ve tried reminding myself that I hardly ever hit it off with anyone at the start. But I’m sure it was easier with the first sponsor when I first met him. I’m not saying I have nothing to talk to my new sponsor about. I just wish I could talk to him about things other than how I’m feeling. I know my feelings are important but I get so bored of talking about them sometimes, it’s embarrassing. This morning I woke up bright and early for my latest shift at the voluntary work that I’ve been doing since July, and the nerves were there, as always, but once again they seemed to be a bit less than last time. Today’s shift was a breeze, and it was a relief to be able to enjoy a pleasant, easy shift again. So why am I so pissed off this evening, I hear you ask? Again, everything about AA and the programme is the answer to that question. I was so relieved to have completed a good morning’s work that I walked to the afternoon’s meeting with a spring in my step, convinced that a good morning had to be followed by a good afternoon, even though I’ve spent a lot of time in the past feeling pissed off at the Sunday meeting, for one reason or another. It doesn’t matter how good my Sunday has been, if there’s something not right when I walk into that meeting room, my spirits will instantly plummet. The most irritating thing about today is that a lot of people decided to talk about anger in great depth. People kept talking about ’resentments’, so much so that there was no opportunity for me to open my mouth at any point, although I wanted to towards the end. I wanted to tell everyone how f***ing annoyed I was with them, for making me feel so isolated and alienated. I wanted to say that I wished I could be anywhere else in the world other than sitting in that chair at that point. I wanted to shout: ‘You’re angry? Well I’m f***ing angry as well!’
In short, there was no real point to my anger today. I just felt this emotion that has played such a big part in my life, as powerful as if I’d never truly felt it before. I didn’t want to be in that room, listening to all those people who had been nice to me at times but who had also hurt me by making me begin to open up and trust them. To make everything ten times worse, I put my hand up at the end of the meeting to volunteer to help out next week. For a moment I ignored my furious inner child and snapped the job up, realising that I haven’t done any commitments in my programme so far. All I have to do is turn up next Sunday half an hour early and say ‘hi’ to people as they walk in. On paper it sounds wonderful, and at the time I guess it was a relief to finally have a commitment which will bring me even closer to the programme.
I continued to ignore my inner child as I stood outside at the end of the meeting and blindly agreed to go for coffee with the group, again. As I did so part of me realised that it could be an absolute disaster, subjecting myself to another hour of social small talk in a coffee shop in bustling Central London with a group of people I still don’t know very well. Once again, though, there was this other tiny part of me desperate not to go home, which forced me to tag along with the ‘cool’ people. A couple of ‘friends’ were in the group, and I chatted with them a bit, but for some reason one of them was behaving very differently to the person I had got to know. He was laughing hysterically and talking loudly, which irritated me after about ten minutes. I kept expecting him to return to his normal self and put it down to too much caffeine or something, but it continued for the whole time that I was there with him. When we got to the cafe I simply groaned when everyone chose to sit at one of the tables outside, even though it was f***ing freezing and there were only two seats available. I ended up having to stand huddled on the pavement with the ‘cool’ group, who talked about fashion and clubbing and the theatre world while I stood there like an alien, gulping my coca-cola down so I could get away as quickly as possible. I haven’t felt as awkward as that in weeks. After ten minutes I wanted to drop my coke bottle on the ground and storm off. Only because I’m not a natural attention seeker did I stay there until I’d finished my drink, saying goodbye politely to everyone on my way off.
I chose to walk home rather than get the bus because I hate public transport at the best of the times, and I needed the time to think. Pretty soon I was questioning what I’d done wrong today to get into such a state again, and I wasn’t stupid enough not to realise that my not sharing played a big part in it. Yes, it was a very busy meeting and a lot of people, like me, couldn’t get a word in edgeways. But I didn’t even attempt to speak; in the second after a share is over there’s always a gap, however small, and I have to learn how to make use of that gap. It takes guts to speak up the second someone has finished speaking, to potentially take the opportunity away from someone else who might have wanted to get in there. But I’m going to have to assert myself more in situations like that. I needed to share today and because I didn’t, I ended bottling everything up. I was so bothered by my friend’s behaviour after the meeting because I would quite like to have talked to him privately, to tell him how f***ing isolated I felt, but there he was playing the clown for everyone else, and I had no chance of getting the attention I wanted. Maybe I could have asked him for a private chat away from the group but can you imagine how embarrassing that would have been, in front of everyone?
