Getting sober allowed some important changes to take place. These changes collectively allowed me to have an opportunity to face and deal with my life. This does not mean that I do deal with my life better, just that this is now possible. I did not have this opportunity before. My perspective before was like seeing the world as a blurry black-and-white picture. I was not only unable to see things clearly, my ability to know what I should do in my dealings with others went from bad to worse. Self centered fear, a lack of clarity, and increasing isolation were a recipe for decline – not growth.
Change came with working the the twelve steps. Attending meetings and not drinking of course helped. I couldn’t have the former without the latter but the converse was not true. Not drinking and going to meetings did not bring about the change I needed. It merely cleared some ground to allow me to begin heading down the path of sobriety.Today, twenty years on, much of the time I am able to see reality for what it is. The unfocused, misguided, distorted viewpoint is now atypical. At times I do lose my improved perspective and yet more often than not, because of practiced what I have been taught, there are people around me that will tell me that I have lost my focus.
Seeing reality for what it is, being sober, and having been more carefully schooled in understanding right and wrong I can approach most situations in my life with an opportunity: do the best or right thing, knowing fully well what that is and what the situation calls for – or – take the wrong or self centered action, which is what I seemed to always know to do before. The promises spell this out “we will intuitively known how to handle situations that used to baffle us.” The rub today is that I don’t always do the right thing. Why? Because having the opportunity to do the right thing does is not the same as doing the right thing.
Still, just having the chance to do better in many situations does lead me to taking better actions. For that I can be thankful. When I do the wrong thing, well that is another reason I needed to have my sponsor take me through the 12 steps for the first time. By taking the actions I did then I learned through experience how to begin to start handling my life. Do the work that can help me to try and do and better and, when I fall short, to understand that nature of my screwups and do what I have to do to clean up my messes. And I still need help with this, and the steps, today.
Wishing you all the best in sobriety,
AA Blogger