Today is the 21st anniversary of my sobriety. Amazing!
It is still chilling to remember this time, twenty-one years ago now, and what that was like. I so fervently hope I never have to feel and experience most of what happened, and how I felt then, ever again.
The ironic thing is in the midst of all of what happened I had a profound spiritual experience. During the fleeting few minutes that it occurred I was more at peace than I have ever been in my life. It was a palpable ease and lightness. The best way I can describe it is that I felt like I was sitting in the palm of God’s hand – and I knew it. That explanation of what it was like though is all retrospective in that I didn’t even believe in God then. I had no idea what had happened was a spiritual experience, or what that meant, or how deeply I had been changed. The immediate benefit was a sense that I knew I could not drink or drug anymore and, as I was to discover, the obsession had been lifted from me. That was of course good.
The few minutes of intense peace I had that night were framed by strange and very opposite feelings and experiences. I had just been revived, through someone giving me CPR, and I had been gone. Dead. The three people around me were very freaked out – yet I was fully enveloped in a feeling of total peace. I could not figure out why they looked so pained and worried. I knew everything was more than all right. Why didn’t they know this too? Everything was fine now and into the future.
Then my few minutes of having my senses about me in a way I never had before, and in someways have never had since, ended. The ambulance, the hospital, a night in intensive care. Not fun. The sense of peace was long gone.
My first sober day was spent in the hospital. Horrible. I laid there and thought about how badly I had failed in life. How could I live now that I could no longer drink or drug? Like it says in the Big Book – I could not imagine life with or without it. I felt so much fear, self-loathing, guilt, and remorse. It was numbing, like a huge weight bearing down on me.
Easily the most horrible day of my life, that day in the hospital. It was my nadir. I could not know it would mark the beginning of my ascent from hell back into the land of the living. Sane, spiritual, love-filled living. Something that bears no likeness to the mess that my old life was.
It is easy to imagine that my old self died when I died that night. But it didn’t. A different me was forged from that experience, along with the Grace I was given by having some powerful changes take place in my attitude and outlook. Yet the old me is only an elbow’s reach away. I have no doubt. Despite all the blessings, good people around me today, the tools I have at my disposal, God in my life, and all the rest – I could still be right back into that dark despair and fear in no time at all.
It would only take me taking a drink….one is never enough for me….and I left off at a place that when I drank I had no idea what was going to happen. Other than what did happen was more and more consistently something unpleasant, bad, and unsustainable. Stuff like dying. That is what awaits me. Any day, any year that I want to pick up again. It doesn’t matter when. My guess is that old me will only be able to give up waiting for me to drink again when I do die, and stay dead, at some point in the future.
Today I can feel especially grateful that God, AA, my friends and family, and other things have all helped me continually kick that old me into the gutter and keep him out of my way. It is so nice to live, have normal living problems, and have love be a part of my life.
So good to be sober!
Wishing you all the best in your sobriety,
AA blogger