Desperate and willing
When I arrived in FA in 2007, it was suggested I go to three meetings a week. At the time, I was a small-business owner, working over 50 hours a week helping to run the company my husband and I owned. I was single-handedly managing the art department.
There were no FA meetings in my area at the time, so getting to an FA meeting meant traveling over two hours one way on a Sunday afternoon—my only day off. Therefore, a good chunk of my “down time” from working so hard was going to be spent fulfilling only one of my weekly meeting commitments. How would I ever get the rest I needed to continue to work at the pace I had set for myself if I went to an FA meeting each Sunday and to two area AA meetings each week? The answer was, I wouldn’t. Something needed to change, and it was me. The problem seemed impossible, but for some unknown reason, I was willing to take suggestions.
Learning to let go
Over time, I learned to delegate some work responsibilities at our small business. It was so uncomfortable! There was fear of rejection, fear of work not being done right, fear of being criticized, fear somebody wouldn’t like me—fear, fear, fear! But I kept giving the fear to my higher power and asking for help to know how to change my thoughts, words, and actions each day. I did not do it perfectly.
Eventually it became clear that we needed to hire another person to work full time and manage our art department. This was something I always wanted to have happen, but I never knew how to get there. When I went to my husband and suggested a new hire, he said to me, “Are you really willing to let go this time and let it happen?” The answer was finally, “Yes,” because I wanted to remain abstinent more than I wanted to control the result of letting go—no matter how much faith it required.
Practicing faith
I’m learning that faith is not so much the absence of fear, but the opportunity to walk through fear and trust that I’m being carried by a power greater than myself. Saying I have faith isn’t the hard part for me. Practicing faith is the hard part. It’s hard because faith requires trust. Trusting a power greater than me is hard because I’m a human being with human blinders, who thinks I’m supposed to create the perfect result in my life. I’m supposed to make something happen. I’m supposed to make life turn out a certain way so there’s no discomfort involved. That’s my ego telling me I know what’s best for everyone, including myself.
Humility requires that I practice faith, that I start trusting. Only then can I begin to believe there may be a better result or a better way to a result that I didn’t think of—a result that my higher power knew was there all along, if I would just get out of the way and trust.
When I really set my ego aside and say, “Okay higher power, show me how to do this,” I experience a result better than any result I could have ever orchestrated, and I get to grow spiritually in the process.
Managing discomfort
Even now, two years later and 40-pounds lighter, I have to resist the knee-jerk reaction to run away when discomfort feels like nails dragging across a chalkboard and my insides are screaming “make it stop! I can’t do this! It’s too hard!”
It’s during those moments of feeling out of control that I have to take a recovery action. I have to pick up the phone and talk to another member when I don’t feel like it. I need to say a slogan over and over in my mind until I believe it. I need to sit still in extra quiet time to get some clarity so I don’t eat, or scream, or run away, or smack somebody, or hate myself because I think I’ve fallen short as a recovering person.
I’m not perfect. I’ll never be perfect. But the real gift today is that I’m willing to let other people see that I’m not perfect. This is something they’ve known all along, but I have spent years trying to convince others and myself quite the opposite.
Today, because I’m abstinent, I get to choose to redirect my willful energy on my recovery. I ask my higher power how I can get out of the way and take the next best action as I change. I receive the gifts of an abstinent life each time I choose a path of change that is guided by my higher power. I trust my higher power each time I pick up and use a tool through my discomfort on this journey. Then, eventually I change, and experience peace and growing up—two things I never knew how to accomplish on my own.