The Share
My Journey So Far
This is the first piece in an ongoing recovery blog I’m launching. I’ve been in and out of AA since I was 21, and I’ve always wrestled with the God-language, the cultural baggage, and the program’s contradictions. But I’ve also found real healing in the rooms. This piece is my “share,” my story of how I got here. Not because I have it all figured out, but because writing it down is part of how I stay connected to the work. I’ll be publishing a new piece each day this week to kick things off.
What It Took to Get Here
What does it take to make recovery stick for someone who doesn’t believe in God, doesn’t trust the system, and keeps falling back into the same old patterns? Over the years, I blamed the alienation I felt from the God-language in AA, and the way non-AA groups often obsessed over not being AA instead of offering a practical recovery program. Quitting drinking finally worked for me when things got so bad, when I was so desperate, that I was willing to surrender to anything that showed me how. That desperation faded as I started to see successes and some of AA’s promises began coming true for me.
I haven’t drunk since 2019, but I did relapse on other mind-altering substances. It took another dive into the abyss to push me back into recovery, and now I’m working the program one day at a time with a sponsor in AA. Variations of this story happen to many people. Some take much longer than ought to be necessary to get and stay sober. Some never make it.
My First Meeting
I remember a few impressions from my first AA meeting. I was twenty-one, home on a school break. I met up with a friend who was a few years older and in recovery. She saw me after a long binge, when I felt like I couldn’t go a day without drinking. I opened up to her about it. She invited me to go to an AA meeting with her, so we went to one on a Thursday night downtown. It was a mix of happy people grinning like they had it figured out, and others who looked miserable or hollowed out. The happy people seemed fake and full of shit, giving me carny energy. The hollowed-out ones didn’t give much to aspire to, though I related to them more.
Looking back, they were all being real in their own way. The fake ones were putting up a front that they needed to stay sober and on track. The lost souls were suiting up and showing up in spite of it all. They had seen authenticity and happiness in someone, and they were holding on to a deep hope that one day they could find it themselves. Plenty of the people at that meeting were completely genuine, but I saw them through jaded-colored glasses.
I wasn’t ready to see that at the time. I was too busy sweating and shaking through the meeting. I was confused by all the reading at the start. The word God was all over the list of steps on a poster behind the secretary. People discussed their personal higher powers and equivocated between them and God, making me distrust the whole thing. It sounded like nonsense. After all that talk about finding your own higher power, God as you understood Him with that H audibly capitalized, we stood in a circle, held hands, and said The Lord’s Prayer. I remember thinking the whole thing was a crock of shit.
The way the word God showed up so often in the Big Book was a real turn-off for me. For many others as well. Many people come in accepting they have a problem, looking for help, but they bounce off the language. Someone gave me a copy of the Big Book at that first meeting. I diligently read the first part of the book, along with a few of the stories that followed. I hated it. The language felt overwrought, and I could sense Bill Wilson’s ego radiating from the pages.
The Big Book and many people in meetings say that agnostics can get sober, but imply they will only stay sober if they find God. It’s pretty obvious which God Bill expected people to find, wink wink nudge nudge. Recovery can feel conditional in meetings. You might have some grace to clear your head and dry out before you find God, but if you never do, you’re doomed. I spent many years resenting that feeling. I missed the people in the fellowship who were genuinely humble about what a higher power meant to them. Plenty of stone-cold atheists stay sober, say the Lord’s Prayer, and couldn’t care less who wrote the literature, because it works for them.
Trying and Failing
I wasn’t able to see any of those people for years; I just kept drinking and resenting. I got sober for about a year and a half at the end of college, and not because I figured AA out. I didn’t. I just got lucky. At one of the first meetings I attended in Humboldt, a guy in a loud Hawaiian shirt came up to me and asked if I had a sponsor. I said no, and he said, “You do now.” He’s been a close friend ever since. He was a surrogate father to me when I was estranged from my own family. He showed me that you can be an irreverent weirdo in meetings, laugh at all the dogma, and still get sober. It still wasn’t enough to make anything stick.
I stayed sober during that period because of the friends I made in AA. Not for myself, but to avoid disappointing those around me. It turns out it’s easy to confuse being surrounded by support with being truly grounded in recovery. I thought I was putting in the work, but I was just clinging to people who were. I was going through the motions. When I left that town and followed a woman across the country, it was only a matter of time before I drank again. Those friends weren’t around anymore, and I’ve never been good at staying in touch once someone’s out of sight. I never truly plugged into meetings in my new city. Never met people who could support my recovery. When I broke up with the woman who brought me there, I walked straight to the liquor store. Just like that, it was off to the races again.
Get Cory’s stories in your inbox
Join Medium for free to get updates from this writer.
I remember walking into the belly of the beast. I knew I was making a mistake, but I had just destroyed a relationship with someone I loved, for reasons I couldn’t even untangle in my own mind. My thoughts were slipping away. Nothing made sense. So why not make it worse? I grabbed a bottle of Bacardi Silver as if it were a time machine. I had crashed and burned. I wanted to go back to the security of self-destruction. It had been my constant companion for so many years that it felt like home. That relapse took me to darker places than I had ever been before. It lasted a long time.
