6 months, 16 days (200 days sober)

My first bit of news is that I have almost completely recovered from the cold which put me in bed for the best part of two days. My second bit of news is that I am 200 days sober, today. I worked this out this morning when I was trying to remember my day count in sobriety. I don’t know why I was trying to work it out. I lost count of the days ages ago. To realise that I’d actually reached 200 days without a drink was quite nice. It does seem a very long time, longer than I ever believed possible in the beginning.

 Despite all this good news I am feeling pretty pissed off this evening. There are a number of reasons for me feeling pissed off, and I know what every single one of them is. I have forked out for an expensive set of PC speakers to replace the worn out old ones, which don’t work properly anymore. The new ones look very nice, but they don’t work properly either. I’ve tried everything and it hasn’t worked. Another reason I’m annoyed is because my skin has been particularly dry and greasy all day (I’ve had skin problems on and off all my life).

 Another reason, perhaps the main reason, is that I spoke to my sponsor on the phone for the first time in three days earlier, and he didn’t sound particularly happy to hear from me. It sounded as if I’d caught him in the middle of something. When I asked if he’d got my message the other day telling him I was ill, he said he had no idea what I was talking about. I thought I’d better let him know that I was ill and may not be able to contact him for a while – well, I guess I needn’t have bothered.

 We spoke for a couple of moments about my day, nothing very exciting. He briefly mentioned that he was in a ‘funny head space’ at the moment; if I was more well-balanced and confident I might have pursued it, but I’ve never felt that I can ask my sponsor about his life. It always has to be him telling me about his life. It was the same with my first sponsor. I still don’t know if I’m supposed to be asking my sponsor outright about these things. He always seems perfectly happy just to talk about me, but I’m not sure I’m happy with it. When he’s in a good head space, sounding normal on the phone, it’s fine; when he’s clearly not OK (like tonight) I have no idea what to say to him because I realise I haven’t got the first clue about his life.

 I know what he does for a living, I know where he lives, I know his surname and I know the name of his flatmate, but I don’t know him. He’s been my sponsor for months, yet I don’t know what makes him tick. In the meeting tonight people were talking about ‘the glass wall’ again, that invisible barrier that separates every alcoholic from the rest of the world; with my sponsor there is definitely this glass wall that I haven’t yet broken through.

 It’s made all the more frustrating by the fact that I know what it is and why it’s there. It’s a glass wall that I struggle to break through myself every single day during every single interaction with the outside world. To notice that my sponsor keeps his own barriers up shouldn’t be a surprise. When we were doing step 5 together, for a moment I felt like I was getting through that wall, like I was seeing the real him. But it always comes back up in the end. I know it because I do the same thing with everyone myself.

 All of this begs the question, what do I really need a sponsor for? I’ve probably written about it before, and you’re probably all bored to tears of hearing about it. But it’s an issue that refuses to go away. Very basically, I suppose I need a sponsor to go through the steps with. I’ve seen people get away with not using their sponsor for anything else. People have told me I don’t need my sponsor to be a friend. He’s taking me through the steps and I should be grateful for that. The fact that I don’t feel warmth from my sponsor sometimes doesn’t sit well with me – but at least he hasn’t sacked me yet, and he isn’t likely to.

 I think more of a worry is the fact that he’s too busy to see me most of the time. Earlier in the month he was coming to a lot of my regular meetings, and during that time we got along very well. But now his life seems to be taken up with endless work again, and it turns out I’m going to have to wait until next weekend to get back to step 5 with him. Anyone who knows about step 5 knows how important it is – I really want to get on with it, and it’s very frustrating to be made to wait even a tiny bit longer.

 It was my sponsor who told me how important it was to start step 5 – so I can’t believe he’s doing this to me now. I had exactly the same problem with my first sponsor, who I loved dearly but who also only seemed to have about three free minutes a week. I’m aware that when things like this happen my patience is being tested, and I could take it as a lesson to be more patient rather than jump straight into resentment and frustration. I’ve already been told that I have the rest of my life to do the steps, that it doesn’t all need to be done right this minute. But I want to do them now! Surely that matters?

 Once again I find myself with a difficult choice. I can either find a new sponsor who will definitely have more time for me, or I can stay with this one and wait a bit longer. If he does what he’s said he’s going to do – return to education later in the year – then he’ll probably have a lot more free time in a few short months from now. Does that make me feel better? Not really. I have a feeling there’ll always be something to feel resentful about.

