I Tried to Fit AA Around My Old Life — This Time I Built a Life Around AA – Jordan B.
About This Speaker Tape
Jordan B. shares at the Monday night Blue Chips speaker meeting at the Naval Club, six years sober from a June 25, 2016 date, with his home group the Fifth Tradition Group. He introduces his alcoholism with the plain two-part definition he finally learned to apply to himself: once he starts he has little control over how much he takes, and once he stops he can't stay stopped. For almost a decade he couldn't see it, because he thought the problem was whatever drug he ended up on — cocaine, heroin, opiates, benzos — not the drink that started the cascade.
He tells a haunted-house scene where he is in line having a few drinks with his girlfriend, his boss, and the boss's girlfriend, and the instant the buzz hits, he walks straight past all of them, gets in his car, and drives to Fourth Ward to score. When he comes home a day or two later he punches himself in the face in the doorway — half to try to burn the lesson in, half so the woman waiting on him will see he's already being punished. He tells the Christmas-photos story: at twenty, he misses the family shoot three Sundays in a row, lying each time (the made-up runaway dog), and finally sees that something is wrong at a level he cannot will his way out of. He describes nine years of checking into treatment every January the day his insurance kicks in, gaming the symptoms, never touching the underlying cause, and eventually spending three months taking enough opiates, sleeping pills, downers, and vodka every night hoping not to wake up.
What finally works is doing every piece of it he had always skipped — a real home group, a service commitment, an honest sponsor, all twelve steps in order, a life rebuilt around AA instead of AA fit around his life. He tells the funny fourth-step scene where he sits in his sponsor's basement room and slowly realizes the chair he's in is not a guest chair, the TV tray of tissues and lotion are not decorative, and his sponsor falls asleep twice during the ninety-six-page reading and asks why he was given a day off. He learns that action comes before belief — you behave like someone who believes, and somewhere down the line, looking back like watching your hair grow, you realize you actually do.
He closes with the first-twelfth-step phone call where his sponsor tells him he's been struggling for two weeks and to call someone else, and how Jordan's alcoholism immediately tries to weaponize that as an excuse to use, strip-club, anything — and he pulls over, prays, and ends up with a pint of Ben & Jerry's instead. He meets his now-wife as a greeter at Fifth Tradition who refuses to date him until he finishes his steps; they have their first baby on the way. The program, he says, is not for people who need it or want it — it's for people who do it.
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