“When the student is ready, the teacher appears.” How I hated to hear those words at meetings. They implied humility and a willingness to listen to whatever stranger happened to sit next to me or approach me on the street. Yet during five years of sobriety, many teachers have appeared in my life. Some were only there for a short time. I was not particularly fond of all of them. But in looking back over those “chance” encounters, I am grateful for the gift of willingness I received long enough to hear what those special people had to say.
My initial experience with the AA program occurred on the road. I went to ninety meetings in ninety days in ninety different towns, traveling through Canada and the western United States. At first, I did not call myself an alcoholic. Strangely, I never wondered why I was sitting in Alcoholics Anonymous meetings night after night, if I did not belong there. Granted, I had answered “yes” to many of the twenty questions in the pamphlet, but I still was not certain that I was one of you.
In rural Oregon, on the rainy night before Thanksgiving, a woman named Sandy sat next to me at the small, open meeting. The chairperson called on her to share first. “I don’t really have a topic,” she said, “so I suppose I will just tell my story.” The words she spoke resonated in my soul. She was telling my story. It was the first time I had ever heard my very own story, my personal pattern of drinking, expressed by someone else. The tears were streaming from my eyes before Sandy was finished speaking. When the chairperson called on me next, I could only manage to say, “My name is Kit and I am an alcoholic.” My teacher, Sandy, had shown me that I belonged in the AA meeting, that I was an alcoholic of your type and kind.
Sober for seven months, I returned to Alaska from my journey Outside. It was minus twenty degrees in Anchorage. Broke and baffled, I was living in a van parked on the street. Daily I attended the One for the Road Group, listening intently to the more experienced AA members and trying to make some sense of the hand that life had dealt me.
A woman named Paula from out of town frequently showed up at those meetings. One day I agreed to go for a drive with her. We drove all the way up to Chickaloon and took the long route home past the snow-covered pastures of the Matanuska Valley. I did not particularly like Paula; I considered her pushy and overbearing. Also, she seemed to be able to see right through me. On that day, however, I was captive in her car, so I tried to tolerate her constant talk.
After dark, we returned to her home. I made a move to exit the car. But Paula had other plans. “Have you done your Fifth Step yet?” she asked me pointedly. It must have been obvious that I had not.
“I’m still working on my Fourth Step,” I replied lamely. “It’s not finished yet.”
“Well, go ahead and keep working on it, but I want you to talk to me about the major issues. I know that there are some things you need to say right now, and you will not get out of this car until you say them.”
I sat in silence for the longest time. Paula waited patiently. Suddenly, in a rush, out tumbled the words I had never spoken to anybody. I talked about childhood and the disastrous relationship I had left in Arizona. I told Paula my fears and resentments. As I talked, she nodded and encouraged me to bring those big secrets out into the open.
When I finally finished, Paula said simply, “If I didn’t love you so much, I would have been bored by your story. I’ve heard all of it so many times before.” I saw that I was not unique. That talk for me was the beginning of a spiritual reawakening; for the first time, I experienced the Steps of this program working in my own life.
Soon after that day, Paula left Alaska, and all my secrets drove off with her down the Alcan Highway. If I ever do encounter her again, I will thank her for teaching me that we are only as sick as our secrets.
I became suicidal at eighteen months sober. In retrospect, I see that the problem was only self-obsession, but at the same time I was despondent. I wrote a suicide note and removed my husband’s gun from the drawer. It occurred to me in the midst of that insanity that I ought to go to a meeting.
I was not at all sure a meeting would help, but I drove for sixty miles on icy roads to get to town. I attended the morning women’s meeting; no help. I traveled another ten miles to attend the noon meeting; still nothing directly related to my situation was said. In desperation, I stayed for the intergroup meeting which was held immediately after the noon meeting.
Cathy looked like hell when she walked through the door. As soon as the intergroup meeting began, she stated in an unemotional voice that she was submitting her resignation as intergroup secretary. After five years of sobriety, Cathy had gotten drunk the night before. Not only that, but she collapsed on the bathroom floor after drinking a fifth of scotch. Her heart had stopped; an ambulance ride to the hospital followed, and through some miracle, she had been brought back to life in the emergency room.
I approached Cathy immediately after the meeting was adjourned. With an air of urgency, I begged her to tell me why she got drunk, why she nearly died. “I have to know,” I admitted to her, “because I need some solutions. I spent the morning planning my own suicide.”
Not meeting my eyes, Cathy told me that her mistake had been in not obtaining a sponsor. “I was dry for five years,” she said, “but I never was able to get really honest with another person about what was going on inside my head. Someone called me last night, before I took the first drink, and I told them that everything was fine. I was unable to reach out and ask for help. And that was my undoing.”
I pondered Cathy’s words during the drive home. Isolated in a tiny town during the long Alaskan winter, I had been carrying so many feelings and thoughts and words inside of me that I was ready to explode. Hence the desire to blow my brains out. Looking at Cathy, I saw where my stinking thinking was leading me. I realized that I had to reach out and ask for help, because no one in the Fellowship was capable of reading my mind. I found a sponsor the following week, and my obsession with self-destruction dissipated as I began to learn how to share with another human being.
Several women have had a sustained influence on my program for several years running. Some, important to me at a specific stage of recovery, merely evolved into casual program acquaintances as the time passed. Still others have recently loomed large in my life, after having been shadowy background people for much of my sobriety. I have learned to let go of old friends as they moved out of my life, in order to make room for the new friends to enter.
I do not understand the flow of people whose paths cross mine in recovery. But I do not need to understand that grand design. If I have faith that my Higher Power is providing for my needs, then I can be confident that those teachers, unlikely as they may appear, are present to contribute to my spiritual growth. Although I cannot know ahead of time who they are or what they will look like, I have learned to watch for the teachers who carry the message of recovery to me. And I pray for the willingness to listen carefully to everyone I encounter, for some of them may say the words I need to hear.