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matter by reminding me that it was important to be myself instead of falsifying my opinions for the sake of agreement. He suggested that I try a simple prayer for a while. It said, “Dear God, let me be me.’’
My life changed as I began to try to follow the AA way of life. I found, through the Steps, that my horizons slowly expanded. I could leave the security of my home group and travel, going to AA meetings in other areas. Very slowly, I grew up. I found I could remarry and raise children. I also grew in the business world by leaving my first job sober, as a cab driver, and eventually reaching a position of responsibility whereby I was in charge of maintenance of an international airport.
By staying close to AA and the Twelve Steps, I discovered a new me. This took me time, a lot of time. The process was sometimes painful, but always rewarding.
Then I experienced an event that has taxed my ability to accept almost to the limit. At the ripe old age of thirty-eight, and with seven years of continuous sobriety under my belt, I had a massive coronary. The heart attack nearly took my life, and the subsequent recovery period was long. Limitations were again placed on me. For a while, doctor’s orders confined me to one AA meeting a week. I still cannot risk speaking at an open meeting or getting too active in Twelfth Step work. Those things, which I had so depended upon for my sobriety, were taken from me.
Many of my AA friends have had similar experiences that necessitated changes in their AA activities, and their counseling has been a great comfort. Also, this experience gave me a chance to practice the principles I had heard about in Step discussion meetings throughout my AA life. I was unable to run to an AA meeting every night as I once had, to recharge my batteries.
I found it more difficult to accept my new limitations at work. No longer was I placed in a position of responsibility. I was given an office job, and my physical and mental activities were cut down drastically.
In short, I had to renew my feelings about accepting the things I could not change. I had overworked the Serenity Prayer in my early days of AA, and now I had to overwork it again. I had to go back and redo or retake the Steps to fit them into my new set of circumstances. I realized that I’d done this before, as have many others I know. We change as time goes by, and the full meaning of the Steps, the Traditions, and all that is AA must change within us to keep us on our happy road to recovery.
First, I had to quit resenting the changes in my life and accept them for what they were. Amazingly, as I did this, many restrictions were lifted. Today I live a full life, with an equal balance of AA, work, and recreation. I enjoy my family, my AA friends, and my business associates a whole lot more than I ever did before the heart attack.
Finally, I appreciate and need AA much more today than I did on that October day in 1964, when I had nothing to lose and everything to gain by joining the Fellowship. I still have everything to gain by following in the footsteps of my successful AA friends. But now I also would have an awful lot to lose by leaving the Fellowship. Today I can compare the sober life with my drunken existence. I like what I’ve got, and I believe I’m willing to go to any lengths to keep it.
W.H., West Palm Beach, Fla.
Charming Is the Word for Alcoholics
By Fulton Oursler
July 1944
Down at the bottom of the social scale of AA society are the pariahs, the untouchables, and the outcasts, all underprivileged and all known by one excoriating epithet—relatives.
I am a relative. I know my place. I am not complaining. But I hope no one will mind if I venture the plaintive confession that there are times, oh, many times when I wish I had been an alcoholic. By that I mean that I wish I were an AA. The reason is that I consider the AA people the most charming in the world.
Such is my considered opinion. As a journalist, I have found it my fortune to meet many of the people who are considered charming. I number among my friends stars and lesser lights of stage and cinema; writers are my daily diet; I know the ladies and gentlemen of both political parties; I have been entertained in the White House; I have broken bread with kings and ministers and ambassadors; and I say, after that catalog, that I would prefer an evening with my AA friends to an evening with any person or group of persons I have indicated.
I asked myself why I consider so charming these alcoholic caterpillars who have found their butterfly wings in Alcoholics Anonymous. There are more reasons than one, but I can name a few.
The AA people are what they are, and they were what they were, because they are sensitive, imaginative, possessed of a sense of humor and an awareness of universal truth.
They are sensitive, which means that they are hurt easily, and that helped them become alcoholics. But when they have found their restoration, they are still as sensitive as ever—responsive to beauty and to truth and eager about the intangible glories of life. That makes them charming companions.
They are imaginative, and that helped to make them alcoholics. Some of them drank to flog their imagination on to greater efforts. Others guzzled only to black out unendurable visions that rose in their imaginations. But when they have found their restoration, their imagination is responsive to new incantations, and their talk abounds with color and light, and that makes them charming companions, too.
They are possessed of a sense of humor. Even in their cups, they have been known to say damnably funny things. Often, it was being forced to take seriously the little and mean things of life that made them seek escape in a bottle. But when they have found their restoration, their sense of humor finds a blessed freedom and they are able to reach a godlike state where they can laugh at themselves—the very height of self-conquest. Go to the meetings and listen to the laughter. At what are they laughing? At ghoulish memories over which weaker souls would cringe in useless remorse. And that makes them wonderful people to be with by candlelight.
And they are possessed of a sense of universal truth. That is often a new thing in their hearts. The fact that this at-oneness with God’s universe had never been awakened in them is sometimes the reason they drank. The fact that it was at last awakened is almost always the reason that they were restored to the good and simple ways of life. Stand with them when the meeting is over and listen as they say the Lord’s Prayer!
They have found a Power greater than themselves which they diligently serve. And that gives a charm that never was elsewhere on land and sea; it makes you know that God himself is really charming, because the AA people reflect his mercy and his forgiveness.
THREE
Men and Women Who Share
You and I Need Each Other
May 1977
DEAR JOHN:
I could almost begin this letter “Dear Newcomer.” The only problem with that is, I want you to know how close I feel to you at this moment in our lives. Watching new people grow renews my sobriety, and I hope I never lose interest in the personal joy of sponsorship in the years ahead.
You asked me a question at our meeting last night. You asked why coming close to your first AA anniversary, you felt a bit down and angry. When I asked whether you thought you were getting to enough meetings, you avoided a direct answer. I have seen this before in newer people—the technique of not answering a pertinent question. The other way of avoiding honest answers is to mumble about “being tired” or “busy with work.” Well—all these things may be true, but meetings are how you and I met.
The questions made me reflect on the ways of newcomers and my sponsor relationship with them over the years. God surely knows, I have made mistakes. I have tried not to repeat the same mistake. I have noticed this rebellion against a proper number of meetings in almost all the younger people I have sponsored. In fact, I have observed certain recurring habits with