 Part of me is tempted to look for a new sponsor who has a lot more sobriety than my current one, who only has a couple of years. Maybe I need someone whose sobriety date isn’t so close to mine. God, it should be easy for me to find a new sponsor, given that I’ve done it twice before, but the thought of the search and the official asking fills me with as much dread as it did both times before. I can’t make a decision about this tonight, but what I can do is write out a step 4. It’s the only proven way of dealing with resentment, and right now the right thing to do is clean house.

6 months, 15 days

Nothing has really happened today. I’ve continued to be down with manflu, meaning that I had to spend most of the day in bed. This evening I’ve been online a bit chatting to friends, listening to my favourite music, something that always cheers me up. I hope I’m better tomorrow, I absolutely hate being ill. Ironically, when I was a child I used to be pray to be sick, so I could get a day off school. I guess a lot of people feel that way; and I guess it’s good that I can pray for my health every day now.

 I wondered if I might be ill because I’ve been pushing myself too hard, but I don’t think that can be the case. I’ve been walking in the wind and rain around London to save money on travel, but that’s something I’ve done for years. Apart from the walking, I wouldn’t say there was anything in my life that was particularly taxing. I have endless spare time (luckily falling ill this week hasn’t caused me to have to cancel any major engagements). I just think it’s bad luck that I got ill this week. I know a lot of people who’ve come down with the same bug, my mum had it last week.

6 months, 14 days

I’ve come down with a nasty cold which meant that I felt unwell all day, and I really resented going to my home group tonight to be the literature person for the first time, but I felt I had to go as I couldn’t let them down in my first week in the role. As I was voted in to be tea boy at the Monday step meeting last week, I was voted in to be literature boy at my home group in a very similar fashion last week: i.e. no one else wanted the job and I was the only mug who looked up to the job. I’m being bitchy, I know, but I’m not well and I don’t feel like being nice about it.

 Doing the literature isn’t difficult, it’s just the fact that I got there tonight to find that someone had already put it all out for me. If they want me to do the job why don’t they let me do it? And then the meeting started and the chair was exceptionally positive about his half decade in AA, as chairs usually are, and I didn’t want to be there. I realised that I had felt this way every single week since coming into AA. I never really want to be there, even though there’s part of me that always looked forward to that meeting too. I made it my home group because it’s the only meeting I have been able to tolerate continuously since last July. Am I feeling resentful of it now because it has become familiar to me? Everything that becomes familiar to me ends up being resented by me at some point.

 After all the newcomers had had their chance to speak I put my hand up to share as I knew it was the right thing to do. I realised that my ‘illness button’ was being pushed by something and the negativity needed to come out for me to feel better. I can’t afford to isolate and keep it to myself any more. I didn’t really plan my share, I simply said what came to mind, and I ended up speaking about social anxiety for three minutes, as I think that’s the real problem with meetings like that. It’s an incredibly sociable meeting, and because I felt ill tonight I didn’t have the energy to put the effort into socialising, which made me resentful and isolatory to begin with.

 Once I’d shared I felt better, though I still had to put all the literature away at the end of the meeting, which was a real struggle. I don’t think I should have gone tonight – I just wasn’t physically 100%. I think I went anyway to punish myself, for all the times that I stayed at home during my drinking days, all the commitments I missed because of hangovers.

 No more commitments until Sunday, thankyou! I’ve done my bit this week, and I am proud of that. I’m not in love with the idea that I will have to commit to those three meetings every single week for the next year – a year is such a long time, and it’s still sooo hard being responsible, even though I want to be responsible now. I will keep my commitments because I know I can do them now. I don’t like them but they’re there and for a number of reasons, they’re mine – so my higher power and my sponsor keep telling me.

6 months, 13 days (a.k.a. working it)

It was quite a busy day yesterday and once again I was exhausted by the end of it, which is why I didn’t write anything. As usual I was greeting at the afternoon meeting down in Covent Garden. I don’t think it’s a commitment that I will ever look forward to. I said to myself as I was walking there, that the day I look forward to a commitment is the day that my ‘miracle’ happens. I get on with the commitment because I have no good reason to jack it in, though I think that if I still feel this way after six months I will happily hand it to someone else. Six months seems a very reasonable amount of time for me to do something like that.

