Day 1 Sober

After getting to work 4 hours later than usual, I saw my director and asked to speak with him. We went into a conference room and I began the conversation. "I hope I can get through this without crying, but I've had a rough week, and I didn't think it would affect my job until last night." He says, "Well you don't have anything to cry about with your job", I replied, "Well that makes me feel better. But I don't remember leaving the happy hour event last night and I got sick afterward."

He said, "Well I didn't hear anything so don't worry about it. I didn't even know anything was wrong until your shoe came off when you left to grab a cab." I couldn't help but laugh. He then said, "I've personally done things far worse at work events and have seen other things. You don't have anything to worry about." I felt so relieved hearing that I didn't absolutely fuck up my new job and also relieved that no one saw what happened. I left just in time before shit hit the fan.

While at work, I was able to keep down coffee and a cupcake. I already threw up everything else prior to work and the night before. I continued to drink a lot of water and waited until 6 pm to go to my friend's house for dinner. She was an AA member and lived in the city. She made me pasta, bread, and an iced coffee. It was nice to catch up with her and relate to things we both were going through.

After dinner, we left for the meeting and picked up a fellow AA member along the way. We showed up to the meeting and sat in the back. I took an AA book and looked around the room. There were different races, ages, and genders. All of us there for a common reason: we are alcoholics and we needed help. We needed a safe space to listen and talk when we wanted. We were all in pain.

The meeting started with the 12 steps and some other verbiage I couldn't hear or didn't understand. There was a lot of talk about God. Then the new commoners introduced themselves, myself included. There were 3 new people there. I couldn't start off with "Hi I'm Christina and I'm an alcoholic" because I didn’t believe it yet. It took me a while to say it. I just said, "Hi, I'm Christina".

Then each person reads a paragraph from a chapter in the book. This chapter was so relatable to me as it was about a woman who frequently blacked out and didn’t respond emember parts of her life. I almost couldn't hold back the tears. After the chapter was finished the last person essentially starts the meeting. You can choose to speak about the chapter and how it relates to you or you can choose to pass. Listening to the people speak was so interesting. Everyone had different stories. Some people were laughing and some you could hear such pain in their voice. The hour went by so quickly.

After the meeting, I asked if I could buy one of the books and the leader actually gave me 2 books on the house. One was the AA “big book” and another was called "Becoming and Staying Sober with AA".  I was so incredibly thankful. I went home and told my roommates about the meeting. Saying it out loud made it more real than just thinking about it.

How was your first day sober? How was your first AA meeting?  

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