It's nasty out there. I'm sitting in my car, on break from my classes. It's cold, wet, and windy. One of those days where the wind just whips through my clothes like pure bitterness. The rain pelts my face from all directions and feels like chips of ice being flung at me. Hard to believe that I normally get to sit out in the sun and write at times like these. This storm has been going on for awhile now and even though it's now technically spring, it seems someone forget to tell Mother Nature. A friend of mine said we're dealing with a front that's come down from Alaska and that's why it's so cold. That might be interesting, but I'm still shivering.
The lack of sun these past few weeks hasn't helped my mood. I've managed to do a few little things here and there to feel better. Yesterday I cleaned my apartment from top to bottom. I knocked off one of my classes on Tuesday to get some work done in the others. I've been going to my meetings. And my sponsees are still calling, that's always a help. I'm the General Secretary for one of my groups and we've been having some personality conflict between the meeting Secretaries. I don't know if I'm going to have to address it at the next business meeting or not, but the positions are all switching over anyway, so I'm inclined to just let it pass.
Not every meeting is great, of course. My Monday night book study had a lot of newcomers, which is awesome, but they sorta took over the meeting. It's difficult to listen to a bunch of newcomers who think they know all the answers. I just try to remember that I was like that--and can still be at times.
One of my sponsees started a beginner's meeting last fall and I went to that last night. We get some young kids in there. Sometimes they've got their parents in tow and that's a bit frustrating to me. I can't help but remember being a teenager and how the last thing I wanted was to have my parents with me anywhere. It's just my personal opinion, but I don't think forcing anyone into meetings is the best way to go. Trying to make someone 'get' Recovery just doesn't work. People get it when they're ready. Period. And at a stage in life where kids are trying to break free of the stranglehold their parents have over them? I fear that kids who go through that will be less likely to go back to meetings one day when they do finally decide they're ready and need to be there. My heart always goes out to them.
I had a conversation once with a parent--a dad who said he was proud of his son and wanted to know how the whole Recovery thing worked. I watched the dad's beady eyes, his on-guard demeanor, and tried not to scrunch my nose up at the heavy stink of booze on his breath. It wasn't a stretch to imagine this father beating the snot out of his son. I might be wrong. I wanted to tell him the best thing he could do for his son would be to go to his own damn meeting. But it's not up to me to take another's inventory.
At the beginner's meeting this week, we had a lot of people talk about how hard it is, doing this clean and sober thing. It had me thinking of a friend of mine who's been doing this long enough now to have come down off her pink cloud. She shares, too, about the real honest and true difficulty of dealing with life on life's terms. When I shared at the meeting last night, I found myself talking about her and to the newcomers, letting them know that it does get better, trying to give them some hope.
My sponsor likes to share that he wouldn't still be doing Recovery after ten years if things weren't better. It's so true. That's not to say that times aren't tough, of course they get like that sometimes. But the swings even out. Experience is a great teacher, and with a clear head and a desire to truly life a full life, we become more fully human each day. Each new day we add to our sobriety age, we grow and we become more of who our higher power created us to be.
Giving that hope to the newcomers was the first time I've given a share quite like that, so specifically to address their need. I didn't tell them to get a sponsor or work the steps. Come to think of it, I don't think I even told them to keep coming back. I just promised them that it does get better, and I made that promise with the weight of my own experience. It's the truth of my experience, strength, and hope. Things really do get better. It takes awhile, and life is still life--with all its ups and downs. But it does get better. A lot better. Anyone with time who's worked the program will tell you so. Like my sponsor, I wouldn't still be walking this spiritual path if it weren't true.
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