Service on a Tuesday

Every Tuesday for the last four years I have logged into Zoom at 6:55 AM, admitted thirty-some people from the waiting room, shared my screen with the format, and opened the meeting at 7:15. I am not a trusted servant in any official sense. I am just the person who said yes when the group asked who would do it.

I want to tell you what that job has given me, because nobody talks about this part, and I almost didn't do it.

The year the feelings stopped

Somewhere around year five I hit what people in the rooms sometimes call the "gray years." The obsession was long gone. The gratitude was present but dull. My life was good. My meetings were familiar. The steps had been worked and reworked. I was, by every measurable metric, doing well.

And I was, if I am honest, beginning to wonder what I was still doing there.

This is not a thing people talk about much, because the program teaches us to be grateful, and gratitude is real, and gratitude is the antidote to most things. But I am going to tell you: long-term sobriety has its own quiet crisis, and the crisis is not "am I going to drink." The crisis is "is any of this still for me."

The answer, it turned out, was that it wasn't. It was for the next person. And I had to rearrange my relationship with the program to understand that.

Why the hosting job fixed it

The Zoom host is not a glamorous position. You do not share first. You do not read anything. You just open the room.

But every Tuesday, at 6:55 AM, somebody new logs in before the meeting starts. They do not have their camera on. They do not say anything. They are just there, in the waiting room, early, because they did not know what else to do with themselves this morning.

I let them in. I say "good morning, welcome to Sunrise Semester." Nine times out of ten they do not say anything back. That is fine. I was that person once. Somebody let me in.

It is the smallest possible act of service, and it is the one that has kept me here for four years.

What I would tell a newer member

If you are past year three and you are wondering where the feelings went: take a job. Not the visible one. The boring one. Open the room. Make the coffee (metaphorical, for us). Set up the chairs (also metaphorical). Admit people from the waiting room at 6:55 AM.

You will not feel anything dramatic. You will not have a breakthrough. You will just be useful, quietly, on a Tuesday, and at some point you will notice that the reason you are still sober is that you are still here, and the reason you are still here is that you have something small to do.

That is the whole program. That is all of it.

I'll see you next Tuesday. I'll let you in.