A MOMENT OF QUIET DESPERATION

A MOMENT OF QUIET DESPERATION

“Just speak from the heart and that is all anyone can do when he shares. The rest will follow on its own.”

And so I did. I sat at the head of the table practically paralyzed in front of 25 or so men, some of whom I knew, most of whom I did not, but none of whom I had spoken before at this meeting. And I was to share with them my frustrations and my hopes for my “solutions” to my problems.

So I said that I did not know that I could share any solutions but I could certainly share my despair at having sobered nearly fourteen months ago after having been picked as a project of my two sponsors and sent away to sober up; telling how after the first month I asked whether I was “there yet” and one sponsor saying that I was just where I was supposed to be and then repeating that scenario again at month two and then three and again at month six. And then I gave up.

I admitted that I gave up trying to find out whether I was there yet because after whatever time I had been in the program I felt that “the miracle hadn’t happened yet” and I was definitely not there. I shared that even as I went to a meeting daily and didn’t drink, I felt that that was not enough to stay sober. That I had to embark on finding and Identifying my higher power and that it was a grueling process, was one which I have at times despaired of finding.

At some point I shared about my desperation of not being employed for over eighteen months and the continued Catch 22 of not being able to get employed because I wasn’t already employed and how utterly devastating and demoralizing that has been in a life that had been one long step up a long success ladder.

And after about five minutes I turned to Jim and said rather glumly that that was the whole sad and rather uninformative story and I was sorry that I could not have been a bit more upbeat and positive with more solutions as the meeting’s moniker would indicate.

The group sharing started to my right and each person appeared moved by what I considered a rambling mess of a story, each man seemingly drawing some message of hope or recollection of where he had been when he was in a similar situation, and words of cautious advice to hang in there. What surprised me was that each man’s sharing made reference to my alluding to my thoughts of suicide that I made during my share.

Oh? … I looked at Don, the first to look sympathetically at me and acknowledge the shared anguish that he witnessed when he heard what I was saying. And he urged me to listen to myself but not to give up. And then another and another and as each man shared there were repeated references to my thoughts of suicide and I had to query myself again did I really say that out loud?

And surely I must have since I could not hide from these echoes of my confession yet they were not hollow reverberations of empty pleas but deeply felt sorrows of people who had been there and through their own strength, had not done that. And they proffered that hope and strength now and allowed that they got through their despair by sharing it with the other men around them and not allowing it to permeate their gut and soul, but let the soul to breathe and air the vapid vapors of their sorrowful moods.

Which was I guess, the point when my sponsor asked me to speak in front of this group, he only told me that I was to share just what might be on my mind and left it at that. He did not say that I was going to be the jumping point for the meeting’s discussion, nor did he mention that what I said would be of any import, for had he, I might have really clammed up and nothing of any moment would have been blurted out nor any truth, if any was to be said, would have been delivered.

So deep self- destructive thoughts had finally been aired and now it was public knowledge. I suppose that is a good thing since I awoke this morning thinking that maybe I should skip this meeting. I was tired, I had been up late to a concert last night and although the performance was other-worldly, my mood was too and as I noted above, my thoughts were certainly tending to put me in an other worldly place, one not very healthy for me.

So I had promised my sponsor that I would go to the meeting. And because I said I would be there, I went. I did not want to cause him any angst; we had been having difficulty touching bases during the week and I have learned of late that he needs my company as much as I need his. So I needed to go for him as much as for me.

But I was really depressed when I arrived. I did not want to sit in front of twenty five guys, I did not want to spill my guts. I did not want to expose myself to …WHAT? Help? What was I thinking?

Did I really not want the help of twenty five other men?

And when the hour was up and all sixty minutes had been squeezed out of the meeting, and each of the men had thanked me for telling my story to remind them that there is pain out there, that they had it, and some of them still had it, they urged me to hold on. Not because all things were going to be better instantly. But because if I waited, things would get better, eventually. But if I did not wait, I would never be able to experience when that eventuality would come.

So here I am after the meeting and I can’t tell you when and who lifted that boulder from my chest. But somewhere about halfway around the table, after a few tears of mine had trickled down my cheek, I understood why my sponsor wanted me to come and speak. Where I had been going was not doing me the trick that I needed; and I needed to get some real estate off of my chest. And as I was leaving, Adamno, our resident Muslim whom I have known for at least five years but with whom I have had no more than three conversations, reached around and gave me a hug and told me to hang in there.

I still did not have a job. My future still seemed as impenetrable as before, and my problems were still there as I left the room. But my grief about it all wasn’t.

© res 4/9/2011