One day in her Step study group, an oldtimer discovers something brand-new about Step Four. Proof that the learning and growing never stops
In my Monday evening Women’s Step Study, our small group’s routine is to go around the room, giving each person the opportunity to read a paragraph or share or simply introduce herself and pass.
It happened that when it was my turn at a recent meeting, the paragraph I read was about the Fourth Step in our Twelve Steps and Twelve Traditions book. The paragraph is about egomania and indirectly urges us to be “a friend among friends…a worker among workers…”
In my copy of the book, that section has been underlined and highlighted in several colors of ink, revealing numerous readings over the years. I even drew stars and brackets marking specific words. Across the top of the page, at some point in the past, I scrawled the phrase: “A friend among friends…a worker among workers.”
Through more than 31 years in sobriety, that paragraph has been one of the most significant anywhere in our literature for me. As I see it, those words mean that I need to humble myself, that I need to tamp down my ego. I am not the smartest kid in the room, and I need to stop acting as though I am. I need to stop judging everyone else (and finding them all lacking in some way or another). I need to be, as my sponsor used to say, just one of the many “bozos on the bus.” In other words, a friend among friends, a worker among workers.
But that day, when I read that personally powerful paragraph in our meeting, the words seemed different. Suddenly the meaning of those two phrases changed for me.
To be a friend among friends and a worker among workers does not mean I value myself less than others; it means I value you more. It does not mean that my self-esteem decreases; it means that my esteem for you increases.
Another line in the same paragraph reads, “Always we tried to struggle to the top of the heap, or to hide underneath it.” That made it sound like my choice was to either see myself on the top of the heap or on the bottom. But as I read those words in the meeting, I realized I was misinterpreting that too.
We are “the heap,” all jumbled together, each with value, esteem and worth. In this human heap, there’s no mentally healthy top or bottom for me. All this time I’ve been trying to figure out my “level” in the heap, when I could have been enjoying the miracle of just being in the heap at all.
As I come up on my 32nd AA birthday, people outside the Fellowship occasionally ask why I still go to “those meetings.” It would be hard to explain to them, but my rereading of this single paragraph explains it in crystal clear terms to me: It’s because I still have so much to learn and so much growing to look forward to.