We all tell the same story

That's why it works - because the details are different but the story is the same. Your story is my story is everyone else's story. You show up, and over and over again, you hear your own story. Some of us lost everything, some of us lost nothing, but the story is the same. I've been feeling a little anti-AA lately. Not that I would ever stop going or anything, it's just some times I get sick of it. I get sick of the meetings I go to, the people who show up to those meetings, the quality of sobriety there, the gossip, the lying, the bullshit, the drama the chaos. Sometimes I just want to be around women with a lot of sobriety - I mean a lot of sobriety, not a couple of years, but 10, 20 years. I want to be around quality sobriety - not a bunch of people who don't have what I want.

I always feel on the outside here - like I've never been connected the way I should be or the way I was where I'm from. Sometimes I try to reach out more than others, and then I withdraw again. So I was talking to this woman after the meeting on Saturday night, because she said she got sober somewhere else and then moved here. And she was talking about being in the middle of AA, versus being on the edge. I always feel slightly closer to the edge than the middle, but close enough to the middle not to fall off. Anyway, she invited me to this Big Book study that someone has at their house on Friday nights. It's a women's meeting and they are about to start over from the beginning of the book. I used to go to one of those when I first got sober. Of course, every part of me doesn't want to go. But I'm going to - cause there is a lot of sobriety there and I want to see if it's quality.

When I get irritated with the program like this, I change up my meetings. I start seeking whatever it is that I'm looking for - strong women, good, quality, long term sobriety. I went to this meeting this morning that I go to sometimes - there is this woman there that I wanted to see. I like her because she got sober when she was 28 (which is when I got sober), and she is still sober 30 years later. The meeting was great though - the lead outstanding. It was this guy who's 54, used to be in the military, cut off half of his hand in a printing press accident when he was drunk, got sober 22 years ago. My story isn't his story, but it is. He was talking about the pain, the unbearable pain of living, the reason why we drank, the way we try to escape ourselves, because when you drink, you can become anyone. He said the very thing that I said yesterday, that it was all so painful that he used to wish he could just be someone else. The good news is, 22 years later, he doesn't wish for that anymore.