Recovery.

Over thirty years ago, I stopped drinking and using recreational drugs. I was 23. This was a good thing.

No one who knew me at the time suggested the decision to stop was an ill-advised one. I was a mess; I had a misspent youth and was careening toward disaster. From the age of 14 to 23, I abused alcohol, marijuana, quaaludes, cocaine, mescaline, librium, valium, speed, acid, and probably other drugs I’ve long forgotten. 

I believe alcohol and drug use was fueled by long-standing un-diagnosed and untreated depression. This combined with what was, up until that point, a paucity of basic life skills, negated the ability to be the loving, kind and giving human being I had the capacity to be. There’s no blame to be had. I suspect my parents did their best to be loving and supportive. Their lead may not have been very good; perhaps they had no business raising children. But placing it in time and location, simply, less was known then, than we know now about such things.

I am convinced my abuse impacted my brain chemistry enough for addiction to take root. Since getting clean I have realized, the things that transpired while drunk and high more than suggest abstinence freed me of the yoke binding me to poor decision-making and a certain early death.

So much time has elapsed since alcohol and recreational drugs were part of my life, I no longer feel deprived by their absence and I have no place for them in my life today.

I learnt about Alcoholics Anonymous from a bloke I picked up in a bar.  He was drinking grapefruit juice and club soda when I met him. A few weeks after spending a night with him, I found my way to my first AA meeting. I have been sober since that time.  

I take little or no credit for this path. Success in recovery was the result of the kindness and love strangers extended to me. Many became lifelong friends. I am a product of the example they provided. I am the beneficiary of the love they freely gave. Not drinking became a way of life. Self-examination became a rewarding process to live by. Although I am an atheist and struggled with concept of a god (in the manner the AA literature prescribes), I managed to find a path to prayer and meditation.

Those parts of the process that I believe in helped change my entire life in positive ways: I am more giving, I am kinder, and I am more willing to be helpful. I value being of service. Recovery was a common thread in many long-term friendships that have been a lifetime in the making. Today I believe there are many many ways to eschew living one's life at the bottom of a bottle. I happened to find one that worked for me.

Yet lately I find myself in a period of transition.  Many close friends with multiple decades of recovery have left the program. Some have reintroduced alcohol into their lives, among them accomplished people with very public profiles who I respect enormously.  I have no desire to join them, but I simply observe their decision has not wreaked havoc in their lives.

Yet, although AA has clearly had an enormously positive impact in my life, if I put aside for a moment those positive things the AA program engenders, I find myself increasingly intolerant of the dogmatic exclusionary behaviour exhibited toward individuals who don't "conform" to the ideology. I am especially disturbed when I witness intolerance causing psychological harm to people. This is often the case with individuals who return to AA meetings after failing to maintain continuous abstinence. Ostracized, criticized and marginalized.

I am also weary of the talk of gods and higher powers.  It’s utter nonsense.  I am an atheist. I try to ‘never say never’ but the likelihood I am struck a believer after what I witnessed across the street from the World Trade Center on September 11, 2001, is mightily slim.  Where was the corporeal being that gave a shit about what anyone did or didn’t do on that day? Surely among the many souls that I watched control their fate, emerging through the curtains of broken glass only to descend into the ground, there must have been some who were gentler and more deserving human beings than I?

When people in AA speak of their higher power who wants this for them or that for them, I think to myself, "If there is such a concept as sin, it must have something to do with wasting my time listening to such bullshit when I could be riding my bicycle or helping others in a more loving, open and accepting way through some other mechanism."

Perhaps the most troubling aspect I grapple with is the realization my burgeoning belief in the notion, 'we practice our destination' is more than a slight contrast to what AA teaches. It seems to be the antithesis of what I see and hear. People suggest, "My disease is out in the parking lot doing push ups." Puh-lease. If I continually tell myself and practice, "I am diseased, I'm broken, I am defective, I'm on the brink of catastrophe..." guess what? I am that. 

The disease state is not a current state.

It may have once been, but ‘disease’ is no longer a lifestream.

These negative repetitive messages that cause one to question one’s judgment as “alcoholic thinking” are neither healthy or productive for me to internalize at his juncture in my life.

As a good friend and spiritual guide who has nothing to do with AA suggested once, "AA meetings! It must be like watching bumper cars stuck in a cul de sac."

While I subscribe to the notion, for me, one alcoholic drink would launch catastrophe, I reject the notion that I am perpetually on the brink of that catastrophe. That is no way to live. I changed. I have a full life. Joy and sorrow. Interests and hobbies. Career and friends. Yep, they may be right in AA when they say, it's a "bridge back to life." But there's plenty of people stuck on the bridge.

I choose not to be that.

How to reconcile and embody this choice is still unfolding; my objective continues to be to explore ways to practice my destination. I should like to think that includes continuing to seek, grow and evolve. The relationship to AA is complicated, but I am increasingly suspect that something that hasn't changed or evolved in 84 years can be the primary integral aid on the path to meeting that destination.