Member-only story
Grasping at recovery
It was the springtime of 1984 and I was impulsively headed to Tennessee in a station wagon full of strangers. At the time I was emotionally lost, and couldn’t avoid the feeling that something was wrong with me, so it didn’t take much for people I just met to convince me to go. Without knowing what I was getting into, I soon found myself sitting on the floor in a conference room at the Sheraton Inn in downtown Memphis, listening to stories from recovering alcoholics. While I was privately uncomfortable with my drinking, I didn’t think of myself as an alcoholic and was shaking my head at the situation I found myself in; attending a national, Easter weekend event and my first exposure to Alcoholics Anonymous. The horror stories I heard that weekend convinced me that I wasn’t an alcoholic because there was no way I was as bad as those people. However, I fell in love with a young woman that weekend, and she considered herself one of those people, so after moving to St. Louis to be at her side, we attended meetings together regularly over the next several months. As a person attending meetings in support, I just quietly observed. This gave me a chance to evaluate the program, and it simply failed to resonate with me. It felt cultish and I had already been a little too close to a cult a couple of years earlier, so I wasn’t disappointed when my girlfriend decided she wasn’t really an addict and abruptly quit…
