God didn’t clean you up so you could pretend you were never messy. Your story is someone else’s hope.
There is something about that sentence that makes me uncomfortable.
And I think it should.
Because after we have been sober for a while, it is surprisingly easy to become embarrassed by the person who first walked through the doors of Alcoholics Anonymous.
We get jobs back. Families begin trusting us again. We become sponsors, trusted servants, old-timers. Some of us become people others actually ask for advice, which would have been hilarious to everyone who knew us years earlier.
Life changes. We change. And somewhere along the way, there is a subtle temptation to edit the story. Not necessarily to lie about it. Just to clean it up a little.
We were taught to share in a ‘general way’. We tell the parts that are safe. We leave out the parts that still embarrass us. We turn our alcoholism into a polished recovery narrative with a beginning, middle, and inspirational ending. But the very mess I would rather forget may be the thing somebody else desperately needs to hear.
We Were Never Asked to Become Impressive
In Working With Others, the Big Book says:
“Practical experience shows that nothing will so much insure immunity from drinking as intensive work with other alcoholics.”
Notice what it doesn’t say. It doesn’t say becoming respectable will keep us sober. Or knowledgeable. Or spiritually impressive. Or having thirty years. It says work with other alcoholics.
And one of the primary tools we bring to that work is our experience. If all I tell the newcomer is what recovery has made possible, I may inspire him. If I tell him truthfully where I’ve been, he may identify with me. Before someone can think, Maybe I can become like him, there is often an earlier realization: My God. He was like me.
That’s where hope can begin.
The Temptation of Image Management
Bill Wilson himself was known to embellish a story from time to time. That doesn’t diminish what Bill gave us. It reminds me that Bill was one of us. Alcoholics can have a complicated relationship with how other people see us.
My friend John K. calls it “image management.” That’s exactly what it is.
Image management doesn’t always require lying. Sometimes it’s simply deciding which version of myself I want you to see. I can tell you about surrender without mentioning yesterday’s resentment. I can talk about my spiritual awakening while leaving out how badly I treated somebody last Tuesday.
And strangely enough, the longer I’m sober, the greater the temptation may become. At five days sober, nobody expects me to have anything figured out. At five years, maybe a little. At twenty years? Thirty? Almost forty? Now I’ve got a reputation to protect.
But I haven’t conquered alcoholism.
I’ve been given a daily solution to it.
Those are very different things.
God Didn’t Clean Us Up So We Could Pretend We Were Never Messy
Maybe that’s what the original statement is really getting at. Recovery didn’t give me a better image to manage. It gave me a life in which I no longer have to manage the image at all. And some of the most important stories I can tell today aren’t stories about what happened while I was drinking.They’re about what happened after I stopped.
The Cup of Coffee
When I tell my story today, approaching four decades of sobriety, I sometimes tell people about something that happened when I had 29 years sober.
I stole a cup of coffee. Yes. A cup of coffee. I didn’t need it. I could afford it. I wanted it. NOW! And in that moment, my alcoholism wanted what it wanted when it wanted it.
So I took it.
There was an amends to make. I made it. And after making that amends, I heard God’s voice as clearly as I have ever heard it: “Insanity doesn’t have an expiration date.”
That changed the way I understood what had happened. Twenty-nine years hadn’t cured me. Thousands of meetings hadn’t cured me. Working the Steps hadn’t made me incapable of insanity. Service hadn’t inoculated me against selfishness. And not drinking for nearly three decades hadn’t transformed alcoholism into something I used to have.
The Big Book says in How It Works:
“Selfishness—self-centeredness! That, we think, is the root of our troubles.”
It doesn’t say bourbon is the root. Or vodka. Or beer.
It points toward something underneath the drinking: self. Elsewhere the Big Book calls it a “spiritual malady.” The thinking behind that cup of coffee was painfully familiar:
- I want.
- I deserve.
- I’ll take.
That little cup of coffee taught me something enormously important about long-term sobriety. The sobriety date gets older. The illness doesn’t retire.
Or, as God put it much better: Insanity doesn’t have an expiration date.
Tell on Your Illness
That’s why I sometimes deliberately “tell on my illness” from the podium. I’ll tell people things the image-management department would strongly prefer I leave out. Not because public confession is inherently spiritual. Not because everybody needs to know my business. I do it because another alcoholic may need to hear what long-term sobriety actually looks like.
And something fascinating happens when I do. People come up afterward and thank me. Not usually for the polished parts. They thank me for admitting that a man approaching four decades sober can still become selfish, fearful, resentful, dishonest, controlling, judgmental, or consumed with himself. They thank me for telling the truth about what it can look like to be a long-timer and still get eaten up with untreated alcoholism and the spiritual malady underneath it.
We don’t talk about that enough.
Sometimes I think one of the most dangerous things old-timers can accidentally teach newcomers is that eventually we outgrow the problem. We haven’t. I haven’t.
I haven’t outgrown alcoholism. I’ve learned what to do about it.
There is a world of difference between those two statements.
When Experience Becomes Reputation
Long-term sobriety is valuable. Experience matters. But experience can quietly become reputation. And reputation can become something I feel obligated to defend. Now we’re back to image management.
- What happens when the guy with nearly forty years is consumed by resentment?
- What happens when the respected sponsor acts selfishly?
- What happens when the longtime trusted servant is afraid?
If I have built an identity around being the guy who has this thing figured out, I’ve created an incentive to hide whenever my life contradicts that image.
That is exactly opposite of what this program taught me to do. The Big Book doesn’t tell me to become impressive. It tells me to become honest.
My Story Isn’t a Performance
There is a caution here. “Your story is someone else’s hope” doesn’t mean every detail of my life belongs in every AA meeting. Not everything that is true is useful. And not every story is mine alone to tell. The question isn’t: How much can I tell? It’s: What part of my experience might help the alcoholic sitting in front of me? Now my story isn’t performance.
It’s service.
One of the promises in Into Action says:
“We will not regret the past nor wish to shut the door on it.”
Maybe we shouldn’t shut the door on our sober messes either. My cup-of-coffee story belongs in my experience just as surely as some of my drinking stories do. So do the resentments. The fears. The selfish decisions. The times I’ve tried to control outcomes, manipulate circumstances, manage perceptions, or simply get what I wanted when I wanted it. Those stories aren’t evidence that AA failed me.
They are evidence of why I still need AA.
Still Messy
Maybe our stories aren’t really before and after. Maybe they’re before and continuing.
I didn’t become a different species when I got sober. I am an alcoholic who has been given a way of living that works.
The Big Book says in A Vision for You:
“You will surely meet some of us as you trudge the Road of Happy Destiny.”
I love that we trudge (or walk with purpose). We don’t graduate. We don’t become spiritual celebrities. We trudge. And every once in a while, someone new starts trudging beside us.
When that happens, my job isn’t to convince him that I’ve finally gotten this thing figured out. My job is to tell him the truth:
- I know where you are.
- I’ve been there.
- Sometimes I can still go there.
- Here’s what happens when I stop tending to the spiritual malady.
- And here’s what happens when I return to the solution.
Maybe every time I tell on my illness, somebody else gets permission to tell the truth about theirs. That may be one of the greatest gifts a long-timer can give a newcomer. Not the image of someone who finally got it all together. The truth about someone who still needs Alcoholics Anonymous.
My story isn’t a monument to who I became. It’s a flashlight pointed back toward where I came from, and sometimes toward where I can still wander, so the person standing there can see that there is a way out.