The thing about bottoms is that they hurt. The ending of something that is ongoing is hard. Even if what is ending isn’t all that great to begin with...
Sometimes, it feels like the bottom is just never gonna happen. It just keeps falling out over and over again, but I have seen through my own addiction, and that of others, that that just isn’t true.
My sponsor said the above line to me this morning. And she, as usual, was right. She said that the bottom doesn’t get deeper, it just gets endless. And fuck me, that is so fucking true...and pretty much all bottoms I have been acquainted with...
Alcoholism keeps spiraling downward but once you hit a certain point, the bottom is just an endlessness that cannot be evaded or endured. Life ceases to fall apart, it is just apart and that apartness is endless.
Fuck, sometimes that woman just levels me. A one line comment in a hour and half conversation that just hits me square between the eyes. And she nails me to the spot, and I am there...pinned to the reality of my own making, or at the very least my own participation.
In a few days, if I don’t make a horrific decision that fucks it all up, I will be sober for twenty-seven years. Twenty mother fucking seven years. Sweet Jesus, that is a long fucking time. My entire adult life has been on this track of staying sober in the face of everything life hands me. Of moving me fonward (fucking onward) and evolving into the best version of myself that I have ever been. It is a wonderful journey, albeit the most productively painful one I have ever endured.
Sobriety has taught me so many lessons that I, thankfully, did not know that I needed to learn. I say thankfully because if I would have known the shit that I would have to walk through when I got here, I would have run screaming from the rooms...like immediately. And I wanted to do that anyway and I was totally clueless as to the exact degree of my dysfunction.
Today I am at another bottom. And I am sitting in the dark bottomness of my own choices. And I see the dysfunction. I see it all around me. I see that it is pervasive and that freedom awaits me on the other side...but, like before, I am scared, I fear, and there is this part of me that wants to continue to participate in the dysfunction. But I see so clearly now that the bottom won’t go deeper, it has already become endless.
So I know I have to make a choice. I know I have to choose something different. And I see the hand of God in all of this, which used to feel like punishment, or torture, or indictment of all my unworthiness. Today I see it as salvation. I see it as change coming for me, liberating me once again from a prison that I helped construct and now have decorated so nicely that it has become hard to leave. The cage doors were flung wide open yesterday, but still I remain, because I am most afraid to change the things about me that have long caused me to suffer.
While I am grateful the bottom doesn’t go deeper, the endlessness is an awfulness that I just can’t endure. I do not want this forever, I want something better, for me, for others and for now. So I have to do the thing, I am afraid to do. I have to take the action I am afraid to take. I have to step off and let the hand of God catch me. And to trust and see that it always has...
And one more time, life begins at the place I am most terrified to take the next step. I am moved forward, in fact propelled forward, out of the endlessness and into the sunlight once more.
