Step by Step
Friday, Aug. 18, 2023
“I had to hide, as a great many people in AA have had to do. I did my hiding in the hampers and in my dresser drawers. When we begin to do things like that with alcohol, something’s gone wrong. I needed it, and I knew I was drinking too much, but I wasn’t conscious of the fact that I should stop. I kept on. My home …was a place to mill around in. I wandered from room to room, thinking, drinking, drinking, thinking. …(A)nd after supper, I’d finish the job up and knock myself out.” — Alcoholics Anonymous, 3rd Edition, 1976, “They Stopped In Time,” Ch 4 (“The Housewife Who Drank at Home”), pp 336-7.
Today, remembering what it was like, hiding full and half-empty whiskey bottles under the mattress, in a suitcase that hadn’t been used in years, in seldom opened dresser drawers and, as I discovered later when I stopped drinking, in places I didn’t know existed. All the hiding — even though I lived alone. It wasn’t until I quit drinking and found bottles I forgot I had hidden that I realized that “something’s gone wrong.” There is no humor in the insanity of hiding booze in a house where no one but me lives, only a statement of the pathetic drunk I had become. Today I have nothing to hide, and it’s only by the grace of God and recovery that I no longer have a reason to hide. Today, I will not do anything that has to be hidden. Hiding just takes too much time and energy — and what we hide always eventually comes to light. And our common journey continues. Step by step. — Chris M., 2023
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