Estimated read time: 9 min
It’s dangerous to be different…
I was a 20-year-old, white, female, college student when I first found the rooms of my 12-step program. (I should add that I am still white and female). Anyhow, I had no drug or DUI charges, I came of my volition, and was not at risk of losing my home, spouse, job, or anything else of the sort. I’ve shared in more detail about my life leading up to my first meeting (see post, High Functioning at Rock Bottom: My First Day ), so I’ll spare you the details here.
The first several meetings I attended in the days following my very first meeting (I’m grateful to live in a town that has at-least one meeting every day of the week.) I noticed four very specific things: 1) everyone at the meetings was white 2) there were like maybe three other women, 3) many of them share about their arrest records, jail and/or rehab trips, and 4) everyone there was older than me by at least a decade if not more. There were a lot of other things I noticed as well, but we’ll get to that later. The moral of the story, I felt different.
When writing this post I wasn’t quite sure what content it would hold. I’ve had the title floating around in my head for a while, and I knew the overarching theme that I had planned to unfold, but I didn’t really know how to approach the dissemination of the information I wanted to convey to readers, or more honestly, myself. With that being said, I’m just going to trust the process and dive in.
If you can, think back to elementary school. This may require reaching way back into those distant childhood memories, the blurry ones that almost seem like a lifetime ago. What do you remember about those early times in your educational career? Perhaps you’re like me and you remember the color of your cubby, the neat thing you brought to show and tell that the bratty kid in your class ruined forever, or even how much you hated nap time (if you had it).
Some of you may remember learning how to spell, read, and write. My arithmetic geniuses, do you remember learning to count to 100, add/subtract, multiply, and divide? Depending on your home life maybe you already knew some of the more basic skills like colors, shapes, and numbers. Maybe you even knew how to read and write from an early age. Chances are, even if you already had a pretty good understanding, you still had to participate in all the class activities and assignments to further develop and evolve your understanding of those concepts. Let me ask you this though, do you remember how you learned those skills and concepts?
When I was in elementary school, well in kindergarten and first grade at least, my teachers were very fun and creative. For the one-hundredth day of school, we had what they called “100 day,” (really creative I know), but what was creative was all the activities they planned for us that day. I can distinctly remember that we got to pick our favorite snack, something small that cheerios, fruit snacks, or goldfish, and we had to count out one hundred of them, to eat and take home at the end of the day. Whoever could do one hundred jumping jacks while counting them correctly could get a prize. You know silly kid stuff, that teachers could also pass off as educational.
Another engaging method my teachers used back then was sing-along songs, and creative storytelling. Some of you may remember the “RED” song to the tune “Are you Sleeping,” or the “BLUE” song. I’m pretty sure there was a song for each mainstream color. We’d all sing along, off-key I’m sure, and in the process of having fun, we’d accidentally learn about colors and how to spell them. For storytime, we’d all be sitting there on our little carpet squares in front of the teacher, and he or she would begin telling a story. Every so often they would pause and call on someone to add a part of speech to the sentence (noun, verb, adjective) to make it make sense in a funny or interesting way. Maybe I’m alone in my experiences, but those first few years of school were fun!
As we got more “advanced” in our learning, there became a common theme in assessing our comprehension of the concepts and skills all those songs and activities were supposed to be teaching us. Venture a guess as to what that assessment tool might be? If you guess Venn diagrams, you’d be correct!
I can remember several occasions in which a worksheet with a Venn diagram was placed in front of me as a young child. It was a very generic diagram, sure, typically it involves distinguish characteristics between two simple items (e.g apples and tomatoes, even and odd numbers, etc.)
In case you weren’t quite ready for a nap yet, let me give just an ever so brief history of the Venn Diagram. According to Wikipedia, Venn Diagrams, as we call them now, were first introduced by, English logician, John Venn in the 1880s; although they were not referred to by that name until 1918.
As most of us are well acquainted with by now, Venn Diagrams are used to explore how items relate to each other against a larger backdrop or environment. More simply put, it’s a visual representation of two (or more) overlapping circles, in which two objects are compared and contrasted to each other. Of course, the middle section, where the circles overlap, contains an itemized list of what the two objects share in common.
A vital little tid bit I feel I should share here is that among the many, and I do mean MANY, cliches, one-liners, and slogans I heard during my first few weeks of meetings was that when listening to other people’s stories shared in a meeting, I should “identify not compare.” So let’s start connecting some dots, shall we?
Remember at the beginning of the post when I mentioned the four things that became glaringly obvious to me at the first few meetings I went to? For a refresh, I’m referring to what was different between me and everyone else. The legal histories, age differences, marital status, jail time, rehab trips, the gap in genders represented, so forth, and so on because there is more where that came from. I was subconsciously noting differences between others in the room and myself.
I told myself that I would come with an open mind, that I would give this whole 12-step thing the “good ol’ college try” if you will, but unbeknownst to me at the time, I was already distancing myself.
I would hear the stories of these people and think, “I’ve never gotten a DUI. Hell, I’ve not even been pulled over before.” Or, “I’ve never been fired for showing up drunk to work,” followed by “I’ve never lost a spouse or a home due to my drinking.” And, the thought that maybe I don’t belong here after all began to creep into my mind as well.
Don’t get me wrong. I enjoyed the meetings. I really like that there was somewhere where people would smile and greet me when I arrived. I liked the coffee and talks on the porch, the fellowship, laughter, and connection the rooms had to offer. But, I felt like a fraud–different–like I didn’t really belong because I wasn’t “like them.”
Then as it always happens, I heard exactly the right thing, from exactly the right person, at exactly the right time. I was sitting in the porch with a few of those old white men I referred to earlier, and they were chatting away.
One then asked the others what they wanted to hear about in the meeting today, searching for some kind of topic to introduce. The chairperson mentioned that they didn’t really like chairing because they didn’t feel like they ever had a good topic compared to other folks, to which another man responded, “Identify, don’t compare.”
This of course led to a whole discussion on the porch about what that means and how it relates to the rooms of recovery and recovery in general. The moral being that if you look for how you’re different or unique from everyone else, you’ll damn sure find it, and it may lead you right back out to wherever you came from before showing up in A.A. BUT if you look for the similarities in the shares, the stories, emotions, and experiences of others you might just find that none of us are all that different from the other.
Basically, it’s not about the left circle, or the right circle. It doesn’t matter what makes the apple different from the tomato. It’s about what’s in that middle section. The section that the two objects share in common. The central theme, the middle of the road, and the commonalities in the rooms of recovery mean far more than anything that is different between two alcoholics could.
It’s about being able to identify, and not fall into the vile nature of comparing what makes me different from you like some sort of sick and twisted Venn diagram of our stories in addiction. It’s about identifying and not comparing.
It saved my life, and maybe just maybe it could save yours, too.
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