 Funnily enough, tonight was my first shift as tea boy at the step meeting in Central London. I was fairly nervous in the hours leading up to it, but I had a few thoughts to comfort myself with, such as the fact that everyone gets nervous about commitments. The amount of people I’ve spoken to who said they hated the tea commitment to start with is incredible; the amount of people who say they loved it by the time they’d done it for a year is also amazing. I don’t think I’d mind doing it for the next year, though as I said before, I doubt I’ll ever look forward to it on a weekly basis.

 It went as well as it could have done tonight. The previous tea person showed me where everything was and what to do with it; once I’d got to grips with things all I had to do was stand there for half an hour serving people tea. Thankfully I knew most of the faces so it wasn’t especially difficult conversing with them.

 When the meeting started I went to sit in the middle of the room; as soon as I’d done so the thought entered my mind that I should have stayed at the tea station, to continue serving anyone who wanted tea during the meeting. Sometimes tea makers at other meetings do this; sometimes they don’t. No one told me I had to do this, so when the meeting finished I sort of accepted that I hadn’t done anything wrong, though that niggling doubt will probably remain at the back of my mind until next week.

 God, my head is so screwed up! Making tea shouldn’t be an ordeal for anyone, but for me it practically is. If I’m not worried about whether to stay with the teapot or not during the meeting, I’ll be worried about not putting enough tea bags in the kettle, or not buying enough milk, or not saying ‘hello’ to people properly. Basically, there will always be something to worry about, because that’s the way my brain is wired. Although I’ve been greeting at Covent Garden on Sundays for nearly four months, there are still niggling worries related to the commitment every week. I simply can’t let them go.

 There was a moment earlier on when I wanted to walk away from all my commitments: that was the old part of me wanting to run away from responsibility. That fear of responsibility and pressure may never go away. I may always hate work. I’d really like to think that one day I’ll find a role in life that I take to instantly like a duck to water, but I just can’t see it happening. I’ve never taken to anything easily. The reason I’m pushing ahead with all these commitments is because I need to find out if I can operate in the real world. Until now this is something I have never been able to do, and part of my recovery is inevitably learning about the real world.

 People say that commitments in AA are designed to keep you coming back to the meetings, but I’m also sure that they’re designed to teach us alcoholics about responsibility. People have shared this week about responsibility: I’m not the only one who finds it sickeningly daunting. I know I keep going on about this, but when I’ve graduated in the summer I’m going to have to find a job to support myself, and the fear that I won’t be able to do it sits with me every day. It doesn’t go away - I’m so fed up of it now, I just want it to be the summer so I can find out what’s going to happen. In a way, I suppose it’s a good thing that I’m getting impatient for the degree to be finished, so I can get on with entering the real world and finding my way.

6 months, 11 days

It has been a very long day, but persevere with this blog I must as I continue to need that daily connection to the outside world. I was up at 7 o’clock this morning for the first time in months, as I would be meeting Earl at London Bridge station just over an hour later, for our second trip to the South Coast in the space of a week. His friend is still dying and I couldn’t think of any reason not to go down there again. Although last week was pretty emotional, I believe I got a lot out of it, not least because Earl and his friend would have been appreciative of my company. So we got to the nursing home by lunchtime and Earl’s friend seemed better than last week. He was talking a bit more and he seemed livelier in general. I don’t know if it’s because we caught him on a good day, or just because his condition is improving. That said, he still isn’t in a good state and it has been confirmed that he hasn’t got long left in this world.

 I realised straight away that I wasn’t anxious about being there today. I felt more comfortable; I could even say a few words of comfort to the guy, which I couldn’t last week. I didn’t wake up this morning with that instinctual jolt of fear that I get most days. Going to see a dying person isn’t exactly fun and last week I was very nervous about the prospect – I made myself go for Earl’s sake because he wouldn’t have asked me if he didn’t need me with him. This week, I felt different. I was grateful today for this miraculous progress that I seem to have made in the space of a week. For once, I wasn’t worried about embarrassing myself in some unexpected way, I simply went into the situation and dealt with things as they came up. As it turned out, there wasn’t much to deal with. Earl’s friend had fallen asleep by the time we left after a couple of hours. It was a peaceful, calm two hours.

 We were out a lot earlier this week, meaning we had the rest of the day to play with as we wished. We decided to head to the nearby city of Brighton, a locality that we both love dearly. I have many fond memories of Brighton, as does Earl. I’ve been there many times over the years, especially in recent years when I’ve gone on gay parades with friends there every summer. Brighton is like London by the sea. It has a lot of significance in the gay community.

