Bob D. – AA Speaker – My Story of Recovery

One day when I was sober about a year and a half I was sinking into a deep depression. I’m the Bill Wilson type of alcoholic. I know I’ve been misdiagnosed by an incompetent psychiatrists, I have been misdiagnosed on a couple occasions too. One time I was diagnosed as clinically depressed, but I’m not actually clinically depressed even though it looks like it. What I really am, is spiritually depressed. It’s the depression of the obsessively overly self-involved. What happens to me is I just get me and my emotions, and they are just on me like that creature in the movie Alien that attaches itself to your face.”How are you doing Bob?”

It feels like the air has been sucked out of me, and out of the planet. I can’t even breathe right. I start feeling like my spirit is suffocating. I stay that way long enough and I’ll start thirsting for freedom. Unfortunately, the only thing in my whole life I’ve ever known that would bust me out of that was about four or five drinks. The obsession creeps up on me. The reality that alcohol has turned on me and doesn’t work will not enter into my mind. I do not think about it or weigh the consequences because I won’t be able to see past the need for the relief. So I came home this one day, I’ve been to two meetings this day. I prayed. I called my sponsor, and I’m sitting on the sofa while I’m sinking into this deep depression. I just got it on me and I’m just so locked up inside of myself I am pondering my life. The more I look at my life, and my future, and where it’s going, the bleaker it looks. I have never pondered my life and did it joyously. It’s never been that way for me. The more I look at me, the bleaker it looks. The more I look at my job, the more I realize all this is going nowhere.

I looked at the clock and it was almost 10:00 at night. I said a little prayer. I said, “God, please help me.” I remembered that there was a meeting at a quarter after 10:00 not too far from my apartment at a group by the Las Vegas Strip. It was hard to get off the sofa. I was so depressed. I felt like I weighed a thousand pounds. If you can imagine, that depression actually debilitated me. You know, it’s just terrible. So I finally muscle my way off that sofa and I shuffle out to my car like a mope. Get in that car drive down to the meeting there’s a parking space right in front of the door to the meeting. I go in I’m sit in the back of the room but I can’t hear anything in the meeting because I can’t get out of my head. What’s going on in the meeting is like music in a doctor’s office, it’s so remote; because when you’re sick of spirit, everything’s backwards.

But sitting across from me in this meeting is a guy who’s coming off a drunk and he’s in bad shape. And he’s grabbing himself like he wants to jump out of his skin and he keeps rocking back and forth like like he’s just having a tell like his nerves are going crazy. He gets up and he can’t sit still. He’s pacing like a caged animal behind me, back and forth, back and forth, and in the bathrooms you can hear him, he’s in there throwing up and dry heaving. I am trying to figure my life out this guy is annoying the crap out of me. The meeting is over doesn’t help me one bit. Charlie and I are the last two guys to leave the meeting. We’re standing on the front porch of the chapel and I look over and the guy who was coming off the drunk is laying on the ground in a fetal position in front of my car. What was I going to do?