UPDATE ON ANONYMITY

AN UPDATE ON ANONYMITY

May 10, 2011


This past weekend there was an article in the NY Times by David Coleman titled “Challenging the Second ‘A’ in AA”. And this article takes the topic of anonymity to lengths of open discussion as there has rarely has been in the past. I cannot argue with some who say that not publicizing the good work of AA defeats the purpose of the organization by shortchanging the public on much needed information about 12 step recovery programs.


I cannot speak for AA but I hold the view that the diagnosis of alcoholism is self made and the treatment is “self-imposed”. Proselytizing in no way improves the ability of the public to know about the availability of AA these days. Nor will more public information about its availability improve anyone’s success in the program. Its ubiquity is legion. So as an organization, I don’t believe AA needs any official spokesman tooting its horn.


Personal anonymity is just that, personal and has always been that. What one does with his addictive history is his business and how one uses this depends upon how he feels this knowledge will impact those whom he contacts in his day to day life. Sadly, over the past seventy years of AA history, general knowledge of one’s sobriety has not been well received in all quarters and has not prevented wide spread and ill conceived discriminatory practices in job hiring and firing, promotion and social advancement as well as a more general social ostracism.


Knowledge is powerful and dangerous and wielding its power needs a judicious hand.


But when I wrote the following piece a year ago I was more concerned with the rather awkward and skewered concerns that new arrivals to AA had about their “anonymity” and how they often used this as an excuse not to come into the program. They would often say that they were “afraid” they would meet people they would know in the program (clients, customers, patients, professionals). Never considering for a moment the other person’s perspective that they might be meeting their grocer, barber, lawyer, doctor or dentist. We get so wrapped up in our own anonymity that we forget that what we did to get into this position was hardly a quiet affair to begin with and that when faced with all of those people “knowing you are an alcoholic” maybe you should consider that now you know that “they are alcoholics too”.


5/10/2011

ANONYMITY



We live our lives as if they were all a secret – nobody watching what we do. Why would the package store clerk not notice that every week I would buy a fifth of McAllen Scotch. Even if I chose to spread the wealth and came around every fourth week by the time I returned, wouldn’t he have noticed that I like Mrs. Jones and Mr. Malden come round regularly for the same stuff? Clockwork really. Why would the Deli man not notice that after years of ordering three beers and a cookie for lunch, that when I ordered a pastrami sandwich and coke should I not have expected anything but the query “what no beer?”

What makes us think that our behavior is so inconsequential? And again, did you think they wouldn’t notice? Did you care whether they did or not? If you didn’t then why do you behave as if you did by acting as if this were just another routine purchase?

We think we live furtive lives because we are ashamed of ourselves. That’s the plain and simple of it all. We are not hiding from others we are symbolically hiding from ourselves. Because that is why we isolate, we do not want to face painful feelings, issues, and facts. I can’t name them. They differ from individual to individual. One man’s fear is another’s fodder. One woman’s shame is another’s glory. But the arch of the act, the feeling, the drink, the shame is usually the same and we all travel that same route.

This morning parked in the municipal parking lot behind the church, I was sitting in the car smoking when I noticed Gary thundering up in his Harley, his slight figure practically enfolded by the immensity of the machine, the noise swallowing his form in a gulp. But he passed in front of the rising sun and his silhouette traced an image akin to a comic book character, chiseled jaw, German WWII troop helmet covering his head as he gently nestled the bike into the parking space. Harley’s don’t sputter when you turn them off; they ‘kachunck, kachunck’, with a percussive vibration that you feel in your toes until the deep throatiness ‘kachuncks’ to a halt. And I thought to myself how in the world could I ever have imagined myself being friends with this tattooed, motor-biking, chiseled jawed, German helmeted, comic book character, out of an Easy Rider rerun if I hadn’t been in AA. It would have been an extra ordinary circumstance to have met him otherwise. Yet he is just an ordinary guy. Sure, he’s been in jail for two felonies but what the hey, he still has artistic tendencies. And not for nothing, his 4 year old daughter is the most charming kid this side of the Connecticut River. And this guy’s greatest fear is that he will do something stupid that would keep him from seeing his little girl. There is growth in that guy that I have seen in him over these past two years, growth that has kept him sober while at the same time I have not maintained mine. He did something righter than I.

I’m trying to draw the measure of myself against the model of these men, friends that I have in the rooms. And they are friends. I don’t know them all by name but I know them by sight. And if I were to ask them for help I think they would fall into that old response “always say yes to a cry for help” or “never say no”. And we do that because we never know when we will need that response for ourselves, so, in a sense it is a call for the behavior of self preservation. “Do unto others for your own selfish ends” and you will feel good about it yourself. It always works that way you know.

There is a price for anonymity, it is called notoriety. Hide as we may from our own worst behaviors we are tattlers on ourselves in the worst possible ways. We don’t mean to be. We didn’t mean to throw up in all those taxis or fall down all those stairs. Or mean to break all those bones, or noses, or dent all those bumpers. We didn’t mean to do all those things. And if those things were done quietly nobody ever knew who the culprit was and we “got away with it”. But mostly, these were embarrassingly public acts and our wished for anonymity was really just that, a vague hope.

We try so hard to remain anonymous that we are befuddled and angered when someone suggests that we may be at fault, (rightly or wrongly), for some mishap such as this next one.

I have a friend who was used to tying one on just about every night. He had enough to drink one winter evening and on driving home he stopped for gasoline having noticed that he was low. After he filled up, he noticed that an hour had gone by since his last drink at the tavern so he decided to find a late night liquor store to cap off the night with some vodka. This added an additional hour to this evening’s sojourn and when he reached home he entered the house and his wife immediately quizzed him about his whereabouts. He gave lame this’s and that’s but the reason for her third degree turned out to be that she had been called upon by the police claiming that a car registered to that address had broken a filling station pump. The police had left a half hour prior to his arrival but he was to go down to the police station in the morning to clear up the whole thing.

Nobody notices us, hmmh? Well he had driven away from that gas station with the pump nozzle still in the car’s gas tank filling dock. And pulling out of the station pulled the hose from the pump and disrupted the whole filling mechanism. The oil company eventually billed him for $500 of damages. Strangely, though, he was not charged with any crime.

So we want to be invisible and think we are, until we aren’t; and then we wish we had been.

The point, not to put too fine of one on it, is that our drinking has led us into an isolated bubble within our own heads. And in that bubble we feel insulated and invisible; and we don’t want anyone to pay attention to us so we wishfully think their attentions away whether it is paid to us or not. Our invisibility is a figment of our imaginations and only when confronted by harsh reality, usually having to do with the law, or a restraining order, or lawsuit, do the blinders come off.




© RES May 30, 2010

      rev. 5/10/2011