 When we got there it was still quite sunny so we decided to go for a walk by the sea before dinner. It was windy and cold, but the views were beautiful. After dinner we attended a meeting in the middle of town that Earl had been to a few times before during previous visits to the area. I didn’t find it immediately appealing; the room was too cold and they insisted on turning off all the lights, leaving only a few candles lit in the corners, meaning that I nearly fell asleep halfway through the hour (I was exhausted from the long day by this point). A lot of the sharing only half made sense to me. I think I was just too tired to listen properly. But I know the chair was good; she talked of being a classic binge-drinking student type, which I definitely was for a long time.

 The train journey back to London was fast and effortless. Earl had suggested that I tell my mum honestly about my day out, as it’s not something I normally do. I’d previous told him about my untalkative relationship with my mother, and I think it worries him that I have friends (such as him) who know more about my life than she does. To be honest, it’s started to worry me as well. I’ve always known that I don’t talk to my mum about anything – it used to make me very angry with her. I thought it was her fault for not ‘understanding’ me. Recently I’ve begun to question what the problem really is, and in all honesty, I don’t know why it’s always been this way. It’s been so long since I talked to my mum about anything, I have no idea whether she understands me or not. She probably doesn’t understand me, but that’s probably because I haven’t told her about things.

 The only really serious conversation we ever had happened when I was around twelve years old; I asked her why my father had never been there, at which she burst into tears. It became clear to me then that she couldn’t cope with serious stuff so I’ve gradually given less and less away to her over the years. I’ve deliberately kept all my problems away from home, which has inadvertently made being at home a problem in itself, because I can’t possibly be honest or be myself here.

 Our relationship isn’t going to change overnight, but tonight I thought it might be worth taking the first tentative step towards change. I told her where I had been, who I had been to see and why. It wasn’t a long conversation; her interested reaction was enough for me. I was actually nervous about that conversation – silly, I know! Considering how well it went, I’m sure there’s potential for more like it in the future. My mother may never know the most intimate details of my problems, but just to be able to come home and talk about myself without worrying what she’s thinking would be nice occasionally. Today has kind of proved that the problem was always in my head. She didn’t bite my head off for talking about myself – she seemed genuinely interested in what I had been up to. God, I can’t believe this has become such an issue. It would be terrible if I left home and became a stranger to her – the truth is, that could easily happen if I don’t start putting the effort in now to change things.

6 months, 10 days

I’m very tired tonight, so it will have to be a short one. I know the main cause of the tiredness is all the anxiety that I went through before this afternoon’s exam. I was so nervous earlier on I could have cried. I really didn’t want this to go wrong. The strangest thing is that until last year, I never got nervous before exams. I really don’t know why that was the case. In all other areas I’ve suffered from a profound lack of self confidence, but when it comes to education I always seemed to sail through comfortably, to an extent. Until last year, anyway. Just before I quit drinking I turned up at one of my second year finals hungover from a big night out, and I automatically failed the exam because I could only answer one question out of two. I had to resit the exam later in the summer, and luckily I passed second time round, but only just. That experience must have put the fear of God into me, because the thought of repeating it is just too much to contemplate.

 I ensured success in today’s exam by spending the week revising, rather than leaving it to one or two days beforehand like I always did in the past. Today’s exam went so well I came out with a smile on my face afterwards. I actually felt very clever, having answered a geeky question on Prospect Theory which I know not everyone would dare to attempt!

 I needed to go to a meeting tonight so I went to my regular one in Soho, where I saw all the usual people. I didn’t share, because I felt genuinely OK tonight. I was happy to just to listen, and it was a very busy meeting. The chair was amazing, with a story very similar to mine. He talked about the shame of growing up as a gay man, and I could identify so strongly, it was quite emotional. Shame is undoubtedly a part of my story as much as fear and anger. It’s blatantly obvious that I continue to experience shame on a daily basis. It will take a long time to get over that.

 There are just things I don’t like about myself, such as my thick wavy hair, my glasses, my dry skin, my thinness. My sexuality has also been a feature in there over the years, though I’m not entirely sure where I stand on that at the moment. I think part of me is too scared to begin dealing with it. I know it’s pointless disliking those things because I can’t do anyhthing about them, and they’re nothing to be ashamed of anyway, but that’s the way I’ve grown up to feel about myself. I need to work on this toxic, all-pervasive shame, obviously. Hopefully step 5 will be the start of that work.

