Holy Service Batman!

My life is all alcoholics all the time these days. I don’t know where it came from, it’s certainly wasn’t my intention, but here we are. I learned how to work the program, the program worked me over, and now I have something to offer the sick and tired who are sick and tired of being SICK AND TIRED.

Those who can must, peeps. It’s a fundamental truth of our way of life, my primary purpose is and will forever more be to help another alcoholic. That’s it. Anything else I add in there re: diet, boys, outfits, occupations, and hair color is really just my will manifesting itself in the only way it knows how. It still comes right back around to; what did you do for the other guy today? Who did you help? Did you sacrifice your own creature comforts for the well-being of the next woman?

I’ve always wanted to be of service to my fellow alcoholics. I’m moved deeply whenever I hear someone announce their day count. I love Newcomer women! But for the longest I was balls out terrified to open my mouth around them, because I thought I would scare them right off. When I was still counting days, I was relatively happy. I stopped drinking and my life got immeasurably better in those first months. But from four months until very recently, I failed to enlarge my spiritual condition and my untreated alcoholism ran circles around my attempts to control my disease.

I was a surly, screaming bitch from month 4 to 14 and I had no idea why.

I tried to do some step-work, but it really didn’t have any affect because I wasn’t completely surrendered. I thought I was, but thinking can be incredibly misleading when it comes to the nature of alcoholism.

Long story short, I was given the gift of desperation AGAIN, I started my steps in earnest, and I really went after my recovery with everything I had in me. And I got better! I got glowy and happy, social and bubbly. The more I stepped, the more people started responding favorably to me and before I knew it I had new-comer girls asking how I’d stayed sober for almost two years.

I was baffled when this first happened. I’m so used to thinking of myself as a miserable excuse for sobriety that seeing some gorgeous little drunk come up to me with admiration in her eyes, was more than I could handle. I freaked out, said something weird and abrupt, and ran away. Progress not perfection, right?

I wasn’t settled into the changes that I had undergone. I didn’t trust that I could interact normally with people now that I had my spiritual experience. I was still defensive and locked up, waiting for hostile comebacks to come vomiting out of my mouth. Or for the volume of my voice to raise uncontrollably, and for people to starts slowly backing away from me. I’ve had 29 years of seeing people shy away from me, it’s normal and natural that I would still be expecting these things. But it’s no longer necessary, and slowly I started sticking around to answer the newcomer questions that were leveled at me.

And my answers are always the same.

“Ohmygod, you HAVE to do your steps. It’s like Magic….you have to try this shit!”

“Did you start your steps, yet? That’s fantastic, I’m so excited for you! You should call me, I want to hear all about it.”

And I mean every word of it. Every word of it is what was given to me when my sponsor read the Big Book with me. That’s what saved my life. Shit, that’s what gave me a life worth living! Steps, steps, and more steps. Service, service, and more service. These two things bring me incalculable amounts of joy, and I can’t stop shouting it from the rooftops.

So now, Alcoholics are popping up EVERYWHERE. There’s two in my office that are in constant need of support. One of them suffered my foolishness when I was first getting sober, and now he’s newly sober so I can repay the kindness.

God, you work in such mysterious freaking ways. I totally respect your Gangsta.

Ingenue

P.S. Stepwork brings the sexy back.