By the time I’d got home this evening I knew the only answer to my problems would be, as always, to tell someone the truth, to hand it over. I should be able to talk to my sponsor about this but since I can’t, I have to think of someone else who’ll understand. I’d really love to talk to my first sponsor, but he’s going away soon and I know he’s extremely preoccupied with that change at the moment. I think my anger today was simply caused by feeling trapped in a social situation that I couldn’t cope with. Why do I subject myself to that so much of the time? The only positive about this evening is that I came home as soon as I’d finished my first drink, rather than politely staying for another. Next week I have to come home as soon as the meeting is over; for some reason I just don’t like that coffee gathering. Sometimes it’s fine – maybe it’s down to the group dynamics. I don’t know. By helping out next week I guess I’ll be subjecting myself to similar social agony in the meeting itself, but at least it has a time limit and I’m doing it for the good of the meeting as a whole.
Sorry for the raw feel to the blog today, by the way. But without honesty this blog is nothing. And I do feel better now – which must be good.
It’s been a very busy few days since I last wrote here. About 75% of my mental energy has been taken up with my degree. The first assigment deadline isn’t for another four weeks, but I’m throwing myself into the work now as it’s imperative that I do well this year – and getting better marks is going to require more than doing everything at the last minute. I’m working every day, treating my degree like a full time job, because it seems better doing it that way. I’m not getting much novel writing done at the moment, consequently, so a finish date by the end of the month has begun to look less likely. But the most important thing at the moment is my degree, really, and despite the suddenly massive workload I am enjoying University more than I ever did when I was drinking.
I think it’s fair to say that my AA programme was beginning to suffer, due to the stress of being back at Uni and the fact that my first sponsor is going away for quite some time this week. When I got myself a sponsor in the beginning it really brought me into AA as I finally had that strong bond that I could trust and work with. For the last few weeks I’ve been in between in sponsors and I only realised this week how disillusioned that was making me feel towards the whole of AA. Last night I had an emotional wobble, after yet another meeting in which I didn’t really speak to anybody and which I went home from feeling completely lonely and pissed off with the programme.
The good thing is that quite quickly I was able to pull myself back up, telling myself I could either choose to quit the programme altogether and go back to how my life was before, or I could get a new sponsor and start working properly on my recovery again. Being in AA and having a good programme is about more than just going to meetings every now and then; unfortunately for the last few weeks I’ve let that part of my life drift a bit, as I’ve only gone to 3 or so meetings a week and I haven’t made much effort to connect with people there. Last night I realised that I can’t keep feeling that way – I can’t keep coming away from meetings feeling so disillusioned that I want to throw it all away, however brief that feeling is.
So I plucked up the courage to ask someone who I’ve come to know and trust recently to be my new sponsor, and he has kindly agreed. As soon as I got his response telling me that he would be honoured to work with me, I felt a huge weight lift from my shoulders. I can finally get on with working the programme and the 12 steps again; I have a reason to keep going to meetings and to make the effort to be honest at all times. A few months ago, I don’t think I would have had the courage or the will to take this step. Asking someone to be one’s sponsor is a scary business, because of the possibility that they will turn you down; basically it’s a very big deal. Three months ago it would have so been in my nature to run away and just give up. It’s a testament to the programme that last night I somehow knew the right thing to do would be to stick around and get a new sponsor. My emotional wobbles may continue, but I think I’m getting better at dealing with them.
It all ties in with my issues around trust. I knew when my first sponsor told me he was going away that my trust issues were being tested, because I instinctively felt let down and hurt, even though his reasons for going away are nothing to do with me. He has his own life, his career, and I’m very happy for him. What I’ve had to learn is that there is a difference between trusting a sponsor and depending on them. I have a tendency to depend on those who I am close to, in a variety of situations. I think I became dependent on my first sponsor very quickly because I’d never had a relationship like that before. I needed the honesty that that relationship brought to my life, and so during the times when he couldn’t be there for me, I felt the old bitter resentment that I’ve felt towards various people all my life, ever since I developed my first and most important resentment towards my absent father.
There are other people in the fellowship who I’ve come to depend on, friends who have been there at crucial times and who I have been able to share very personal things with. When I came into AA I desperately needed that friendship, and to a great extent, AA can offer this type of friendship, as it’s what many of us alcoholics have missed out on in our previous lives. AA and the people within it are there forever; when the worst comes to the worst there will always be someone for me to phone, or a meeting for me to go to. But I don’t really know whether it’s right for me to feel so dependent on one or two close friends within the fellowship at the moment. My first sponsor told me that dependence for me is OK, as I am still in my early days, but I think that when it leads to me feeling let down, like it did last night when I didn’t get to speak to the close friend who I hadn’t seen for weeks, like it did last month when my first sponsor told me he was going away, it could be a problem.
