‘How much time you got up?’ is a question you may hear in meetings of Alcoholics Anonymous, referring as it does to the last time you had a drink of alcohol. Answers vary of course, being anything from ‘About an hour ago’ up to ‘50 years sober’ and beyond. One old boy that I know started going to meetings in 1967, four years before the death of AA founder Bill Wilson, which kind of blew my mind when I first heard it. For me the answer varied as well and started to become embarrassing as it went down from months, to weeks, to days and – with grim inevitability – hours, minutes even.
I went to my first AA meeting at their local headquarters in the central Gold Coast, to be met by a friendly man called Paul, who I’d already spoken to on the phone. Paul told me cheerfully that ‘this isn’t the most functional meeting in the world but hang in there’. He took me in and introduced me to another member who confirmed that, ‘Mate, there are a lot of crazy people in here today’. Indeed, this particular meeting being city central does attract its fair mix, including those with mental health problems and the homeless – the homeless and severely depressed person I was, in short order, soon to become myself. It was, to be honest, a thoroughly depressing experience. And, like the dutiful alcoholic I am, I walked straight out of my first AA meeting and into the nearest bar, there to get blind drunk. Not, I discovered later, an uncommon experience.
Casting time back a spell, the very first time I got drunk was over 30 years before at around age 14, just before a school gig. Impington Village College just outside Cambridge being the venue. Me and my mates met in the woods beforehand with booze that we’d managed to obtain, this being back in the day when no one seemed to care much about children getting drunk, and you didn’t have to be 25 or whatever to get your hands on a drink. But where my friends brought just a couple of cans of beer each, I turned up with a quart of whisky, which I totally skulled, soon to find myself at the gig completely paralytic and being dragged home by my geography teacher, covered in vomit. Looking back on this incident, as I have through many AA ‘shares’, it’s notable that I got far drunker than anyone else there that night – far drunker. Another seed was sown.
Things progressed merrily on. Throughout my time at Sixth Form, I was generally ‘first in, last out’ of the pub, supported in my endeavours by a gang of cheerfully drunken mates, many of whom remain good friends to this day. But there was always ‘a thing’ around my drinking that I was aware of even then. Upon leaving college, I slipped easily into the world of catering and hospitality, with its accompanying blitzkrieg of drink, drugs and gambling, only to find myself – a few years later – walking dazed through the doors of Anglia Ruskin University, there to do reasonably well (all things considered) in a History degree.
A career in journalism and later marketing followed, throughout which my drinking remained at what might be discreetly termed as the ‘high-functioning alcoholic’ level. We all know people like this, and there may well be a sense in which it is true. People who are drinking too much but are also holding down good jobs and managing well enough, even very well. I did that for a while, and things held together just fine. But I’ve since come to the conclusion that I can’t ‘manage’ my drinking as such (and believe me I’ve tried), as it’s progressed to a point where – if I drink – life becomes unmanageable. As such I’ve had to learn to reject such notions as ‘high-functioning alcoholic’ or ‘social alcoholic’, or whatever euphemism it is you want to apply, because they will simply lead me back to drinking. To the amusement of my friends here at rehab, the other day I described myself as a ‘bog-standard alcoholic’, which isn’t to be deliberately down on myself but simply to try and strip away the implied management that comes with labels such as ‘high-functioning’. I can’t manage alcohol. At all. I’ve tried everything and yet it just keeps getting worse. Only total abstinence supported by some kind of recovery program can help me.
After about a year after my first meeting, my drinking reached genuine crisis point and I returned to AA, this time to a different place and had a different experience. Firstly, I was already drunk upon arrival (which is fine by the way, you’re allowed) and secondly because this time it made a different impression. I was approached by a guy who later became my sponsor, and I started to see AA differently. After a couple of false starts, I sobered up and – by attending lots of meetings, sometimes three a day – stayed sober for nearly four months – something I previously hadn’t thought would be possible.
But it was during one of these meetings, as I sat happily in serene sobriety, that I received a phone call that would change my sobriety, my relationships and my life for ever.
I’d rather keep these posts short, so I’ll finish this particular story in Part 2, tomorrow.
One day at a time.
Photo by Fabrizio Verrecchia on Unsplash
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