Articles 2024

Sobriety is a Long and Winding Journey

by Kari Ann O., Missoula MT USA, age 75.

In September 1975, I had done occasional drinking, not knowing my (then undiagnosed) blood sugar disorder was a mortal danger if I drank. My last drink was half a cup of wine, and almost put me in a coma. I was frighteningly disoriented, but was able to cross the living room to the couch and make a phone call to a woman in another 12 Step program. She told me I could be an alcoholic.

The similarity of my experience to near incapacitation left no room for surmise.

I never took another drink.

Why?

My chronic mental disorders, post traumatic stress and clinical depression, had brought me close to suicide several times, incluidng one very serious attempt at fourteen. And at the time of my last drink, no pharmaceuticals or effective therapies had been invented which could treat these disorders.

I was determined to avoid suicide and a life of incarceration in a mental institution, which my father, a sexually abusive doctor, had already threatened.

No one ever pressured me to drink during my sobriety, and I credit the many friends and acquaintances in the academic and creative worlds for never glamorizing alcohol or drugs or pressuring me to destroy myself. My beloved husband, Silas Warner, had gotten sober the same year as me and we were solid in our support of sober persons everywhere, especially in our home.

However, in this violent society, violent deaths of people we know either personally or through our professional reading and writing is never far away. Staying aware and alive and unblunted by alcohol and drugs carried and still carries the price of living through other people dying, sometimes slowly and sometimes quickly and often with complications of diseases I was desperate to avoid, particularly insulin-dependent diabetes. There isn’t enough room here call those names.

 However, this is when the wonderful 12 Step Program’s “let go and let God” and “one day at a time” can make the most important difference, along with the support members can give each other.

We are all sometimes tested with pain so great we have to fight to remain in reality. I cannot state my gratitude enough to the  AA meetings which helped me survive the alcoholic murder of a very close friend, including crying at the meeting tables, not an easy thing for such tough men and women to accept. But I thank them, and I love them.

However, we don’t live in AA meetings, and no one gets sober in a vacuum: we live in a world where alcohol and drugs are “in” and the price of admission to certain crowds, certain communities.

I have always been dedicated to writing and the last person on Earth to become a nonentity in search of a crowd. This as well as AA and beloved friends and my husband and mother in law saved my life. For Alcoholics Anonymous and Narcotics Anonymous are honest places: when I go to meetings, it is accepted and acceptable to declare our personal powerlessness over alcohol and drugs.

But the meetings can also be a trial: profanity, smoking, hearing the physical and financial pain of members and their children, usually single children whose fathers are dead or absent from lives of supporting and loving. And when some members fight physically in meetings and other members write that off to “well, they are alcoholics”, the meetings become unsafe and defeat their own purpose of support.

I am now living in a beautiful Montana small town where I am rarely reminded of the horrors I have already witnessed. The sense of safety is real. And the meetings are not arenas of aggression.

At age 75, I am dedicated to remaining clean and sober no matter what the obstacles, and at this time of the most terrifying political climate, where governmental programs which support millions like me are being threatened, I have learned that the principal lesson of the spiritual road is that our worth is absolute inthe eyes of whatever name assigned to God.

Witnessing madness in public life along with hatred and bigotry I have never seen, even during the Vietnam War, strengthens my decision to retain whatever sense of worth I can. 

I hope someday there will be organic and medical cures for addiction. Right now, we are generally dependent on a spiritual decision reinforced by positive communities in and out of AA.