my two cents

A friend in the program who recently relapsed after a few years of sobriety and is back counting days has chosen a young woman as his sponsor.

He’s gay, and that is his not-entirely-unjustifiable reason for breaking with the tradition of same-sex sponsorship (in a small town where there is not a gay man with long-term sobriety). He wants a sponsor that he is comfortable talking to &etc. So he picked one of his sober hags.

For me, being terminally unique and special (and tailoring the spiritual solution described in the books and in the rooms to accommodate my own fears and resentments) was not helpful. It was counter-productive. It conscribed my vision of what was possible. When I followed suggestions (and the steps), my world expanded. Having a straight male sponsor has kept me focused on the spiritual solution of the program.

It seems almost counter-intuitive, but whittling away the excess of who and what I thought I was, and accepting the singular and fundamental truth that I am an addict, allowed me to really grow and begin becoming who I am (and will be).

And, even though I am a slightly pudgy white American male, with enough time, money and plastic surgery, I could become a bronzed Latina flamenco dancer and live in rural Barcelona. I could change pretty much everything about myself except the simple fact that I am an addict. I could buy papers to change everything about my past—my date of birth, my family, my education, my social security number. But I will always be an addict.

Before I tried to kill myself (and ended up in a treatment center instead), I had been talking to my therapist about getting a lobotomy, or maybe shock therapy. He had been trying unsuccessfully for months to get me to attend meetings (he is in the program himself). In the end, he was getting together some names in the region to talk to—the decline to my spiritual bottom was rapid, and terrifying to watch. Quitting meth without a spiritual solution was not a good decision for me.

Neither was drinking almost constantly for the next nine months. But it was what I needed to do, because I said so, and I knew me better than anyone else. Except, I didn’t.

I only knew the me that was, I didn’t know the me that could be. As long as I relied upon my own will, my own willfulness, I could not accept that I could feel anything other than despair.

Today I have hope. I even have hope for my friend. While he didn’t pick the sponsor I would have picked for him, she does have really good sobriety, and he is trying. So that’s a start.