For the past few days I have been a little more reflective than usual. I was asked to lead a meeting this past Saturday, and then a different one tomorrow night. While I don't generally think too much about it, I did get taken back to some realizations about the old me, as I listened to a friend's story last night.
The fact is, it is rather difficult for me to really wrap my thoughts around just who I was then.... how my journey has unfolded. The pain and anguish, the outright blindness I suffered is just so hard to remember and identify with now. I do remember awful tragedies, and where my last drunks landed me, inside and out. I need those memories so I can call on them when senseless defective alcoholic thoughts come rolling by.
But the details of the savageness of it all is indeed hard to call to memory now. This seems to be a blessing, but rather strange. It is almost like I am trying to think back to another person; someone I no longer identify with. She is still in there, somewhere, but I just can't get back to that level of pain that was there. The way life is now is beginning to feel so completely normal... the old broken tools and coping mechanisms of the greater part of my life are buried under many many inventories and amends. The focus is just so completely changed now, so long as I am free of alcohol and working the program.
I am deeply humbled tonight, by just how much a person's life can change by simply just 'showing up'. The greatest decision I have ever made was to let someone... something else run my life 24 hours at a time.
So tonight, I vaguely allow myself to remember that girl who first stumbled into AA, scared, like a deer caught in headlights. I recall the drama I was attracted to even in the rooms, the lightening-bolt love affairs, the sense of being so lost, and trying soo soo hard... too hard. I don't know how AA put up with me for so long... I am so glad you did. If I could go back and just hold her I would... I guess I do, when I reach my hand toward a girl I see with that same look in her eyes. That's what you have taught me to do.