6 months, 9 days (Josh is happy)

If wordpress was like facebook and had something like a status update, today my mood would be ‘happy’. I have just come back from a couple of very good meetings, one in my local area in London and the other one in Victoria, Central London. Both of which I went to last Thursday as well with my friend Earl. As with last week, I shared at tonight’s first meeting then sat back and listened at the second one. They’re very good meetings; I feel at home in both of them. This is very unusual for me, given that six months ago I didn’t feel at home in any meeting. It’s also unusual because they’re predominantly heterosexual meetings where the average age of the attendee is a lot older than 25 (my age). Despite the differences between us I feel comfortable at these meetings now, which is amazing. The sharing at both meetings was very positive, full of all the AA cliches and metaphors that I have come to love.

 There were lots of newcomers present tonight as well; I can really appreciate now that newcomers keep us all sober. I only have to look at someone who is in their first day of sobriety to see how far I have come in the past six months. Whether the person sharing is one day sober or thirty years sober, I get something out of the share, and I’m brought back to what alcohol did to me, what it did to all of us. Someone tonight who just turned 29 years sober the other day said that alcohol was like a dirty sticking plaster: instead of solving the problem it got inside the wound and tore it apart. Alcohol wasn’t the route of the problem, it was just a symptom.

 I was full of anxiety today about tomorrow’s Psychology exam, but I’m still happy tonight. I know the exam will go well because I’ve been preparing for it all week. It’s in a subject that I love, and I really want to do well; I know I can do well. I have to keep reminding myself to believe in myself; hopefully that’s going to become more natural over time. Who knows if I’ll be feeling OK or feeling terrified tomorrow; tomorrow is tomorrow. I’m keeping this in the day.

 Tonight I’m grateful for my sobriety. I’m grateful for my recovery, and for the fellowship. I’m grateful for my intelligence and my health. I’m grateful that I am learning to be more comfortable and to share in different meetings.

6 months, 8 days

Every time I miss a day with this blog, I can’t help feeling when I come back as if I’ve been away forever. I know to combat that I should just make the effort to write every day, but sometimes I want a rest. The main reason for no blog yesterday is that I was busy chatting to friends and acquaintances on the internet. My bad. I was up til 1am last night, talking about random crap and not much else. I’m quite embarrassed about that. It’s like the internet has become my new addiction.

 Being able to talk about anything and everything on internet discussion forums has started to make me feel like alcohol used to make me feel. When I’m getting attention and validation for my discussion posts, a little switch goes off inside, and I can’t tear myself away. I want to change, because staying up until 1 in the morning is really bad for me. It makes it impossible for me to get up before 10 the next morning; today I was actually in bed til midday because I was so tired.

 Luckily I have no Uni this week, so I can get away with it, but that won’t be the case forever. When I go to work after the summer I know I will be required to get up early every single day. One of the reasons I’ve always hated work is because of the morning routine. Early rise, day in day out; it reminds me of being at school. I’ve been aware for a long while that my fear of work stems back to my fear of school. Even though most jobs are nothing like school, I haven’t been able to escape the school mentality. The responsibility and the pressure to perform are the main things, but the early mornings are a part of the fear as well. It must sound really strange, but this is what school has done to me.

 The past couple of days haven’t been that eventful. I went to my home group yesterday as usual, and for the first time I had to put my hand up to share, as I am no longer classed as a ‘newcomer’. To begin with I didn’t think I’d put my hand up – normally I’m really bad at doing that – but yesterday I made myself as I knew I was having the kind of day where I needed to share. I was bored and somewhat depressed all day, and the only way to get over that kind of day is to share about it. I’m so lucky to have the opportunity to get these things off my chest now: I need to be taking that opportunity as much as I can now.

 Once I’d shared, of course I felt better. After the meeting I was shocked when the secretary suggested that I become the new literature secretary there. Apparently the old one has disappeared, and since I’ve been helping out with the literature over the past couple of weeks anyway, I seemed the natural choice. My instant reaction to being picked for the job was fear. I don’t yet have a full grasp of how literature works - I don’t know how much things cost, I don’t know where everything goes and I don’t know how to order new stuff when it’s needed.

 Luckily before I left last night I was able to ask the secretary some of these questions, and he seemed glad to help, although he’s one of these people who seems to have a million things going on at once, and he’d walked away before our conversation was over. So I will have to find out the rest of what I need to know next week.

