My Thoughts at the End of the Blogging Day…

On AA Sponsorship…

I just returned from an in-town AA meeting.  It was a small, sparsely attended meeting.  During the meeting, the chairperson asked that if anyone needed a sponsor to raise their hands and someone will talk to you.  I sat there looking dumbfounded and then panicked when I thought everyone was looking at me. It was a total paranoid schizophrenic moment.  I almost had a panic/anxiety attack.  I felt as if I was being dishonest by not raising my hand.  I felt in the spotlight. 

I am scared of the intimacy of having a sponsor.  Of having to call on the phone everyday and make small talk.  Many things about it bother me.  I want to be the lone wolf AA attendee.  I also realize I will have to get over my fears and give in.  How will I ever begin to work the twelve steps without help and guidance?  Someone pass the Paxil.  I am going to need it.

Life on Mars...

I mistakenly read the other day that they had found microbes on Mars -- a source for the methane in the atmosphere.  It was just an overzealous reporter muddling the words in the report.  I was elated for a moment there, though.  Life on an alien world would challenge many conventions and beliefs held here on earth.  The holy grail of evolution.  Would they have DNA and RNA?  Would they be carbon based or silicon?  It opened up so many questions.

I went to my first AA meeting in weeks last night.  My sponsor had grown very insistent.  The floor was opened up for people to generally just share about what ails them.  It came my turn to talk.  We went around the room as it was a shy group.

"I am struggling with my use of prescription drugs and whether it is harming my sobriety," I blurted out at my turn. "I have become dependent on certain pills to make it through the day."

Nobody said anything about it in the meeting except to, "keep coming back and it works if you work it."

My sponsor talked to me afterwards about when he was first getting sober they didn't have such pills and had persevere on through.

"But I have a mental illness!" I interjected.

"You've used that before to explain your drinking as if your mental illness would be worse without the beer," he told me.

He was right and he knows me well.  I am still not ready to give up the Klonopin, but have gladly given up the Benedryl.  I am at a crossroads.  It feels good to actually have a choice, though.  I never had a choice when drinking I like to lament.  It was beer or misery, or so I thought.   I have a choice to stay sober today and i am.