Last April, I walked through a barely marked door on a small West Village street and into a dark, compact, dusty room. The lights were low and people- mostly in their fifties and sixties- sat in folding chairs around a small judge’s bench complete with a gavel. I was moderately hungover and my face was inflamed- I felt constant pressure from fluid in my extremities. I made eye contact with a young, preppy boy– under eighteen, wearing expensive and fashionable sneakers-- and asked where I should sit. He said anywhere and I made nervous, tentative conversations with him and his friend– a small thirty something man with a wispy mustache and the far too obvious affectation of someone who had grown up around money and power but found those things always just out of reach- while I waited for whatever was going to happen to start.
It was the first twelve step meeting I attended. It began with a convocation followed by a series of announcements, (we have no fees but we do have expenses; the only requirement for membership is a desire to stop drinking, our monthly business meeting is on the first Thursday of the month, we have service positions available), a man stood and sat at the judge’s bench and spoke for about fifteen minutes about how he found freedom and joy– sober and dancing in the same nightclubs where he developed cocaine and alcohol addictions in his late teens. Various signs hung on the walls and an old ceiling fan fought to cool the unairconditioned space. After the man finished, a donation basket was passed and people raised their hands and spoke for five minutes about whatever they wanted. I was struck and confused by the variety of responses. I cried silently, felt sorry for myself, and read the signs. There is no wrong way to get sober. No photos. A particularly large poster titled and listing The Twelve Steps- the structure of a recovery program that I was only aware of insofar as I knew it included apologizing to the people who had been harmed by a now sober person’s addiction. I paused when I read Step Four.
Made a searching and fearless moral inventory of ourselves.
I have been doing that every single day for my entire life, I thought. Haven’t most women been socialized to constantly and exhaustively analyze all of their behavior in order to be kinder, better, more accommodating? Less selfish, more empathetic, to get our point across without taking up space? What could I have done differently that would have changed his behavior? How could I have resolved this conflict before it began? Was I the problem? When was I out of line? What is wrong with me? Me. Me. Me. I told my therapist that week that I wasn’t sure the Twelve Steps would work for women- it was, after all, a program designed by and for men. “I hear this feedback a lot.” She told me. But I had a desire to stop drinking and the only thing I knew to do– the only advice I had ever heard about the subject- was to attend daily Twelve Step meetings. “You drank every day [I did not drink every day] so you go to a meeting every day [I went to a meeting every day].”
Many of the people in that first meeting, including the thinly mustached man, asked for my phone number. I gave it to them. Most of them called me that evening to ensure that I was not drinking. “No, I don’t drink. So I am not drinking.” I told them. The mustache guy began to call me daily and encouraged me to find a sponsor- a person who had been in “The Program” who would guide me through the Twelve Steps.
“I’m not sure that I am going to do all of that.” I told him, “I know I need a real break from drinking, I know I have a drinking problem. But I am not sure that I am an alcoholic. I actually don’t think I am an alcoholic.”
“No one who isn’t an alcoholic has ever ended up in a twelve step program for alcoholics.” He told me– he was the first of many to repeat this phrase to me. It struck me as impossible that such a thing could be true. Twelve step programs have been around for almost ninety years. Surely, in the last century someone had gone to meetings, had a period of sobriety, and returned to occasional, unproblematic, and moderate substance use. Certainly someone in the period between the Great Depression and the AI apocalypse had thought they might be an alcoholic and then realized that, in fact, they were not. My father is an alcoholic, surely many children of alcoholics are hyper aware of addictive patterns and worry that their genetic destiny has come true? My divorce was completely destabilizing in its total lack of contentiousness. Surely another recently divorced person had leaned too much on alcohol and wondered if they had crossed the line into addiction? I had been severely, debilitatingly bulimic a decade before. Six-ish years into my progressive and supposedly chronic eating disorder, I woke up one day and simply knew I was finished. That I would never binge and purge again, that the severe cycles of restriction and occasional fainting spells were over. I was correct. Spontaneous recovery is controversial in psychological circles (and I did receive eating disorder treatment more than a year before I recovered) but it was my experience. I still, as a woman, have body image and occasional food issues. But I do not have an eating disorder. It seemed extremely possible, it felt probable, to me that drinking was also a crutch I used after a period of severe trauma. Perhaps clinically diagnosable as Alcohol Use Disorder but not- in my case- chronic. And yet when you hear something enough it begins to feel true. People assured me I was an alcoholic and so I began to say it, at least once a day.
“I’m Hannah and I’m an alcoholic.”
…
I write about my hesitations about my own relationship with addiction to contextualize my ambivalence about Twelve Step programs. I attended these meetings to help me understand myself better and because I wanted to learn how to socialize without drinking– I was seeking community but not refuge. I wanted to understand my relationship with alcohol and understand whether I had alcoholism. I had strong relationships, a therapist, and money to support myself. I did not have what twelve step loyalists call “the gift of desperation.” I was not in a state where I was willing to say or do anything in order to remain sober. I was open-minded but not complicit. My twelve step program helped me tremendously. But the indoctrination also affected my self worth, I acknowledge this is probably largely because I am not the person these programs were designed to save.
…
About a week after I stopped drinking, the thinly mustached man began calling me at nine or ten at night, keeping me on the phone for hours to discuss not only sobriety but also his relationship with this decade younger fiancee and his feelings about friendship, politics, and women. I began to wonder if this was normal.