The Good Doctor!

So I have been attending AA meetings online since February. I have found a nice group of people to connect with. During the online meetings we share our experiences with alcohol and our hope for recovery. I have grown to love and look forward to connecting with people who have so much in common. Alcoholism has no boundaries of race, gender, sexual orientation, or religious background. I found that being apart of that group encourages me to drink less, pray about my problems, and approach alcohol with an entirely different attitude.

So, recently, I started to have private messages with Nancy from the AA online group. We click, we share that we are both in the LGBTQIA community, have children, and enjoy writing. We share a few messages and a couple emails. I like talking to Nancy and we are becoming fast friend (do people really say that)? Anyway, during a private conversation I confide in Nancy, because I trust her, yes not far from being a total stranger I trust her. I tell her I’m struggling with weekend drinking. I want to go all in, but struggle with alcoholic, because yeah, I’m alcoholic. She tells me no worries, she won’t judge me and to keep coming back. So I think that’s like on a Thursday. I login for my meeting on Friday morning and see a message from Nancy. She has decided we cannot chat because I am weekend drinking and well the point of AA is to stop drinking, right. Well guess what the biggest part of learning the 12 steps is from talking to another alcoholic. I tell Leah about the entire incident. She said Nancy was judgmental and could have contributed to a full-on relapse. Yet, I get Nancy’s point, but here is the thing; what I drink won’t you drunk. And people share in the online room that they drank or did drugs—that’s the place we come to admit those things. So I don’t understand why Nancy pushed me away, it hurt. I cried through my share on Friday morning. It was messy. It was a minor setback. In the end, I decided not to take it personal. Hey, if I was getting in the way of Nancy’s sobriety by listening and sharing my recovery, then maybe we shouldn’t be chatting outside of the meetings. The thing is, she often messaged me and asked me how I am doing. So by telling her the truth, that I’m still struggling made her cringe, then why did she contact me?! I’m so in my feelings about this! She won’t respond to my last messages I sent, so I guess I just accept that sometimes things just don’t go as planned. Everything happens for a reason.

  I am building up the courage to stop drinking completely by going to meetings everyday for the last 60 days. But here is the thing, no one must be my friend. And my recovery is just that, MY RECOVERY. It might not look like anyone else’s it doesn’t have to. I will continue going to meetings and continue being honest about my drinking, that is the only way I can recover. However, now I will be careful who I befriend. I told Nancy a lot of personal information, and she shared a lot of personal information with me. We really talked about grief, our relationship statuses etc. I really thought I meet a great person and that we were in the fight against alcohol together. She invited me to chat on google hang-outs, she sent me a friend request on Quora, she asked me to send her my poetry. Etc..

I will never understand what I did wrong here, so I will just say, maybe it was because Nancy is Autistic, and I triggered something. Anyway, it was nice meeting you Dr. Nancy Ellen, the good doctor.