Today I met myself in a meeting. Someone, who described his struggles with getting sober. That part I didn’t have, when I came in. I knew I couldn’t stop drinking and never questioned that First Step. I had no questions about being powerless over alcohol. It was a major factor in my life. That impossible fact that I couldn’t will the drink away. I totally surrendered and accepted that I was an alcoholic.
No, that wasn’t where we were similar. What was the same was the way he thought. It was me all over again. His intellectualizing and analyzing everything. After I came in, though I had already accepted my alcoholism and the unmanageable life I had, I questioned everything else. So much so that my sponsor and those old timers got on me for doing that.
I was told that I was too smart for my own good. That I didn’t know that I didn’t know. I only thought I knew. I was to find out the truth to that statement, as time went on. But for a long time I was in my own way. My thinking that I knew it all and that everyone else was wrong. I lacked humility and was filled with my self centered ego.
But having been educated in theology, psychology, and philosophy, and other subjects, I thought I could bring them in here and put them into action instead of the action the program talked about. How wrong I was. I was told to leave what I had learned outside the doors, get an open mind, and come in and sit down and listen and learn. Slowly I came to do that, but it took a lot of ego deflation to get me to listen. And when I did, I could see why and where I was wrong.
Part of the problem eventually came out in the open. I talked about that with the man, who was me, after the meeting. I told him I had a “God hole” within me. A very black hole inside, which all my drinking life I tried to fill from the outside. Buying things, getting money, and whatever else and nothing filled that gap within. In here I finally learned that the only way that hole could be filled was from within. And eventually it has been. Absolutely amazing to me.
But just the fact that after the meeting we were standing outside talking was another thing, which hit me later on. I found that I was still filling that hole within. Part of that we have to give it away to keep it. That’s what I was doing, not thinking that way. I just wanted to share my story with him. I know from what he had said how rough it had been with him. That too I could identify with. And it made me grateful that I am where I am today.
I only hope that my sharing with him will help. I pray that it will. Anyway it’s our primary purpose, which I laid out for him, to do what we were doing there. To stay sober and carry the message to the alcoholic, who still suffers. It sure helped me.