First Light

The first time I logged on to Sunrise Semester, I left my camera off and my microphone muted. It was 7:14 AM. I had not slept. I had, in the strictest sense, "done my last one" — which is a phrase I had used before and would have laughed at from anyone else.

But that morning I needed to hear a voice that wasn't in my own head.

What I thought I was walking into

I'll be honest: I expected a lecture. I expected a room full of people who had figured something out that I hadn't, and who were going to explain it to me very slowly. I had enough pride to resent that in advance.

Instead I heard a woman in Brooklyn talk about feeding her cat. She said she had woken up that morning and had not wanted to take a drink and this was, for her, a miracle worth reporting. Nobody disagreed. Nobody asked her to elaborate. Someone said "thanks for sharing," the next person unmuted, and the meeting kept going.

I thought, that is the weirdest thing I've ever heard.

I came back the next morning.

What actually happened

Nothing dramatic, at first. I showed up. I listened. After about a week I unmuted to say my name. After about a month I shared something true. After about a year I realized I had not been drunk on my birthday for the first time since I was nineteen.

There is a line from the Big Book that I did not understand for a long time:

We are not cured of alcoholism. What we really have is a daily reprieve contingent on the maintenance of our spiritual condition.

The word that got me was daily. Not done, not fixed, not graduated. Daily. Like feeding a cat. Like logging on to Zoom at 7:14 AM.

The part I didn't expect

Sobriety, for me, was not the hardest thing. Staying available to other people was. I had spent most of my drinking life protecting myself from being known. Sunrise Semester kept asking me to show up, and then it kept letting me show up — even on the mornings when I didn't feel like I had anything to give.

That is what a home group turns out to be. Not a place you go to be fixed. A place you go to be useful to the person who hasn't found it yet.

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If you're reading this on the fence, here is the only thing I can tell you that I know for sure:

Just come to one meeting. The link is on the Meetings page. Don't turn your camera on. Don't say a word. Just listen. If you hate it, you have lost one hour. If you don't, you have found something some of us spent a long time looking for.

The sun comes up either way. You might as well have company.