Harbor Light – 2016/04

“Made a searching and fearless moral inventory of ourselves.” I read somewhere that early AAs, Bill Wilson included, completed all 12 steps in a very short time sometimes mere hours. Perhaps times were simpler then; no cell phones, no internet, people often worked at one company their whole working life. No one talked about being “dual diagnosed,” there was no Betty Ford clinic. Whatever the reason for early, fast step work, nowadays it has become very stretched out. Even with this in mind, however, I stretched it to the limit! When I first went to Alcoholics Anonymous thirty years ago this month, I was pretty sick. My mind was paranoid and I was deeply conflicted about being a lesbian. Add a ton of rage on the inside and you can see this was not fertile ground for recovery. Steps one and two were about as far as I got for a long time. It seemed to me that maybe step three would be okay, but step four loomed like an unscalable mountain. Why did we have to go into all that? Didn’t I hear in meetings that it didn’t matter what made us drink, we were just drunks? I took a quick, sketchy fourth step alone and checked that off the list.