Between the Big Book and the Big Bang

How I redefined sobriety and rebuilt my life

After two unsuccessful short-term stints in alcohol and drug addiction treatment centers, an 11-month residential program gave me the support and time I needed to “do the work” and find sobriety.

This time around was different. After three years in and out of the AA program, living on welfare, and suffering progressively worse relapses, I was faced with a binary decision: get sober or die.

I had enough AA exposure to know what I needed to do, and I was willing to take the required action. I called a cousin who was a few years sober, admitted that my life was unmanageable, and turned my will and my life over to him.

That phone call created a remarkable chain of events that led to an interview and acceptance at the only long-term treatment center in Ottawa. I moved in and began the process of adapting to my new setting.

Fast-forward three months, and the twice-daily AA meetings began to drive home an uncomfortable truth. I wanted more than what I was seeing and hearing at the meetings. I wanted what I defined as complete sobriety. In other words, a level of healing and sobriety that wouldn’t require daily meetings, an AA job, an AA wife, and AA friends to be sustainable.

Don’t get me wrong: many people in AA are happily living fellowship-centric lives and grateful to have the opportunity to do so. I’m not judging them or the fellowship of AA.

But I know me—and I knew what the eventual outcome would be.

The Deal

No, I was ready to do whatever it took to be like the guy who’s deadly allergic to shellfish. Otherwise normal, just awfully careful when eating in seafood restaurants.

I’d read and reread the Steps, Promises, and Traditions, and I knew intuitively that the freedom I wanted so badly lay in the Steps. But the workbooks and discussions were too dense for me. I needed to simplify the text without diluting the work or the outcomes.

This was 32 years ago, so the resources available in recovery were pretty limited. If I was going to reinterpret this stuff, I was on my own.

So, I got a notebook and wrote down the opening text from each of the 12 Steps. For Step Four, that is: “Made a searching and fearless moral inventory of ourselves.” Each word carried sufficient weight to provide clarity and direction.

The simplicity was easier for me to digest and execute, and being able to see a condensed list of things to do on a single page made it obvious that each step was dependent on the full completion of the steps that preceded it.

The first three established the humility and faith required to tackle the action steps that followed. It was a revelation, and it looked doable.

But I needed a higher power. I needed faith so I could take the necessary leap of faith. And as a card-carrying agnostic, I had hit a wall before I even got warmed up.

During a meeting the following week, I remembered a chapter from Frederik Pohl and Jack Williamson’s The Singers of Time. It discussed the infinite nature of the universe and Stephen Hawking. The vastness resonated.

I went to the library and borrowed Hawking’s A Brief History of Time. There, I began to understand the Big Bang not as a miracle, but as a program.

In terms I could finally grasp, a design unknown to us had been executed long ago, and I was an infinitesimal, organic part of that program. I didn’t need to know the objective of the program or my role in it to understand my place in the universe.

I believed in something real, backed by science. I understood that when I looked at the stars, I was looking at the past. With that bridge, I could move forward with the remaining steps.

It was May when I started my Fourth Step, and Serenity House was a short walk to a river. I sat by the river almost every day for six weeks and wrote fearlessly about my life. I realized that the more I wrote about a shortcoming or character defect, the more repulsive it became. I inventoried my assets as well—what (if anything) would define the guy who would be left standing?

It took nine months, but by the time I got to the Eleventh Step, the guy I used to be was gone. Buried. It was traumatic until it became cathartic.

The guy I’d become would soon wrestle with the difference between aggression and assertion, and turning it over (to a higher power) or taking it back (and owning it), but he was fundamentally a good guy.

I didn’t really have to ask my higher power to remove the defects of character. I wanted so badly to not be that guy that the defects were outgunned. But I stuck with the process because, after all, this was my repair manual. My ticket to a new life. It was all I had.

Why It Took So Long

External events or circumstances often provide the opportunity to validate the completion of one step and graduation to the next step.

I couldn’t manufacture many of these external events, so the best I could do was to be fully prepared, open, and ready so that when they did appear, I recognized them and jumped in. Life, fate, or the program that spawned the Big Bang was a willing collaborator that gave me the events I needed to maintain momentum.

By the time I hit the maintenance steps, sobriety stopped being something I managed and became something I embodied. I wasn’t guarding against relapse because I was no longer organized around the person who would relapse.

For me, real recovery involved a kind of erasure. Not denial or forgetting—just the subtle disappearance of someone I no longer need to carry.

A few weeks ago, an old friend from high school looked me up on Facebook and sent me a picture he took of my first wife almost 50 years ago. He also sent over a couple of pictures from our high school years. He wanted to chat on Messenger about those days, and I quickly realized that I didn’t.

It made me understand how much I don’t like the kid he knew, or the young man my first wife knew. His perspective leaned towards glorifying the past, but I don’t see much glory there. Or humor.

The conversation made me reflect on that period of my life, and I discovered that there’s stuff that’s just gone. I can recall fragments, but few details. I nonetheless realized how absolutely rudderless I was. And clueless. I simply wasn’t present in my own life.

The Moment I Knew

During my first year, I hung on to the past as a warning: you’re only one drink away from that guy. But in my second year of sobriety, I got my first test.

At a licensed restaurant on the Caribbean island of Grenada, with my new partner Joanne, I ordered a Coke and she ordered a Carib beer. My Coke arrived in a tall, slim glass with a slice of lime. Nice. When I took a sip, it was obvious that I was holding a rum and Coke.

The inevitable conversation in my head began. Nobody would know. This was just between me and me, and as long as Jo didn’t see the bill… My subconscious sober self raised the glass up high, and a voice that I recognized loudly proclaimed, “This has rum in it!”

My old self had been crushed before the argument had been fully tabled. I was that guy who’s deathly allergic to shellfish.

No matter how crazy my new life got, the thought of drinking or using never again entered my mind.

I can’t express how grateful I am for this freedom.

We invite you to share.

How do you define sobriety and recovery in your own life—specific to you?
Whatever your path or program, how have you taken recovery wisdom and made it your own?