 The funniest thing is that exactly the same thing happened to me on Monday night, at the end of the step meeting where I had just done my chair. They were having a committee changeover which meant that all the commitments had to be filled with new people. Colin was keen for me to become tea boy, as he thinks it will be a good role for me. No one else was interested in the job so, just like last night, the position went to me. This means that I now have three commitments in AA. Three days ago I only had one!

 I didn’t really want the tea or the literature commitment, but I couldn’t really say no, could I? I know service is what keeps us sober, and I’m probably going to need the preparation for my entrance into the real world this summer. If I can manage three commitments then it may be a bit easier for me when I leave my comfortable world of education and find a proper 9-5 job. The only reason I’m scared of taking further commitments on is because I’m scared I’ll be crap at them, I’m scared I won’t know what to do and I’ll have to ask for help, which could make me look silly.

 By next Monday night I’m sure I’ll be as nervous as hell, but right now I’m not hugely concerned about my new role. The former tea person at the step meeting has offered to help me out for the first week, and as I said, the secretary on Tuesday will help me out with the literature. If there’s something I don’t know how to do, all I can do is ask for help. If I don’t, I really will look silly. Perhaps I should take heart from the fact that on two occasions this week, people have thought me worthy of an important commitment. They know me in AA now; maybe I’m popular now!

6 months, 6 days (the next chapter)

Sorry for the lack of blog updating yesterday, this occurred because it was an incredibly busy day day for me. Today has not been so busy, thankfully, though it was quite a full evening. So, yesterday I finally started step 5 with my sponsor. I went round to his flat early in the afternoon, and it was another one of those journeys that seemed to be full of delays, which caused me to question whether I really wanted to go through with it. In the end I knew I had to make a start on the fifth step. I was more than ready weeks ago; there would be no point in continuing to delay it. We made a good start yesterday. We sat comfortably in his living room for three hours, talking about my father. In step 4 I wrote 70 pages on my resentments, 4 of which were dedicated to my father; somehow we only managed to get through the first two yesterday. I hope we can speed up the next time I see him, because the step would end up taking all year otherwise!

 Later in the afternoon we drove into town together to the Covent Garden meeting, where I was greeting as usual. I still don’t look forward to that commitment at all, but I always get it done nonetheless. It’s still difficult making conversation with people I don’t know, but luckily I know most of the faces who go to that meeting now.

 My main gripe with greeting there is that it’s such a busy meeting, and I can only get a seat right at the back of the room, as all the others are taken by the time I’ve finished my job, which makes it very difficult to share. I didn’t share yesterday, though I would have liked to. The chair was great, given by my sponsor’s flatmate actually! I suppose it’s lucky I wasn’t feeling too bad yesterday: on those occasions it’s not urgent for me to share. It’s when I’m feeling bad that I do need to open up and speak.

 After the meeting I was hooking up with a non-AA friend for a night out at the cinema. I haven’t been to see any films since last summer, which is just terrible. Now that I’m in recovery I want to do things that don’t involve pubs and clubs, because that does kind of feel like my old life now, not something I want to go back to. It’s only now that I’ve made the effort to do something slightly different, i.e. eat out at a nice restaurant and watch a good film at the cinema with a good friend. We never did that sort of thing before, honestly!

 That was yesterday, a good fun day all around. It feels weird describing the start of my step 5 as fun, I guess, but I’m glad it happened!

 Today was, as I said, a bit more low key. I spent most of the day at home, making a tentative start on some revision for this Friday’s exam in Thinking & Deciding. To begin with I was quite anxious that I’d managed to leave revision so late, but as I began going back through my notes, I realised how good my memory was, and I’m sure I don’t need to worry about it now. Revision isn’t meant to be about learning the stuff for the first time, it’s merely supposed to remind you of things you already know. I enjoyed that unit last term, mostly because I was understanding quite difficult concepts easily.

 This evening was, of course, my first AA chair! I found myself feeling very nervous beforehand, not surprisingly. It wasn’t the kind of fear I thought I’d feel, though: it was like the fear I get every time I do service, the fear of having responsibility. I wanted my first chair to be a good one for the meeting’s sake, I didn’t want to let all those people down. The minutes leading up to the meeting dragged by, as did the bit where the commentary on Step 3 in the Twelve X Twelve was read out by the room. Finally at 8 o’clock I could start to speak, and it seemed to flow pretty naturally. I talked about my background, my youthful feelings of isolation, anger and anxiety; my wild and colourful drinking days; and then came onto my progress in recovery, which was really nice to talk about. I talked quite a bit about step 3 because it was officially a step 3 meeting, so there was lots of mention given to ‘handing it over’, something I admittedly still struggle with on a daily basis.