For me, becoming co-dependent is such a natural thing to do. I was shown so little kindness in my childhood that it has been impossible for me to avoid feeling dependent on anyone who has shown me the remotest signs of kindness in adulthood. If I don’t see a close friend for a while, I literally begin to miss them so much it hurts; and when I see them again, I feel a lurch of fondness in my stomach. That feeling is so scary because it means I have begun to truly TRUST someone, and in my past experience, trusting people has always led to me being let down. It has been like a vicious cycle of trusting and getting let down. I don’t know whether my new AA friends will let me down or not, and that’s the problem. The evidence so far leads me to conclude that they won’t let me down, but I’ve never been one to fully trust the evidence. I want everything to go perfectly; I want to see my friends all the time, speak with them every day and do things outside of AA that have nothing to do with going to meetings. So far I haven’t really socialised with anyone from the meetings in a non-AA setting, and I’m just waiting for trips to the cinema and so forth to start happening. There are occasions like last night when I go along expecting to be able to hang out with these friends because I know that they’re going to be there; and then as soon as the meeting’s over they decide to rush off home before I can really get a chance to catch up with them. I might need to accept that life isn’t always going to be perfect in that way. Just because I don’t see certain people very much, doesn’t mean that our friendship has automatically come to an end.
For many in AA I will have reached a signifcant milestone in my recovery today, so although I wasn’t going to write today, I thought I should to mark the occasion. In some ways it seems like a lot more than 90 days since I last touched a drink – so much has totally changed for me since the 15th July, I wouldn’t know where to begin in describing the changes. Committing to the AA fellowship is about more than just not drinking; for me, anyway, it’s been about changing my perceptions of the world and the people in it. I found that my instincts about people were wrong, in that I didn’t know how to trust them, because I thought they were all out to get me. I’m still working on that issue day by day, but I’d like to think I’ve moved on a little bit in terms of opening up and trusting people. I’ve become used to socialising without alcohol, which is something I thought I’d never do. I’ve changed my lifestyle habits completely; I only go to bars occasionally now, which compared to my thrice-weekly clubbing before is amazing. The biggest and best change is that I am in complete control of my life and my behaviour. I have choices now – whilst many of them are scary and full of responsibility, this is really how I always wanted my life to be. Things are nowhere near perfect yet, but it’s getting there.
This week has been very busy, purely because I’ve had so much to do at Uni. I have projects and deadlines coming out of my ears already, and we’ve only been back two weeks! Therefore I haven’t had time to focus on the novel this week, sadly. The good news is it’s near completion anyway. Only a few more chapters to go and then I’m done with it. I’ll probably be announcing a book launch date by the end of the month (I wish!!)
My current relationship with the AA fellowship is still good; despite the sudden upsurge in responsibility with being back at Uni, I’m still getting to loads of meetings, seeing lots of people and making new friends. On Wednesday I did my first big AA ‘night out’, when a few of us went to see a chat show being recorded. It was exciting, fun, entertaining and very surreal, as I’ve never seen TV being recorded before. For that reason it was probably the best night out I’ve had in years, not least because I got to go home reasonably early and didn’t have to worry about hangovers in the morning!
After a week of not having internet access at home, it has for some reason decided to come back on today, so I thought I’d better take the opportunity to write something before it goes again! Since I last posted here things have been pretty much the same. My final year at Uni has begun properly and we’ve already been given a tonne of homework which I haven’t even thought about starting yet. Part of me is filled with dread every time the thought of that homework crosses my mind; and then I berate myself for being so lazy because I won’t get the marks I want this year if I keep putting everything off to the last minute. But it has just occurred to me that I still have a while left to do the work - my first deadline isn’t for a fortnight, so perhaps I don’t need to put so much pressure on myself at the moment. Unfortunately it’s in my nature to beat myself up. I’m so desperate to get good marks this year, the idea of slipping behind again literally terrifies me.
The novel’s still going well, I guess. If all goes to plan I’ll have finished it by the end of the month. Of course I would have liked to finish it last week, so that I can start to focus completely on my degree. But the creative urge has definitely died a bit this week, and it’s tough to write more than a couple of pages a day at the moment. Compared to the forty pages I wrote last Monday, that seems like nothing. Again, it’s tempting to beat myself up over it. Why can’t I write forty pages every day? Why does the urge have to come and go so sporadically? The truth is, I don’t know why it comes and goes, and there’s not much I can do about it at the moment.
