My Best Thinking (example one)
Historically I’ve had a hard time making 12-step meetings. I tend to be something of a loner. I’m certainly an introvert, although most folks would find that hard to believe. Mostly, however, it’s been my depression that has played a part in my tendency to “miss meetings”.
Shortly after I moved back to Mobile from Memphis in ‘99, I started hitting meetings. I’d been on a good meeting run in Memphis for several months, averaging I would guess, somewhere around 3 a week. I’d also acquired about 4 and half years of continuous sobriety. (I realize it’s the steps and not the meeting that make sobriety possible, but it doesn’t hurt me to be around other folks like me.) I like alcoholics and addicts. They are the folks I prefer to hang around, both when I’m drinking and drugging, and when I’m in recovery.
Anyway, after initially hitting a bunch of meeting in Mobile, my wheels came off. The depression that had been kicking my ass for years at that time just wore me down. About that time I got hooked up with Mobile Mental Health, which is where the poor folks go for care. Soon I was on meds, and I planned on getting back to meetings when my depression abated.
Well, when it abated, I felt so damn good, for the first time in years, that I decided not to return to meetings. In my grandiosity, I told myself that I might be a bad influence on the garden variety alcoholics and addicts, since it was medication that ultimately gave me my life back. I dropped the meeting like a hot potato.
For a time I kept up with reading recovery literature. I was also doing some 12 step work, trying to help a kid I worked with want to get sober. (He died). But as time rolled by, probably about nine months into my psych med regimen, I packed away my recovery material and pronounced myself cured.
And things went great. Until they didn’t. When I got sick and injured, I didn’t have any support. Somehow I managed to hold on for a year as my life seemed to disintegrate around me. Ultimately, though, I picked up. It was probably inevitable from the time I packed my 12-step material away.
Live and learn. Hopefully.
[...] No, meetings don’t keep people sober long-term. Only God does that, via the steps. But meetings may very well prevent someone from relapsing, if say, that someone went to a meeting instead of the liquor store. Meeting have never gotten me loaded. I wrote about my meeting experiences at “My Best Thinking (example one)“. [...]
it works if you work it « Cracked Head Blog
February 14, 2008 at 12:04 pm