 Once I’d finished I felt that rush of adrenalin that comes after every share, which signifies I’ve done something really good. The sharing back from the room was lovely. Many of my friends from the fellowship were there, and they were all kind enough to tell me how it had been a privilege to see me grow as a person over the past six months. Dean reminded me of the conversation we had in our early days, when we both wondered how people ever got asked to do chairs. Now we know, as we’ve both done one!

 It was very strange being sat at the front of the room, with everyone looking directly at me. To begin with I felt like I was piloting a plane for the first time, with the duty to steer a good meeting entirely on my shoulders. But by the end it was fine. I made a conscious effort to maintain eye contact with everybody as they shared with me, which felt unnatural but OK. Afterwards when the meeting was over I talked to people I don’t normally speak to, and I went for coffee with the group, for the first time in ages. There were moments when I sat quietly in the cafe, not participating in the group conversation, like the old me always would in social situations. But mostly, I had a good time and a laugh. Tonight ended on a very positive note, and it seems I have passed a definite turning point in my recovery. No, I’ve passed a turning point in my life. The chapter in my life where I hide behind the mask of shyness is over now. I’m more than ready to move forward and embrace the next chapter of sobriety now. From now on, I must do everything I can to be honest and true to myself. There can no longer be any keeping anything back.

6 months, 4 days

It’s been a very painful day, but like many days in recovery, I believe it has ultimately been good for me. I was invited by Earl this morning to go visit his dying friend on the South Coast. I think he asked me along because it is always a tough trip for him and he could do with the support. I happily agreed as I was honoured to be asked, and given that I’ve never seen that side of life before, I thought I could learn something.

 Our journey down was long and fraught with delays. Part of me couldn’t help wondering if the delays were installed by my higher power, to question me on whether I was really sure that I wanted to go. As we got nearer to the coast I got increasingly nervous, knowing I was really about to see someone in a heartbreaking state. It was certainly going to be a different day out for me.

 When we finally got to Earl’s friend’s nursing home we were ushered into the room, where this old man who could barely speak or acknowledge us lay practically paralyzed in his bed. He had suffered a recent series of strokes and it was originally thought that he wouldn’t make it past last weekend. That he is still alive is a miracle to all concerned. Earl and I simply sat with him for three hours, seeing to his needs and chatting sporadically while the TV lit up the room in the corner. I’d never sat with a dying person before.

 It was painful to watch someone so helpless; even more painful to see photos of that same person up on the wall, in his happier days when he was full of joy and life. In the photos he looked like a ray of sunshine, a pleasure to be around. That’s what really stuck with me today, the photos. The person in the bed was barely a shadow of the man on the wall. According to Earl, he was a chronic alcoholic whose current condition was brought on by that. If alcohol has done that to Earl’s friend then I believe I’ve had a lucky escape.

 Ever since we left the nursing home this evening I have been on the verge of tears, but I can’t quite get them out. Even now, safe in my own home I can’t cry, because my mother is in the next room and I can’t let her hear me. Over the years I have learnt not to cry for that reason. I wouldn’t be rebuked for crying, it would just be embarrassing.

  But that’s a side issue. Anyway. I’ve been reminded of my mortality today and that is very frightening. Well, ‘reminded’ might be the wrong word – I’ve never even had cause to think of it before. During my drinking, all the dangerous situations that I got myself into, not once did I really think that I could die. I knew I could get hurt but when you’re young you can’t help feeling invincible, can you?

 Earl himself is in his 60’s and practically on the way out thanks to years of smoking and crippling insomnia. Though compared to his friend in the nursing home, I suppose he is in the peak of health at the moment. I’m very sad tonight, because no matter what I do in life, no matter what I achieve, there are some things that can’t be changed. None of us will be here forever; not all of us will get to go out in a manner of our choosing.

 The positives to be taken from situations like this include, of course, the fact that that man I saw today will have his friends and relatives around him in his final days. People who really care for him. And that’s lovely. I may not have interacted with him much but there’s a chance he knew I was there, and perhaps he just appreciated the company. I don’t know.

 I will certainly come away from today feeling very different about things. Some of my worries have inevitably been put into perspective. Earl told me that what I must do is value every minute I have left on this planet, because every minute is worth its weight in gold.