Sobering
Addiction is an equal opportunity leveler. It doesn’t care who you are, what your background is, or what your lot in life is — if you have a predisposition for it, and get trapped into it, it will do the same thing to you, on the inside, regardless of what’s going on, on the outside. It will take you down.
Once you’re in it, and down, getting up and out is no easy task. It generally requires considerable help from beyond. That help, necessarily, usually has to start with a little help from your friends, if you’re lucky enough to find some who know how to help with such an issue. If you’re really lucky, you might even find some friends who learned how to tap into the great beyond. They can show you how they did that, while they‘re helping with the immediate issues. Cultivating a relationship with that great beyond is what will sustain ones freedom, and allow one to really thrive in the business of living life on life’s terms, without the aid of a mind or mood-altering substance.
After much searching, and finding that mere reliance on friends and others who were in the same boat as I, was not quite enough to achieve and sustain said freedom, I was lucky to find such friends as those described above. They were able to show me how to establish and sustain a relationship with a power greater than myself. They said that would be the most important relationship of all, and if I got that one right, the rest would fall into place.
It was a turning point in my life, a dividing line, where everything before that was a hopeless struggle, a constant battle where it seemed the harder I fought, the worst shape I found myself in. Life after that became much saner, still with a lot of confusion and effort involved, but effort that more often resulted in improving conditions in my life, both inside and out, after crossing that line.
I’ve tried to never forget how truly lucky I was to find such friends as those who taught me how to be free. One of the ways to “keep it green”, as they say, is to carry that message of freedom to those who are still stuck in it, or who are still paying a price, still living the consequences of things that happened around them, when they were deteriorated on the inside.
I was asked by a friend to carry such a message the other night, to a place where folks are locked up, and under maximum security, due to things that happened while under the influence, where they became a threat to themselves and to those around them. It’s not a prison, per se, but a guy who once shot a president spent a good deal of time locked up there, before he was finally deemed safe enough to be allowed to rejoin the human race outside of this maximum security facility.
It had been a long time since I’d carried a message into an institution. I had never been asked to carry one into a place with as much security as this one had. As my friend and I waited in the waiting area to be given entry into the facility, we both recalled times we were on the inside of places not too unlike this one. We were sitting by the secured doors that you leave the facility by when you’re done — he told me how it felt, the first time he came in to this place, once he was leaving, and those doors closed and locked behind him. I could only imagine that feeling.
Eventually, a guard came to sign us in, and we were guided to a locker to put anything we had in our pockets into, and locked, before we went through the metal detector and got wanded down. Next, we were led through a set of locked doors, escorted by a fellow with a walkie-talkie who got someone else to unlock the first set, then once we were through that one and it closed and locked behind us, the next set of doors was deactivated, just long enough for us to walk through, then relocked. We were now securely inside.
The next hour and fifteen minutes were spent with the folks on the inside. I knew these people. I had been inside other facilities with folks they reminded me of. I was well on my way to a facility just like this one, before I got lucky. I could easily have been one of them, easily been on this side of the double-locked doors, for more than just this evening. Being there with them brought it all back to me, though all of that was over forty years ago.
After a number of opening readings from various sources, mostly from the AA Big Book, I was introduced and asked to tell my story. There were about thirty in the large room, most listening, some unable to sit still long enough to listen, but it did seem that they were all right there with me, as I described what it was like. After I told my story, and a coffee break, we opened it up for any and all to share. Among them were some who had years of sobriety under their belts. A number of folks came up to me during the break and after the meeting, to talk and graciously thank me for coming.
After the meeting, they were all sent off to their various wards. Some were in the maximum security side, some were in lower levels of security — all would be spending the night there, except for me and my friend. We got to leave.
He was right — that feeling you got when you stepped outside of the locked doors, and they clanked shut behind you, was like none other. Walking out into the cool fall nighttime, towards our cars, the air smelled especially sweet. The freedom tasted even sweeter. My friend, whose sponsor got him to take this commitment, told me what his sponsor said about coming to the meetings in here. “Each time I leave, I feel a little more sober.”
I knew what he meant. When I got home, after a 45 minute drive, I had a renewed appreciation for what I have in my life, today.
It was very sobering.
