All the Same Age

Although I’ve been a very thankful member of this wonderful Fellowship for two and a half years, I still feel like a veritable babe in arms. I know we are all toddlers until we have been abstinent about five years. I look forward with alacrity to the day I’m emotionally of an age to join the OA kindergartners! Maybe since I came in at age 18 (having burrowed my way to what I pray will be my worst and last rock bottom), I have literally been growing up in OA. However, I’ve never felt like the youngest member in a meeting. Age has never really occurred to me. In my eyes, we are all the same age.

Maybe as a result of our dire struggles with this disease, we have old souls. I have never felt distanced from you because of a possible age divide—I have simply felt incredible relief and such gratitude to have finally discovered the solution to a problem that had been slowly killing me from the inside out for as many years as I could recall. Engaging in the usual activities with peers in my age group no longer holds any allure for me. I would much rather be in an OA room, sharing pain and laughter with a group of my post-menopausal friends, than half-heartedly bopping under a disco ball, trying to act as if I was enjoying myself with my school friends.

Last Saturday night, in fact, I went to a university ball with them, and I must have looked a positive bedlamite in my golden dress, eating a bizarre-looking mung bean and hummus salad out of a huge neon orange lunchbox while the rest of them were trifling with the elegant hors d’oeuvres. While they were partaking lavishly of free alcohol, I was taking the term “teetotaler” to a new level by asking bartenders for boiling water to infuse one of my trusty tea bags. While I was snuggling down with Earl Grey, my friends were getting sloshed. But “To each their own,” I daresay, because we all had a fantastic night!

— Chloe E