Still going to lots of AA meetings; most of the time I’m glad to be there, but sometimes, like today, I still wish I was somewhere else. I don’t know why but I felt so angry and resentful again this evening, I could hardly talk to people properly, even those who I consider my friends. The voice in my head was saying: ‘don’t speak to anyone, they all think you’re a freak’. It hadn’t done that for a while and I guess I was thinking earlier this week that I’d finally overcome the resentment and fear…and then today happens and it all begins to crumble again.
As I walked home tonight part of me wanted to never go to another meeting. If it’s still this hard to talk to people normally after three months, how long am I going to have to wait until it gets easier? That part of me also really wanted me to have a drink tonight. The voice was saying: ‘maybe it wouldn’t be so bad to allow myself one night of boozing, to anaesthetize the negative feelings. What harm could it really do in the long run?’
Luckily I went straight home and avoided the pub. So there must still be a part of me that wants to continue with the AA programme. There were so many reasons why I felt angry and isolated today, and they all come back to my intrinsic self-centredness. Alcoholism is such a selfish disease and today I expected everything to be perfect; sadly it wasn’t and my natural response was to feel resentful about that. They say in AA that when you take away the alcohol you still have the -ism, and I think my ‘ism’ is resenting people. It’s my new addiction. I hope that when I go back to meetings this week I’ll be able to ignore that nasty voice in my head and open myself to people’s friendship and love again, because there really is a lot of love in the rooms. I’ve felt some of that at times, and it’s truly wonderful.
Readers, it’s been a long week. For the best part of it my internet connection at home has been down, meaning I’ve not been able to log onto here very conveniently since my last blog post. I am sitting in an internet cafe right now hoping I can get a good post written in time before my credit runs out!
Having no internet at home has been a bigger blow than I would have expected it to be. For me the internet has come to represent a lot of the good things in my life. Without it I wouldn’t have this blog; I wouldn’t have made a lot of friends over the years thanks to several great social networking sites; I probably wouldn’t have made it to AA, were it not for those social networking sites in the first place. It’s really easy to say that the internet represents everything good in my life. It has dramatically changed my life in so many ways and not having it at home feels like not having electricity. I’d become that dependent on it.
Unfortunately there’s nothing I can do about the problem until an engineer is due to come around to fix it next week. Being a typical alcoholic I’m getting exceptionally impatient for next week to come around. I’m feeling resentful that I’m being deprived of what was once my only link to the outside world. I’m really lost without it, even though there are many internet cafes situated in my local area which provide reasonably priced web access. It’s not just a connection to the outside world for me, it’s a symbol of how far my life has come in the last few years. Before I had the internet at home I had no friends in London. I couldn’t chat with people at all hours of the day and night, I couldn’t download music at the press of the button. The period in my life where I’ve had home internet access is completely separate to the long period before when I didn’t.
It probably sounds quite sad to go on about such a trivial thing, when this is supposed to be a blog about recovery from alcoholism. Getting the internet three years ago didn’t immediately stop me from drinking, there were three more years left of that. But it did initiate some big changes in my life that have enabled me to begin getting better. My life before the internet is the dark, distant past, something which I am trying to escape from every day to get better. As I’ve said, before I had the internet I had no friends in London, because I had no idea to socialise here. I didn’t know how people went about making friends in such a big city.
That’s the past, but sadly it feels like it is catching up with me all the time. The feelings I used to have about myself are still there: the loneliness, bitterness, resentment. The only way I’ve managed not to drink for nearly three months is by continuously going to AA meetings. They are my most vital link to sanity now. While I still get slightly nervous going into the rooms now, it’s far easier to speak and share than it was three months ago. I have genuine friends now, and I’m starting to get invited on ‘AA nights out’, which is incredible.
Finally got back to University this week, and the modules that we are studying in our final year seem suitably fascinating. I have been told my final year dissertation will be a study on addiction, precisely what I wanted to do. The nerves about improving my marks are still there, and they always will be, but I’m not the only one in that position.
The book, thankfully, is still going well. During the long periods that I’ve been at home with nothing to do this week, I’ve forced myself to write, even though the doubts and the fear are very strong now. Most days I don’t want to write. But I desperately need to finish that novel before the real work at Uni begins. I’ve completed about two thirds of the book, which in the space of ten days, is pretty amazing, even though I’d hoped to complete it by the weekend.
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