Still Super Sick and Suffering

Oh, character defects. No matter how humbly we ask God to remove them, they will inevitably expose themselves again at the most inopportune moments. Many of us addicts and alcoholics will come to find that we are quite predictably selfish and self-centered, and will spend sizeable portions of our lives making amends for acting egotistically, forever unable to fully stifle our solely self-interested nature. However, what most of us will fail to recognize until months or years into our sobriety is that we are, and are forever destined to be, utterly and eternally psychotic.

I sincerely believed, deep within the depths of my booze-drenched heart, that once I became sober I would be nothing short of a flawless human being – nursing wounded kittens back to health and traveling to Ghana to bathe fly-ridden children on my days off. I was shocked to find that even after months of avoiding cocktail parties and opting instead to enthusiastically attend Big Book studies, I was still a stark raving lunatic, incapable of maintaining any kind of interpersonal relationship and sabotaging any worthwhile opportunity that seemed to present itself. So why, even when sober, was I still a vindictive, sadistic, lying, cheating wench?

The answer is simple, however unfavorable. Addicts and alcoholics are crazy people and they will never ever not be. Fortunately, the more severe symptoms of insanity tend to lessen as one becomes more heavily involved in the program. The Step 7 prayer suggests that God will remove all of our personal defects that stand in the way of our usefulness to Him and our fellows. Thus, God may not really care about the fact that I bite my nails to the wick – he’ll probably focus his attention more on my never ceasing desire to light hospitals on fire. So while I may forever be a nervous nail-biter, I will hopefully not be a criminally insane arsonist by the time I thoroughly complete my steps. However, if I’m not exceedingly honest about my twisted flaming fantasies, there’s a good chance that the local fire department will soon be very busy.

Of course, we need to work on changing our behavior – we cannot be exclusively reliant on a force we will never fully comprehend to better us as human beings. The main mistake I made was failing to work on myself as I did what I was told, and I eventually fell victim to the same self-destructive patterns. I entered into a relationship early in sobriety and rapidly morphed into a psychopathic, unstable man-eater, repeatedly deleting and re-adding my assumed life partner’s number from my phone. I got kicked out of my halfway house for missing curfew numerous times, and called in sick to work when I was, in actuality, exceptionally healthy and simply soaking up the Florida rays on the beach.

It is crucial to remember that we are not saints, and that we truly are embarking on a journey of progress rather than perfection. It is also crucial to remember that it does get better, and even though I do still sometimes daydream about the windows of Columbia Presbyterian exploding in fiery catastrophe, the gifts of sobriety undeniably outweigh jail time.