A few years back, because of moving from Md, to upstate N.Y., I had to dispose of a number of things. One of them was a number of boxes, which contained a lot of notebooks. In those notebooks were the journals I wrote, covering about 15 years of my journey into sobriety in this program. For some reason I thought about these journals today.
I don’t know how I got started on keeping a journal, whether by suggestion or just whim, but they proved invaluable to me in my sobriety. They weren’t an everyday diary kind of writing. They were writings I put down on my thoughts about my struggles, as I began to grow along spiritual lines. Sometimes things I picked up from my readings.
They gave me a kind of measurement of where I was along the way. I remember one day I learned a valuable lesson, which literally changed my thinking and my emotional life. I was caught up in a depression of sorts and decided to put my thoughts down. After I had written a couple of pages something hit me. So I decided to go back and read from a couple of notebooks I had written in before. After I read a couple of pages, I went back further in a couple of other notebooks. And there it was. What I had written down that day I discovered I had written before. Almost exactly the same words, line by line.
What it showed me was a pattern in my thinking and my actions. Someplace Bill W. wrote about looking for patterns. Suddenly I knew that I could change these patterns and I did, through the help I got from talking to others and the help of my higher power.
After that I have never fallen into a depression since. I learned the warning signs and learned to sidestep those traps.
By applying the Steps to what I learned, I found that I could change my thinking and how I felt about anything. I also learned that the spiritual awakening is not just a one time event. It is to me a process, which began from the day, when I stopped drinking, and still continues on to this day.
If I had my way (talk about being powerless), I would urge others to keep a journal for at least the first few years in this program. I remember reading an article on this very subject, which reported that those who kept a journal for a number of years in this program, never went back to drinking. I would have to guess that it has something to do with commitment.
Some place along the line, I realized that I was done with that kind of journal keeping. Whatever I had written and what I had gained from it, was no longer necessary. Probably because the results were already ingrained within me.
After having written those statements, I had to laugh at myself. I’m still doing it. Talk about habits. Oh, well, I’m grateful that I had the opportunity to develop along these lines. It has added so much to my to my sobriety. And that, after all, is my primary purpose in life.