My Conundrum

I’m sitting in a chair waiting for an AA meeting to start. There are five of my buddies who are in my sober living here and a handful of old men. I am careful to minimize conversation with the old men because it is extremely painful to sit through an unbelievably boring conversation while trying to appear engaged and interested, especially when I am in an irritable mood to begin with. I don’t want to be here. I hate AA (and by AA I mean any of the 12 step programs).

When talking to other people, I give a few reasons why I hate AA, but I rarely say the real reason. The usual reason that I give for hating AA is that I’ve been around the rooms for so long that I’ve heard it all. I say that the stories bore me and are all pretty much the same. Which is actually kind of true in a way. But tons of people have been around the rooms for far longer than me and they still are passionate, happy contributing members of AA. So, the problem lies with me, not AA or its people. I am no better than them.

There is actually a simple solution to this problem. To use an AA mantra, “simple, but not easy“. The solution is to share at meetings and see what I can add to the meeting rather than only listen then shoot out the back door at the end. You have no idea how badly I want to speak. I almost always have some great things that I genuinely want to share.  I want to get involved with my fellow addicts in the meeting and also make friends with them outside the meeting. I have a deep desire to be a part of something.

But I don’t share because I have some fucked up social anxiety. That is the real reason why I hate meetings. When I think about it, the social anxiety pretty much explains every problem in my life.

When I say I have social anxiety, no one gets it. Everyone seems to say that they struggle with social anxiety, but then I watch them introduce themselves and share charismatically for 5 minutes. Most people tell me to buck up and just speak at the meeting, in front of 30 people, for 5 minutes because they think that my social anxiety is the same as their “social anxiety”. Here’s the thing, if it were physically possible I may have given it more of a try by now. But it’s not physically possible without being humiliated. When I get nervous, which appears to be 100% of the time because it is my God-given natural state, I have an uncontrollable swallowing tick. If I am in a silent room with people, it is unbearable because it is a very loud swallow, actually more like a gulp, about every 20 seconds on a good day. And people definitely hear it- I’m not being overly self-conscious. If I am trying to speak, it is even worse. It will come on in the middle of a sentence. Then, it fucks with my head on top of the existing nervousness and it basically ends up being incredibly humiliating. If the swallow were not there, I could manage controlling my breathing and speaking or reading in front of people. My strange OCD swallowing tick seems to be the variable that separates my social anxiety from an average person’s.

And then there are my relations with women. I understand women the way non-addicts understand addiction- it is a textbook understanding. In practice, I tire myself out trying to figure out what the hell they are telling me through their damn body language. Unfortunately we are in a reality where women don’t say anything direct. Our incredibly useful language is moot here. In my defense I was raised Catholic by too-conservative parents in a Catholic school, which ended up molding me into an incredibly awkward person around women. I’m not blaming my parents, they did their best, but it is relevant. Every relationship I have ever had has pretty much fallen into my lap while I was drunk or on drugs. My skills with talking to women while sober are pretty much nil. I struggle with differentiating a woman’s romantic interest from friendliness. You’re probably imagining a complete spaz, which I’m not.  I am aware that I am likely being too hard on myself, but the basis of what I am saying is still true.

I could go without speaking at AA meetings and I could even go without making friends again, but the complete lack of intimacy is the true dagger in my heart. I’ve opened up about this problem to many people. Some of them claim to understand, but they really don’t. What I mean is that I have the level of game of a barely functioning autistic kid. That may sound exaggerated, and perhaps it is, but it might as well be true based on the scorecard between me and an average autistic kid’s amount of pussy scored in the last two years. I’ve tried to go back to the drawing board on this one, but I don’t see a way out. Fuck social anxiety and fuck God. I despise people who have victim-hood mentalities so I try not to play the victim, but I can only take so much hopeless frustration.

This problem is so frustrating and feels so hopeless that it has nearly driven me to suicide in sobriety. (I am not currently suicidal, so fuck off and don’t call any loony bins on me). I have attempted suicide once, in the midst of my addiction. But in sobriety I have honestly thought about taking my own life constantly for the last 5 or so years. I don’t see a way out. And I can’t decide if the pain of being sober and greatly restricted by my anxiety is better or worse than being on drugs. And I have established that being on drugs is straight up hell. So if those two seem to be my only options, no wonder I reject life.

There is a glimmer of hope somewhere inside me, obviously, because otherwise I would have killed myself already. I realize that I am not 100% hopeless despite being close, but I seriously wonder if that inkling of hope somewhere inside me is more detrimental than good. Maybe I ought to be 100% hopeless because the little bit of hope that I have is just keeping me alive in a shitty existence with an unsolvable problem and seemingly bottomless amounts suffering. I wonder if when I tried to kill myself I actually did succeed and this is a deeper stage of hell than I was already in.

I am resentful towards God. I have been on my knees countless times, sober and willing to change. I tell God that I am suffering and I cannot find a solution to these problems. I beg God to please help me. And I treat His children well and try to add good to the world and not be selfish. Nothing. So God needs me to be stuck in this conundrum apparently. Probably for a good reason, just at my expense.

So, sometimes the only thing that inspires me to keep trudging along on the painful and pointless road to nowhere is a myth that I once heard. It is called the Myth of Sisyphus. Basically, this guy named Sisyphus gets punished by the gods so he must push a boulder up a hill for eternity and every time it reaches the top, the rock falls back down to the bottom and he must repeat. As pointless and frustrating as this sounds, Sisyphus keeps doing it and doesn’t give up and it actually ends up frustrating and pissing off the gods who punished him, effectively backfiring onto them. This is an inspiring story. And sometimes it is enough to keep me going. I want to persevere, not give up, and maybe it will piss off God so much that he will have a stroke. That would be fine with me.

One day, I will be a speaker in an AA meeting. My hot, smart, successful wife will be there. I will have a PhD and be wildly successful in my life. Like Sisyphus, I will rise up and persevere. I will do it with or without you, God.