Does that mean I can't reveal the high backsliding rate for A.A. members that everybody knows about and no one talks about. Go read all about the Achilles heels, sick practices and undesirable thoughts that are drummed into your head by A.A. gestapos, in the Orange Papers:One Man's Analysis of Alcoholics Anonymous and Substance Misuse Recovery Programs, and Real Recovery. Or go read similar vendetta, poison spewing jive about how A.A. is only in it for the money and in cahoots with 12th Step based Hospital and Outpatient Treatment Programs to make "millions off the backs" of alcoholics at Stinkin' Thinkin': Muckraking the 12-Step Industry. They started out attacking the treatment industry, for whom I once was a whore, but ended up attacking A.A. with some far fetched and some rational blameworthy frenzied writing.
I was warned about wearing two hats and leaving a perfectly good career in magazine writing and editing to go back to school so I could prostitute for the 12-step recovery based hospital and outpatient treatment facilities. It doesn't matter how many books you read, letters after your name you earned or boring workshops you sat through, the first question of every single patient/client is "Who are you to tell me about Alcoholism/Addiction? What makes you such an authority?"
As soon as you share your personal story right on cue for so many dollars and cents per hour and prove you are one of them, you're exalted to a state where you almost can't do any wrong until you get to no dating or sex the first six months-to a year of sobriety. You tell the same story over and over like a fortune teller at a carnival somebody put a buck in. You feel you are selling out your sacred beliefs for an income, but, hey, everybody is doing it, and some clients say you helped them.
Dirty, dirty business. I relapsed after 15 years clean and sober time, and in looking back I'm surprised it took a full ten years of counseling alcoholics/addicts to finally get me to pick up that first drink that led right to the worst hell imaginable just like everybody says it will. Now, today, many years later, I have managed to put together two years without a drink, joint, cocaine, or any old pill or drug that I came across on public restroom floors or skeezers with a desire to get you down in the same hole "he's in." (Bob Dylan.)
I'll probably go to the morning meeting. It's sort of like chasing the initial high of a drug. You want to get back that first rush of all that synchronicity making miracles happen every single day as long as you don't drink or get high. You want back that feeling of belonging with these people who think like you, act like you and have the same character defects as you. All the meetings where I cried out of gratitude, genuine love for my fellow survivors, experienced life changing insights, and slowly grew up with the rest of the misfits out on the playgrounds of the church basements, school classrooms, and misc public buildings where A.A. meetings were held. It was a sweet life. I worked with others, newer people in the program, because my heart went out to them. Their pain and lack of self-confidence and low self-esteem was stuff I knew inside out. I didn't do it for a paycheck or what they might do for me.
And I ended up thinking I was never as bad as "these people." I didn't pimp my daughter for money for crack, wake up in crackhouses, or seriously endanger my health. No, I was the dirty pedophile priest, getting drunk on communion wine and shooting smack, and seducing the youngest altar boys in my lair, the rectory. One of my last, disturbing memories was one of the last nights I was still officially employed as a substance abuse counselor (C.S.A.C.) and got one of my slicker outpatients to come with me for a ride to try and cash a check of my soon to be ex's that I had performed forgery on with the help of nail polish remover, I think it was. Jewel and Dominick's were having none of that larceny, and we ended up just driving around all night into dawn hoping we'd run into somebody who'd give us some drugs for being the good people we were. It felt definitely sleazy and filthy to expose the addict in me to a man who had once respected me, worked hard at his recovery program, and done a lot of the right things to stay clean and sober.
That's all I care to confess for tonight. You're not supposed to break your anonymity at the level of the media or press, but who reads this?
Today, I am happy just to be a mostly unemployed writer. I work as Chicago Alcohol and Recovery Examinder for Examiner.com for a little while longer. I started in April, and have made $1.52 so far this year total. It is a content farm that employs writers who become slaves and stay on with half-baked promises of more money in the future. I had hoped I might help at least one person, but you need readers for that. I made $1.52 on reader clicks, so I guess it's safe to assume my readers are my sibs and friends to whom I proudly, and ridiculously, send copies of my articles.
BTW, does anybody besides me think Yahoo's new Beta e-mail is even more fucked up than the old e-mail that now I can't get back to? If they show me my 2007 mail again, somebody is going to get hurt.
Don't forget to donate. The donate button is on the blog, and the e-mail address that goes with it is: missmarymac0040@sbcglobal.net. I have to get away. I have to go be a travel writer or join the Peace Corps or something. The prosaic, mundane and boring are closing in on me until I can't breathe.
