Member Experience
In Their Own Words
Names are first name and last initial only, in the tradition of recovery literature. These are real stories in the sense that the people who told them know exactly what they mean.
I had been to three NA meetings and left each one more confused about God than when I arrived. BA did not fix this. But I've been clean eight months, I sleep through the night now, and last Tuesday I ate a real breakfast. I don't know what I believe in. I believe in the breakfast.
For years I kept waiting for the moment where I finally couldn't function anymore, because that was what I thought had to happen before I got help. I was still waiting while I was interviewing for jobs and making dinner and calling my mother on Sundays. BA was the first place that told me the functioning wasn't proof I was fine. It was just proof I was good at it.
My sponsor in BA is a 58-year-old retired schoolteacher named Connie who has a garden and a dog named President Biscuit. Connie has heard everything. Connie did not blink once. I cannot overstate how much I needed someone who had truly heard everything and was still fine.
I went to my first meeting because a friend dared me. I went to my second meeting because something happened at the first one that I'm still trying to explain. Someone read the Promises. And I started crying in a way I had not cried in probably six years and I did not know why and I still don't entirely know why but I went back.
I was the kind of person who had convinced everyone around me that I was extremely okay. I had convinced myself. I was doing the math at 3am and failing every night and going to work every morning and doing it again. BA is the first place where I said the thing out loud and the room did not collapse. That sounds small. It was enormous.
I have been asked, by multiple people who know me in real life, what the turkey baster is about. I tell them it's a long story. It is not a long story. I have simply decided that some things belong to BA and that is one of them.
Recovery culture didn't have a place for someone like me. Or it had a place but the place required me to become someone I don't think I am. BA has a place for whoever I actually am, which is a person who dresses in a specific way and has opinions about things and needed help and found it in a church basement that was not expecting me. They recovered quickly. We all recovered together.
I relapsed at ten months. I came back at eleven months. Nobody made me feel like I had failed a test. My homegroup chair said: you came back. That's the whole thing. That's all it ever is. Come back. I have come back four times in three years. Each time they said: you came back. I think about that a lot.
I don't have a higher power. I have tried. What I have instead is the group, and the group has been enough. There are people in that room who know things about me that I have never said out loud anywhere else. They are still there every Thursday. I have been sober two years and I still can't tell you exactly how it happened. Mostly I kept showing up.
My daughter is eleven. She doesn't know the details. She knows that I go to a meeting on Thursday nights and that something there is helping me be a better person and a better parent. She calls it "the turkey thing." I do not correct her. She is not wrong.
I worked all twelve steps. Didn't graduate. Kept coming back anyway. I think that's what winning looks like.
To share your story with the BA literature committee, reach out via the contact page.
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