Getting Started

On the morning of December 17, 1981, I checked into an inpatient treatment center for alcoholism. I was eighteen years old. That night, after supper, a vanload of fellow patients and I attended an AA meeting, my first, in the cavernous basement of an old Episcopal church. Scared, ashamed, beaten down by recent experience, I waited to see what might unfold.

I didn’t know anyone there. Even my treatment mates were strangers to me. We sat in a large, irregular circle on metal folding chairs. Just about all of us smoked cigarettes, and I recall a dreamlike, hazy aspect to the lamp-lit room. I didn’t know what to say or how to act. And for the first time in years I didn’t have the comforting advantage of some disinhibitor in my bloodstream. Despite the relative warmth in the room, I was shivering.

Each of us in turn said our piece. Today, I don’t recall specifically what I uttered that night, or what others said, nor would I share that information if I did. And really, what was said or heard is secondary to the feeling I drew from the experience.

I’d always been something of a misfit. Even among my dearest friends, I never really felt all the way in. Sitting in that first AA meeting, though, it seemed as if I’d discovered a haven of sorts, a safe harbor. I didn’t know a soul, yet I could intuit what my fellow attendees had experienced along their respective paths. Their stories meshed with mine, as I’m sure mine did with theirs. But more than that, I was gifted with a vision—really, only a glimpse—of possibility. Maybe, just maybe, there was a way out of this. That meeting gave me something to hold on to as the evening played out. And if this first day worked out—if I didn’t use or bolt from the treatment center—it would bode well for the next day, and perhaps further.

The shivering subsided.

I would remain in the program for a year-and-a-half before relapsing—at first smoking the odd joint with friends; then chipping away at pills, coke; and eventually returning to booze, my drug of choice. Not surprisingly, my meeting attendance during that time fizzled out to nothing. I would spend three more years in active addiction—more than a thousand days of pain, despair, and humiliation—before returning to recovery at twenty-three. Today, I’m approaching thirty-four years of sobriety. Literally everything I have in my life right now shares a causal link to my having returned.

But an even more powerful connection, one that I acknowledge every December to this day, is that initial cloud-break of hope: getting my start in the smoky, warm glow of that church basement in 1981.

*AUTHOR’S NOTE: An edited version of this short piece appeared in the Readers Write section of THE SUN magazine, issue 546.