There's a joke I’ve heard a bunch of times, the basics of which go something like this:
A guy stays out too late drinking one night. Staggering home at two in the morning and not wanting to wake up his wife, he goes to sleep on the back porch.
The next morning, his wife comes out and wants to know what happened the night before.
“I had to stay at work and help George,” the guy says. “He had so much extra work -- if someone didn’t help him out I knew he’d be fired. We didn’t finish till two in the morning.”
“That’s funny,” says the wife. “George called last night around nine, looking for you. What do you have to say about where you were now?”
The man thinks for a second, then says: “That’s my story, and I’m sticking to it.”
Stories play a large -- a strangely large -- part in recovery. And it doesn’t require the skills of a trained literary critic to see that the great majority of these stories follow a certain pattern. The Recovery Narrative, as anyone who’s gone to more than one meeting knows, has a certain basic shape, and follows a certain number of basic rules.
The beginning usually focuses on the period of infatuation: the narrator's discovery of alcohol, and its ability to render what previously was an opaque and baffling world suddenly both understandable and even enjoyable.
In Part Two, the problems start showing up. Broken relationships, lost jobs, physical injuries... all of them leading up to a series of bad situations, in the last and greatest of which – the crisis-point of the narrative -- the narrator finds his or her bottom.
Which leads on, inexorably, to Part Three: the journey back. Piece by piece, the narrator describes how he or she has picked up the wreckage of his or her life since then, and ends with a description of wherever he or she is at now.
Countless wrinkles exist, but in basic outline that is the way the great majority of the recovery stories I've heard have run. If you wanted to draw a diagram of this story, the easiest way to do so would be to draw a simple arc: a parabola dropping down, then coming back up to where it started. A smiley-face without the eyes.
All of which raises, for me at least, a question:
Is this story true?
Not “true” as in “did it really happen?” but “true” in another, larger sense. Does the Recovery Narrative – either mine, or Bill W’s, or that of the thousands of other people who have their own to tell – run the same way, again and again, for a real REASON? Is it more than just some arbitrary tool for ordering the apparent chaos of life?
Recovery stories are really all versions of a larger form of story sometimes called the redemption narrative. In redemption narratives, the narrator begins on what seems to be the right track in life, only to find himself – figuratively or in actual fact – in the woods. Sometimes the narrator gets lost because of something he did wrong. At other times, it seems like the narrator did nothing to incur his fate, but simply ended up there. Some redemption narratives (like some qualifications) are excessively moralistic, others less so. But in all of them, there’s a journey down and out, away from the straight track, through a region of darkness and confusion – and then, following the lowest point in the story, a journey back, toward the light.
Redemption narratives come in all shapes and sizes. But one thing runs through just about all of them. At the conclusion, the narrator is a better person (morally, financially, intellectually, spiritually) than he had been at the start. The journey through the woods was no picnic, but as a result of it, things are better for the narrator than they were before. Even world history itself – as in the Christian story of creation, fall, and redemption – can be read as one giant redemption narrative. In that case too, as bad as things get toward the middle, by the end – to quote the Christian mystic Dame Julian of Norwich – “all manner of thing shall be well.”
One of the first things I learned in the course of the month I spent in rehab some twelve years ago was that my life followed this arc as well. Or at least, it followed the first part. I had, for the past decade or so of my life, been involved in all kinds of things, had had all kinds of experiences, met all kinds of people. But I was also, in the course of this time, on a journey downward. My life, in a fascinatingly chartable way, really had been getting steadily worse. And it had all led here -- to this strange limbo of the lost called rehab – where, our counselors told us, our journey back up was to begin.
At rehab, I realized I had a choice. Finding myself at the bottom portion of the classic recovery redemption narrative, I could either look at my situation as just a bunch of mush – a chaos with no rhyme or reason – or I could look at it as a coherent story. A story I wasn’t reading about, or hearing, but – odd though it was -- actually starring in.
I chose the second option. Life, I think, really does follow patterns. Stories have shapes -- recognizable, repetitive shapes -- because reality does so too. Ever since the first ones were told around Paleolithic campfires, every tribe, every culture, every civilization has had its basic story, its founding narrative. These stories, whether they are “true” factually all the way through – or at all – are true in another way. They are bottomless. No matter how many times you tell them, you can always tell them again.
The basic recovery narrative is one of these stories. Bill’s story, as told in the Big Book, is the original smiley-face narrative, the paradigmatic journey down-and-up through the Inferno of alcohol (and later, by extension into other 12-step groups, other forms of addictive behavior). It’s a narrative that, I realized, one not only hears, but – believe it or not – actually lives oneself.
That, at least, is how I see my story. And like the guy in the joke, I’m sticking to it.