“Admitted to God, to ourselves, and to another human being the exact nature of our wrongs”

The golden glow of sunset diffused through a room already full of shared laughter – laughter at ourselves, at our fucked-up little problems, at how big they seem and how we seem to be unable to keep ourselves from causing them, laughter at the heartaches we have suffered, suffered equally from sorrow or joy, laughter coming from the almost too painful knowledge that we have been exactly, at one point or another, where the man sitting next to us has been – as I watched a man get a twenty two year medallion. He said “Friends in this program are the key. You can pray all you want, you can lock yourself in a closet and work the steps like crazy, if you’re like me, you’ll drink again. It is the friends we find in these rooms that keep us sober.”

I know I am safe with these men. In this room, I know it will all work out one way or another. I know I because can be any which way I happen to be here. I can say anything, I can lean on this fellowship – these guys will see me through anything. There is no need to hide here, no need at all.

How did I get to this place? A large part of it has nothing to do with me at all – this is simply the way the rooms work – call it grace if you will. Yet there was also something I had to do to avail myself of this grace, and I believe it was Step Five. Grace opened the door, and Step five walked me through to this room I am experiencing tonight.

I was sure, with a freshly penned Step Four, that I would simply dissolve if anyone knew of the things I had written. Much of what I wrote then (and some of what I find when I take an inventory even now) quickly gets labeled ‘unacceptable.’ The longer I believe this, the more isolated I stay. It is the ‘unacceptable’ – the stuff I will tell no-one, the stuff that I can hardly look at myself – that cuts me off from a connection with others, the connection that I so desperately need if I am to stay sober.

What causes the isolation is not the particulars of what I did … no, what cuts me off from others is the belief that what I did makes me unacceptable as a human being in the eyes of others, in the eyes of the world.

Step Five is our first experience of the falsehood of this belief. We read our fourth step to someone sure that we will be banished from the face of the earth. We are given instead a welcome into the human race.