each day – with a discipline I had long since thought myself incapable of – and I asked God to relieve me of my alcoholic obsession. It finally beat us into a state of reasonableness.” In this respect, alcohol was the great persuader. AA’s Big Book describes the path so many in my shoes have followed: “Faced with alcoholic destruction, we soon became as open-minded on spiritual matters as we had tried to be on other questions. I realized that I needed God to exist, for there to be a force greater than myself that could relieve the lethal burden I was carrying. I completely and totally surrendered my ego. On the night I checked myself into rehab, sobbing and slurring my words, I received the gift of desperation. AA holds that it is “an illness which only a spiritual experience will conquer,” and thus the alcoholic must choose “to be doomed to an alcoholic death or to live on a spiritual basis.” But addiction is a beast that defies logic, only prey to an act of Providence. I wanted to defeat my addiction through intellect. Just a few months prior, when I could still, barely, be considered a “high-functioning” alcoholic, I had graduated cum laude with a highly awarded thesis.
#Surrender serenity symbol full#
I wanted, more than anything, to be able to stop drinking and drugging on my own – why couldn’t I rationalize myself out of these self-destructive behaviors? I was always a top student, I was successful in most things I attempted, and I had earned nearly a full ride to a private college. And then instead of the pills, I picked up the phone and checked myself into rehab for thirty days.ĭespite how long I’d struggled with abusing alcohol and drugs, and despite the insistence of my family, I had always refused to go to rehab. I poured onto my bedside table every pill I could find. I had arrived at the inevitable crossroads of addiction: I couldn’t keep using, but I couldn’t stop using on my own. At that moment she realized there was nothing she could do. It was the most hopeless cry I’ve ever heard. She fled into her room, climbed into bed, and wailed like a wounded animal. I was delirious, belligerent I raised my fist and snarled in a harsh voice not my own, “I’ll hit you. She had barged into my room while I was downing an eleven-dollar pint of gas-station vodka. That night, my mother and I got into a fight. Following a failed family intervention, I had spent the entire summer and early fall trying to get sober but ultimately getting blackout drunk and high in my childhood bedroom every day. On October 24, 2019, I finally surrendered. I couldn’t keep using, but I couldn’t stop using on my own. I’d never been able to complete the Twelve Steps because I couldn’t get past Step Three: “We made a decision to turn our will and our lives over to the care of God as we understood him.” By extension, I was never able to stay sober through the program. The program is a far cry from Christian orthodoxy but was always enough to make me squeamish. I only attended church very briefly during childhood, so most of my exposure to religiosity has been through Alcoholics Anonymous. All my life, I wavered apathetically between agnosticism and atheism.
“Addiction” comes from the Latin addicere, meaning “to devote, consecrate, sacrifice.” To worship. If asked at the time about faith, I would’ve claimed atheism, but at night, alone with my splitting heart pain, I hoped I was wrong. I hit rock bottom last year, at barely twenty-two: I’d annihilated my relationship with my family I was broke and unable to hold down a job I was experiencing paranoid psychosis I had liver and nerve damage and I was hallucinating after twenty-four hours without alcohol. It’s a pitiful, desperate foxhole bargain, one I was guilty of making every night toward the end of my drug and alcohol use, that dark tunnel of time when it seemed more likely I’d die than recover. If I live until the morning, I’ll stop.”Īs an alcoholic-addict, this was the only prayer I knew.
And it is in dying that we are born to eternal life.
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