It was close to a year ago now when my boss, Edward Grinnan, the editor-in-chief of Guideposts Magazine, told me he had a new project in mind for me.
“I’d like you to write a blog for the Sober24 site,” he said.
“A blog?” I asked. “You mean one of those things where you write about what you ate for breakfast that day and the last movie you saw? Who’s going to want to read a blog by me?”
“Maybe nobody,” he said. “But I think it’s a good idea. Just write something regularly with a good recovery message.”
“Okay," I said. "I’ll give it a shot.”
Ever since, every week or so, I’ve taken time out from my regular Guideposts work to come up with a short, informal essay on the theme of recovery. Like most sober people, I spend a fair bit of time thinking about sobriety anyhow – in particular my own – so subject matter wasn’t much of a problem. Each week I pretty much just wrote about whatever happened to be on my mind at the time.
The only slight problem was the “good recovery message” bit. Sure, I was sober, and had been so for more than a decade. AA’s core ideas had come along at just the point in my life when I most needed them to, and had, without exaggeration, saved me from an early death.
But at the same time, I wasn’t exactly a poster boy for perfect recovery. “You’re writing a recovery blog?” one sober friend said when I told him about my new assignment. “Couldn’t they find someone more…”
“More WHAT?” I asked defensively.
But I knew I knew full well why my friend was talking about. I’ve never been a recovery person with a capital “R.” While I credit the Twelve Steps with saving my life, I also know that I do a less than perfect – a way less than perfect – job of incorporating them into that life.
That fact was borne home to me last week by a series of posts about what some readers found to be a disturbingly vivid description in one of my blogs about my use of the prescription opiate Demerol. Where, some people wanted to know, was the help for a sober reader – especially a struggling reader who was perhaps new to sobriety – in such material?
I was both taken aback by the strong reaction these lines got, and at the same time not taken aback at all. The biggest surprise to me, actually, was that it was these particular lines that had brought on the reaction and not any number of earlier ones. After all, many a previous post of mine contained statements that were just as questionable from a recovery angle.
The posted reactions to my piece also contained some responses from people who were kind enough to point out that the larger message of the piece was indeed a positive, pro-recovery one. I’d like to think this is indeed the case. But at the same time, I know that I’m guilty of all the sins the negative posts accused me of – and then some.
One of the first things I learned when I stopped drinking and taking drugs twelve years ago was that in order for recovery to work for me, it had to be interesting. “Recovery, gentlemen,” my favorite rehab counselor told my fellow patients and me somewhere during the first murky days of my sobriety, “is not a Magical Mystery Tour.”
I knew – or thought I knew – what he was getting at. Sobriety needed to be approached on its own terms. It wasn’t something you could jerk around with – something you could spice up with additions and alterations of your own. At least if you intended to stay sober.
But at the same time, I also realized that I couldn’t leave my individual personality – with all its various kinks and quirks, its ever changing moods and opinions, its tendency to be right about some things and wrong about others – outside the door. At least not if I intended to stay sober.
Somehow I had to figure out a way to keep my individual personality – my problematic but essential self – while at the same time handing that personality over to something larger and smarter than it could ever hope to be. A “something” that I could neither see nor even define, but which I sensed existed all the same.
At a certain point early on in my recovery, I decided that the Twelve Steps were talking about something – a spiritual landscape – that was genuinely real. And the more certain of this I became, the more relaxed I became about allowing my views of it to change from day to day. Once I realized that the values the Twelve Steps point toward were going to be out there regardless of what I thought of them or of how well or badly I managed to live by them, I was able to question them -- even to argue with them -- without fear that they would suddenly break or vanish as a result.
If there really are such things as spiritual principles, those principles will remain what they are regardless of how well or poorly we live by them.
It’s in that spirit that I’ve been writing my flawed, and (probably) occasionally outright wrong-headed musings on the Steps and what they mean to me.
Does this make for that "good recovery message" my boss originally asked me to deliver? I hope so. That is, I've tried to frame my occasionally off-center thoughts within the larger context of my belief in the reality of the spiritual principles -- and the larger spiritual landscape -- that the Steps imply. In the future though, I'll try to remain more conscious of lines that might -- especially out of context -- have a negative effect on readers.