Days of Fear

Accept and don’t dissect

“We were full of fear.” -Alcoholics Anonymous p. 28

This was not a planned post. Although I normally do write on Sunday mornings and publish during the week, I am currently out of the country to visit with an amazing woman I have the privilege to take through the work.

However, God definitely had other plans. And as I type this out on my iPad, I am a reminded once again how grateful I am for sobriety and for sanity through both of my programs.

I had a great morning yesterday. The evening before, my sponsee had finished up some important and revelatory step work. We enjoyed a beautiful outdoor dinner on the lake, singing along as the piano player keyed Elton John’s “Your Song.” I slept in a beautiful bedroom with a skylight and a four-poster bed. I slept nine straight hours, which is highly unusual for me.

I spent the morning hours with God doing readings and in prayer and meditation, which is my normal practice, whether I am home or traveling. I sat outside looking over a golf course. I put my earbuds in and listened to inspirational music. My friend awakened and made me breakfast. A perfect morning.

And then everything went completely to hell. Not on the outside, mind you. Everything was okay looking at me and my surroundings. But on the inside my emotions started going nuts. I became very sad, overwhelmingly so. I spoke with my friend and started crying. Then I called a trusted member of the program and talked it out. None of this helped.

I started tying to figure out what the hell was wrong with me. Everything had been going so well. Yes, adapting to a different country with its metric system and currency had proved challenging in more than one day (like the $180 hold on my debit card for a tank of gas), but eventually I got the hang of loonies and toonies and kilometers per hour and had adjusted very well. So what was the matter?

I had started dating someone a couple of weeks before and thought maybe it was that. As I tried with my keen mind to predict every possible thing that could go wrong with a budding romance, I could not come up with one thing that was actually wrong with us. In fact, everything was positively okay. No, that wasn’t it.

My friend and I had done some pretty intensive step work and had some very meaningful discussion regarding alcoholism and its effects. Sometimes a day later the intensity of step work with a sponsee can really impact me. Was that it? I thought maybe, but still wasn’t sure.

The morning before I had done a ton of shopping and spent WAY too much money. Even with a 24% exchange rate in my favor, the amount I spent was still excessive. Most of it necessary, but I often feel uncomfortable spending large sums of money like that. Maybe the overspending was causing this emotional slip.

I could not just sit with this sadness. So my friend and I went for a good walk. I need physical exercise during these emotional upheavals. But even that didn’t help. Hours later and I was still feeling miserable. And then I realized that the sadness had a lot of fear behind it. I started to feel that I was not going to make it through this day. That made the fear a lot worse. I started shutting down. I could barely talk. I was with company, so I did have to “act as if” the best I could, but thank God these friends are in recovery, so I could be pretty honest with them as I was experiencing this fear.

Eventually I just surrendered. I gave up! Fine, God! Have it your way! You just want me to be miserable. I stopped analyzing and just accepted that this was going to be the way it was for this day. I knew I wouldn’t feel this way the next day, because in 19 years of sobriety, I know my pattern. But somehow I feel that I should no longer have this crap. And then I am reminded that God made me a perfect human, and not a perfect God.

I have the mistaken belief that if I can figure out what exactly is causing the fear that I will then be able to control it. And it never works. Because the answer is that everything is causing the fear—and nothing is causing the fear. I suffer from the disease of alcoholism, a disease that is progressive in nature. That means that for the past nineteen years of my sober life, my disease has been doing its daily pushups, just waiting for a chance to take me down. Yesterday was one of those days where the disease just wanted to win. And I had no mental defense.

However, I did have my conscious contact with God. I was royally pissed at God—to be sure—but he and I were having conversation throughout the day, and I have honestly come to believe that this is what saved me yesterday from picking up a drink. Or from completely self-imploding and doing something else really stupid. It was not graceful, but it still worked. It ALWAYS works.

I am grateful to be writing this post this morning, still sober and still sane. I will keep coming back! Thank you, God, you never let go of my hand.