“How About A Little Real?”

One of my issues is frustration with bullshit. I know, I’m totally alone in this, right? Seriously, though, I seem to live in a culture where lies and half-truths and bald-faced deception is the norm. Those who cheat are the ones who get ahead, those who play by the rules are the ones who are left behind. I’m reminded of that old saying about how nice guys finish last. Or maybe it’s that one about how everything in America is legal—until you get caught. But I digress.

Through working our Recovery, we learn that principle behind the first step that eluded so many of us for so long: Honesty. But we are also human beings living with other human beings in the world. No one is perfect. In the end, all any of us can do is our best. And so we have things that aren’t totally 100% honest that seem to creep in. Lies of omission, little white lies, etc. There is a spectrum to honesty, and right now I’m thinking that if we can hold ourselves to the ideal, then we will probably do alright even if we don’t get there all the time.

I was talking with a sponsee the other night about this principle. I joked that I did plenty of lying before I got Recovery, I just was never any good at it. Most of us are very adept at deception. A lot of times it's done with the best of intentions. To my mind in this moment, it strikes me as something done in some form or another as an attempt to control. We hide things because we don’t want to hurt other people’s feelings. We keep our mouths shut because we don’t want to get in trouble. We try to preserve others’ confidence. These are only a few examples.

Again, we do our best, and when we are able to fully express the truth or hear it spoken, it is like a breath of fresh air. Honesty is hard. A lot of people go overboard with it. They practice brutal honesty. That, my friends, is not part of the Program. A minister friend of mine once said that the best way to go about being honest is to ‘speak the truth in love.’ That’s the course I try to hold for myself. I don’t always succeed, but more often than not, I do.

I was at a meeting earlier this week and heard a bit of that fresh truth. I don’t know if the man sharing was an old-timer, but he sure sounded like it to me. He laid bare some real hard truths about the program and the fellowship. Most folks who have been in the rooms have felt the love and welcoming of the fellowships they attended. If we’ve had the courage to put ourselves out there, introduce ourselves to others, we often feel an even deeper level of that acceptance.

This man, though, had a few choice words on that subject. He talked about himself as a realist. He talked about how, yes, there are cliques in meetings. He mentioned a time when he was gone from the rooms for a period of six months and didn’t receive one phone call. He spoke of the times he called people at one o’ clock in the morning and they were bothered. This man wasn’t mentioning any of this as a pity statement, he was just letting folks know—these were his experiences. I heard him speak and silently rejoiced, hearing the clarion-clear sound of the real.

We do our best. We are still human beings. We aren’t perfect. You won’t always get along with everyone at the meetings you go to. That is part of life. Some meetings will feel exclusionary to you. So what? Find another. You are the only one responsible for your Recovery, and no other. If your recovery is dependent on others feeding you bullshit, you probably won’t make it. There’s a reason people in the rooms talk about having friends in their lives who will call them on their shit—who are honest with them, who can speak the truth in love to them, and who can hold up the mirror and show us the things we don’t want to look at. We need to see those things about ourselves that we don't like; it's the only way we can change them and grow.

We get to choose the people we have in our lives. We get to choose whether we have folks who hold up that mirror, who speak the truth in love to us, or we can choose to surround ourselves with those who coddle us in our denial, who insulate us from that which we most need to hear.