God did it.
I want to be clear about that before I say anything else. He did it. I just could not stop wanting to know how.
One person
There is a person I want to talk to before I say anything about myself. I do not know his name. He has been coming a while. He has done what he was told. He has a sponsor, or he has had four of them. It has not happened for him yet.
I want to ask him how long he has been telling himself the problem might be him.
I am not going to answer that. He already has.
I was that man for seven years. Everything that follows, I am saying to him.
At twenty-six, drinking heavily and finally willing to admit it, he walked into a church and told someone the truth. He was told to leave. He tried again later. Same thing. Then again. Three times the one place that was supposed to be a hospital for the broken looked at his wounds and sent him away.
He does not believe a single one of those men wanted him to go drink. They had nothing to hand him. They said the only thing they had.
Seven years of trying to get sober followed. Seven years of failing. He found sobriety and he found Christ on the same day. It happened in a room full of people in folding chairs. They did the one thing no church had been willing to do. They welcomed him exactly as he was and walked with him while he changed.
Seven years
I tried everything. Seven years I cycled through the rooms. I started the steps more times than I can count. Every time I got to the fourth one, fear would overwhelm me, and I relapsed before the work was finished.
I want to be precise about that, because the precision is the whole thing. It was not that I did not want it. I wanted sobriety more than anyone watching me could have known. I did everything I knew to do.
I went back out because I could not stay.
Here is what nobody tells you about being the man who keeps coming back. Somewhere in there, the drinking stops being the worst part. The worst part is what grows on top of it.
Seven years is not one hard stretch. It is seven years of resolve and collapse, more times than I can count. Walking into a room and meaning it, and walking back out having failed. Each round I came back with less than I brought the time before.
The noise never stopped. Not once, in seven years. Every morning was something to survive.
The ditch
If the problem is you, then the answer is more of you. That is the only conclusion available. That is what I did.
Here is what took me years to notice. The harder I fought it, the further away it got.
I was the person at the end of the road. The car in the ditch, wheels spinning, every effort to escape making the problem worse. Every turn of the wheel digging me in deeper. I was not lazy. I was not insincere. I was stuck, and my barriers were too dense for the tools I had.
That should have told me something. In anything else in life, when effort makes a thing worse, we stop and ask what kind of problem we are actually looking at. In this one thing, we do not. We tell the man to push harder.
If wanting it and working for it were the answer, why did seven years of both make it worse?
How the door actually opens
It took me a long time to be able to say the answer out loud.
The door does not open by force. It opens when the self that has been doing the trying finally runs out.
I did not get sober because I finally wanted it badly enough. I wanted it for seven years. I got sober when the trying ran out.
Which means all that effort was not wasted, and it was not working either. It was doing something else entirely. It was wearing me down. Every round I came back with less, and I thought that was the failure. It was the mechanism.
One day there was not enough of me left to hold the door shut. That is not a failure of willpower. That is how the door opens.
It means two things for the man I started with. If it has not happened for him yet, he is not doing it wrong. He cannot make it come faster by squeezing harder. Keep coming. Keep doing the next thing in front of you. The trying is not what saves you. The trying is what wears you down to where you can be reached.
September the first
September the first, twenty seventeen. My regular meeting. A man I had never seen walked in and shared his story.
I cannot remember one word he said. What I remember is what happened in me. Immediate and complete respect. Something in the way he carried it made me trust him on sight. I asked him to sponsor me. That was the first time in seven years I did everything I was told. Not the parts I agreed with. All of it.
The obsession was not reduced. It was not managed. It was lifted. It was removed.
I know how that sounds. It sounds like the new man was the right man. He was not. What was different was not the man. What was different was that I had nothing left to try. Seven years of trying had emptied me out, and he walked in on the day there was finally room.
Then the thing I did not expect. The noise stopped. The next morning was not something to survive. It was just a morning.
It was like color being added to a black and white world.
Everything changed. Not because God changed. The barriers blocking my access to Him had been removed. His power is made perfect in weakness. I had spent seven years trying to bring Him strength.
What it made
I spent twenty years in a field where we checked resistance every day, to see whether what was being sent was arriving. Ohm's Law says the same thing every time. If nothing is arriving, you send more current or you bring the resistance down. Seven years I turned the voltage up. The current was never the problem. The resistance was the problem. That morning the resistance came down. I went looking for what actually brings it down. I have been looking ever since. That is what I do now.
Take the one nobody wants
To the man I started with. You are not the exception in that room. You are the reason the room exists.
To everyone else, here is the part of my story that has nothing to do with me. The man who reached me had no idea he was doing it. He walked in, he shared, he sat down. He changed my life and he never knew my name.
Somebody is the next sponsor for a man who has already failed, and he will probably never know it either.
Take the one nobody wants. He is the one who is almost empty, and empty is where this starts.
I am here because somebody did that for me. That is the whole reason any of this exists.
Why this is written down
I did not think my way to any of this. I was dug out, and this is what was found underneath.
I am not the theorist of this work. I am its first proof. Everything that buried me became the credential, and every failure became the qualification. That is why this is written down rather than kept.
If you are struggling with thoughts of suicide or self-harm, call or text the 988 Suicide and Crisis Lifeline. Veterans can dial 988 then press 1.
From The Trying Ran Out, his own narrative account, and The Door With No House Behind It.