Desperation and Change
This new bottom left me with nothing. I had burned every bridge, alienated all my friends, and torched every opportunity that ever came my way. I crash-landed in a small rural town where my mom lived. She had a spare house she let me stay in, which turned into ground zero for a long, grinding relapse. Serious mental health issues and drinking kept me in a miserable stasis there for five more years. My life got so empty, I started going to meetings every now and then just to hear myself talk. Or rant semi-coherently as the case may be. My wife tells me about this; I was so lost in the sauce, I don’t remember meeting her for the first time in a meeting. When I finally took my last drink and got sober, it was pure desperation that got me in the doors and made me do what I was told.
I saw a guy who had been a wreck the last time I tried to get sober there, and I did try every now and then. Now he was laughing, hugging everyone, and looking genuinely happy. I saw someone who had what I wanted. I didn’t believe in God, the steps, or much of anything, but I believed in his laugh. I asked him to get coffee with me, and between sips, I asked him to be my sponsor. He was religious and dogmatic about his recovery, but I was too desperate to care. I didn’t have a spiritual awakening. I didn’t come to believe. I just reached a point where I was so beaten down by my own choices that I was willing to let someone else choose for me.
He was dogmatic, sure, but my new sponsor was willing to let me come to my own understanding of each of the twelve steps. They made sense as a practical program to become a better person. You admit you have a problem. Accept that there’s a solution. Own your shit and confess it to someone you trust. Figure out who you did dirty and take real steps to make things right. Then keep working on yourself, and help someone else. I could get behind that and push. And I did. I became dogmatic in my own way. I drank the Kool-Aid. It didn’t feel holy. It felt like a deal. I did these things, and I felt less like a hopeless monster. Then I saw that all those ninth-step promises were coming true for me. I made real friends. Felt accepted for who I was. Fell in love. Got a real job. Things weren’t perfect, my mom died, others I knew relapsed, but I stayed committed.
A Falling Away
Then the pandemic happened, and all the in-person meetings shut down. My social world collapsed. I thought I had built something that was centered on me. In reality, my recovery still relied on meetings, on people, on social capital. A bit of that is part of recovery. We don’t generally do it alone, but the fellowship can’t be all there is. Online meetings weren’t providing what I needed. I drifted away from recovery.
It wasn’t long before I decided smoking a bowl wasn’t a big deal. And then I was right back at it. I spent the next four years cycling between weed, kratom, kava, all the legal ways to get high. I told myself it wasn’t a relapse if I wasn’t drinking or buying anything off the street. But getting high is getting high, and misery doesn’t care about legal loopholes. It wasn’t until things got so bad that I couldn’t ignore them anymore that I decided to get sober again.
My family had moved to Eugene, Oregon, and I didn’t turn to AA in this new place. I just quit everything and called it a day. After the self-congratulatory phase of feeling like a champ for quitting on my own, I realized I didn’t really have the peace and serenity I had experienced in recovery before. I told myself I’d buried the old Cory, the one who suffered through addiction. In his place rose a new, resplendent Cory. But I didn’t stay resplendent for long. Real life quickly asserted itself, and I had no real recovery to soften the blow. Life doesn’t pay out for abstinence, but for change, and I hadn’t truly changed.
When I got sober before moving to Eugene, I found a way to understand the AA program that made sense to me. Still, I kept myself apart from it. I kept overthinking the program at every step, and I remained connected mainly through the social aspect. I still resented the language. My life is busy in Eugene, and I don’t have friends in the fellowship yet. I can’t hit multiple meetings a day, or even one every day. My schedule is all over the place, so I can’t get to the same meetings to get to know people. I can’t rely on a steady social group to support my sobriety.
The Return
What feels different this time is that I don’t care. I don’t care if there is a God or some conscious entity I’m praying to. I don’t care too much if people like my shares at meetings. I don’t care about being perfectly logical about everything. I just want to stay sober and find some of that serenity and peace I’ve experienced in AA in different times and places. I have two young kids, and I don’t want them to grow up resenting a dad who checked out all the time or was too drunk or high to make it to their games or performances. I don’t want my wife to resent that her husband isn’t capable of being present. I want to live my best life, and I know that AA has helped me figure out how to do that in the past.
So, I shared at a meeting about my situation and mentioned that I needed to find a sponsor. A few people came up to me afterward and introduced themselves. Nothing too pushy, but one guy handed me his card and said I could call him anytime. The next day, I did. We talked, and he gave me the usual pitch about potential sponsorship, but he seemed down-to-earth, and I liked the vibe I got off him.
We met for coffee a few days later, and he acknowledged all the issues I had faced with the program before. He said he had struggled with many of the same issues but had found peace and serenity through working the program and has been sober for over twenty years. We’ve been working together for about a month and a half now. The promises haven’t all materialized yet, and we’re just starting on the steps, but this feels different from before. I’m doing this for myself, and I’ve already experienced moments of that peace and serenity I was missing. Now, it’s up to me to keep doing the work. This blog is part of that journey. It’s work I’m doing for myself, and offering to you in the hope it resonates. If I keep myself centered in the flow of recovery, I can keep from drifting off toward the abyss again.
If you vibe with this, follow. I’ll be publishing one new piece each day this week to lay the foundation for this project: stories, reflections, and honest writing about recovery, doubt, and trying to live well without a blueprint. I also published this one on Substack while I figure out where to make my home base, though I think it will be Medium.
