Page 14 - AA NEWS DECEMBER 2019

14 14
Continued from page 1
to get good but rather sick people trying to get better.” In hindsight I can only wonder at why that notion had never occurred to me – but it hadn’t! I still remember the first time that I heard someone express that sentiment at a meeting. Wow! That was surely not the way I had been viewing things. I had indeed come to view myself as simply a bad, very bad, person, a no-good nick if you will.
While I was well educated in the ways of this world, for a very long time I knew absolutely nothing about alcoholism. I wasn’t a “drunk;” that much seemed certain to me. And yet I had no idea why I was making such a mess of my life. There was something very wrong going on with inside me, and it was only getting worse. But I’ll give it all more thought tomorrow, I’d reason - I don’t need to get myself any more depressed today. So, I’ll continue drinking for now and then get off to a good, clean start in the morning (at coming up with a plan for solving my problems). And there it was - the cycle of my life (day after day after day). To me alcohol wasn’t the problem; it was the solution to the problem (that being the depression that was being brought on by all the inexplicable problems that were sprouting up around me like mushrooms). But alcohol was the thing that was allowing me to cope with my misfortunes. It was the
thing that was saving me. Alcohol – my savior. To what depths off self- delusion I had fallen!
During those dark years I was, in a very sick way, living my life one day at a time. Or, more accurately, I was taking life one drink at a time. Which means, of course, I was not really living life at all. I had lost my love for life and finally I lost even whatever love and regard I still had for myself. Alcohol had finally become, at last, my very best friend (my only friend); it was the barrier that kept me from drowning in the bubbling caldron of self-pity and self-condemnation that was just waiting there to suck me down into a darkness from which there was no escape. My only relief was to be found in “the next drink and the temporary comfort of oblivion it brought” (12&12, p. 120).
How did I ever make it out of all that? Even today I sometimes ask myself that question. It was simply a miracle - there is no other way I can characterize it. No other explanation fits the facts. Something greater than me did for me that thing I was incapable of doing for myself. Something beyond my human ken reached down into the dark pit of my suffering and it snatched me be back from the brink. To borrow a line from the old English hymn Amazing Grace (John Newton, 1772), “I once was lost, but now am found;
Was blind, but now I see.”
By David L. Continued page 15