Unboxing My Disease

I’ve been in OA for almost a decade, and I’ve had various levels of recovery. In the last few years, I entered in the deepest, darkest relapse I’d ever experienced. The only thing I can say I did right was to keep coming back.

I’ve recently been going through old boxes that have been undisturbed for ten years. They’re all labeled “sentimental stuff.” The boxes have shown me two things about myself: I was never as fat as I thought I was (it brings to mind that saying “I wish I was as fat as I was the first time I thought I was fat”), and it’s also shown me how disturbed my thinking and self-perception were from an early age. Now that I’m the largest physically that I’ve ever been, I often don’t realize how big I really am.

I’ve started working through the green workbook (Twelve Step Workshop and Study Guide) for the second time with a sponsor, and reading through Step One in the OA Twelve and Twelve, Second Edition has helped me to see how powerless I am and how unmanageable my life is.

I truly don’t know how my HP got through to me in order to give me this chance at a new life, but I do know that I wouldn’t have had this chance if I didn’t keep coming back. I share a service role with another member, and just before I was gifted with this abstinence, I said to her, “I can’t do this anymore. I can’t keep the meeting key. I have to give it back.” I’d had enough and was over OA and the so-called recovery that I could never find. But, somehow, my HP was working on me, and that very day was the first day in years that I ate only three meals and nothing in between. What a miracle.

Since then, it has only been a month, but every day, I have been doing my two-way prayer (writing out a question for God to answer and then answering as if God is doing the writing—and I truly believe that the answers often come from God because they’re not things I would ever write!). I am also meditating, reading the OA-approved literature, and now working the Steps.

It really does work if we work it, and we’re worth it, so work it! Thanks, OA, for saving my life, one day at a time.

— Robyn