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September 1961

I’m in my eleventh year of sobriety in AA and it’s not at all like I thought it would be in those first few tremulous months.

How did I think it would be?

Well, the old hands in our area were dry five to six years when I went shyly through a meeting hall door for the first time. As I became aware of them as people, there developed in me a sense of awe for the old-timer of the day.

From my own insecure stance, I thought, ‘How wonderful to have a platform of sober years to work from. Surely, these men and women who have been dry for so long have a security from the horrors of alcoholic drinking.’

I longed for that security.

Then a decade whirled and I became conscious that in some eyes I, too, had become an old-timer. A friend who was to be chairman of a special “big meeting” asked me to dig up a speaker for him.

“I want all the speakers to be in the six- to eighteen-month group,’’ he said. “They are the ones who pack a real punch.’’

I pondered this.

I pondered it even harder after attending that meeting. The speakers had great power. All talked out of the remembrance of recent agony and great gratitude for their release.

Freedom! Freedom from alcoholism was the theme. How purposeful they made AA life seem!

For the last couple of years I have been uneasily aware of once-active members who have disappeared from meetings, and disturbed by reports of slips suffered by people with years of sobriety. Where was their platform of security? Where was my own?

Recently, a bouncy Twelfth-stepper, just over a year dry, brought a slippee to my door. Both were in varying degrees of desperation. The AA man wanted my help in solving a difficult hospitalization problem. The sick man, it appeared, had made himself unwelcome at almost every institution in the area.

The sick one was babbling and arrogant. I became resentful and irritated. A couple of phone calls solved the problem and I made a half-hearted offer to accompany them to the sanitarium. The offer was politely turned down.

When they left, I was overwhelmed with shame. True, I had given of my past Twelfth Step experience, but nothing else; no compassion, none of the essential friendship of AA. A chore had been accomplished and my friend knew that for me it had been nothing more.

Is this a common problem of the older AA member—remoteness in time and feeling from the sick alcoholic stumbling in his search for recovery?

One does not, I think, become suddenly remote. It creeps up, as smugness and security displace concern for our own sobriety and that of others.

How secure is my eleven-year sobriety today? As secure, I am forced to admit, as that of any other self-deceived older member who, to the dismay of his friends, has returned to drink. As secure, insight tells me, as that of the newest member, because my sobriety and his are attached to the same branch of earnest desire for freedom and to the same root of spiritual principles.

I am facing the truth that there are no platforms of security in AA. Because if one tarries on a platform, he leaves the living stream of AA life. He becomes alone.

And I am remembering that when an alcoholic tries to stay sober alone, he returns to drink. At least I always did.

J.M., Vancouver, British Columbia