Only as Sick as Our Secrets ...

“Love to faults is always blind, always is to joy inclined. Lawless, winged, and unconfined, and breaks all chains from every mind.”
Originally uploaded by Vashtia
I told my story of experience, strength and hope at my regular Sunday night AA meeting tonight. This is probably the 10th time at least that I've shared my story in the past 2 years. I never know what I am truly going to say, having learned that I should ask God to talk through me in the moment.

The very first thing that I said tonight as I began is that in order to bring myself into the room fully and into relationship with everyone, I need to not hold inside the fact that I am struggling and that it is an issue from my past that is now here and that I can't say more about it other than the fact that I have learned in these rooms that we're "only as sick as our secrets". This is the place where I can ask it to be held, by the room and by God. And that when I do this, I am not taking on the burden alone.

What would unfold as I shared my story was the theme throughout every segment having to do with,  you guessed it ... secrets.

My father's drinking was held a secret that was to be kept hush behind the walls of our home and, even in there, it was never to be discussed even though it was right out in the open spilling all over us.

My adoption was a secret until I was 9 and then it wasn't, though much of the important details were for a very long time.

My chameleon teen years were filled with the secrets I crafted in the forms of pretending and manipulating and lying. These would later fuel the mechanism that kept my alcoholism running at full speed.

The dirty secret that I had buried underground during my entire childhood and adolescence was stabbing and jabbing me throughout my drinking years -- that I was ... GASP ... a lesbian !
And that my "coming out" would coincide with my stopping drinking was the first recognition that we are indeed only as "sick as our secrets".

And then my 13.5 year relationship during my "dry" period. A basement full of secrets. The ones I kept to myself and the ones she kept to herself and then the ones neither of us could even let ourselves know about -- like the fact that we "didn't work" and were totally co-dependent and dysfunctional and unhealthy and shouldn't be together ! And all the years of deceit in the form of her using substances and pretending that she wasn't and telling me I was crazy for accusing her. And then her use was right out in the open and I repeated what I learned from my mom and swept the secrets under all of our rugs and into our closets so that no one on the outside would ever know what was happening on the inside.

And how my secret of being unhappy and out of love and totally dissatisfied with the relationship would finally be disclosed a week after my partner gets out of a rehab and it totally splits our world in two and then we split and go our separate ways.

And then there's the financial secrets that come to a head in '09 and I have to confess to loved ones the trouble and debt I'd been trying to hide and this is on the heels of re-entering the rooms of AA after a long absence.

Fast-forward to a couple of days ago. The final "secret". An issue from the past that is here for healing. What form and shape it will take is yet to be determined. Which brings me back full circle to the start of the meeting.

One of the members who shared this evening said that what struck him the most about my story was the gratitude that he could see and feel and hear in me. And how this reminds him about not holding things in because when we are no longer keeping secrets, we are living soberly and honestly. And he was right. Amid all that I disclosed in my story and what I am grappling with right now, I am grateful for my program, for being sober, for having the willingness to meet this, to be able to use the Steps to help me get through difficult moments.

May I not regret the past nor wish to shut the door on it. May I comprehend the word serenity and know peace. Fear of people and economic insecurity will leave me. These are just some of the Promises that are at my fingertips if I choose to work for them.

I am only as sick as my secrets.

Today, I want a life in the whole Truth, nothing but the Truth.