"Keep Writing"

The last time I was actively working steps, I sort of petered out in the middle of Step 10. I didn’t think too much about it. I do have an active prayer life, and I do a lot of service as well as sponsor other guys in the program. So I felt pretty comfortable with my program maintenance. But a few weeks ago, I was starting to feel a little itchy. Maybe it was nothing more than wanting to have bragging rights so could officially say I’d finished this latest round of steps. Or maybe it’s an integrity thing. Whatever. The point is, I’ve gotten back into the steps. I hauled my workbook and journal out and have been writing.

Ha! I seem to be on a writing kick lately. I do this blog, I’ve started doing some creative writing again, and now I’m putting pen to paper and doing step work. Maybe I’m trying to give myself Carpal tunnel syndrome.

I just wrapped my latest tenth step and am feeling really good. I can see, there in black and white, that I work a strong program. I was struck, too, with some good feelings about myself: I’m a good guy. For someone like myself who lived day to day hating himself and thinking he was the worst of the worst, that is a great change to not just see but feel as well.

I’m a big proponent of writing out step work by hand. There’s something too impersonal about typing it. When I see the words on the page in my own handwriting, they seem to have more power than if I’d just typed them up. When the truths of who I am emerge from steps like ten, four, and eight, it does so very intensely. I have my sponsees keep journals to do their step work in. I think it’s an important part of the process. There’s something ancient about it, in the way that sitting around in a circle in a meeting feels ancient and sacred. Talking with each other, writing our thoughts out, pen to paper, these are things humans have been doing for a long, long time.

Many of my leaps forward in Recovery have come from doing the work and being faced with what I’ve written. I see my own words in my own handwriting and I can’t argue with them. So often, I have been the last to know certain things about myself. At first it was that I was a selfish asshole. That was something everyone who knew me knew about me. These days, it’s that I’m a good man. Again, it’s something that the people in my life know and have even told me on occasion, but when I see it written out in my own handwriting, I can’t argue with it.

I don’t know if it’s like this for other addicts/alcoholics, but for me, with all the lies my disease tells me, I have the damnedest time knowing myself. I’m grateful to the friends I have in the program who help me with that, and I’m grateful for these tools and especially the steps that help me to catch up to what everyone else already knows.