CORONAVIRUS
Alcoholics Anonymous member doing his best to stay upbeat during pandemic
Social distancing tests mettle of a recovering alcoholic.
The Alcoholics Anonymous member knew, back in March, back when coronavirus began shutting Houston down, that people who rely on 12-step programs were in for a rough time.
He’s 16 years sober. I talked to him soon after he led one last in-person AA meeting before Harris County’s stay-at-home order took effect.
It was a Monday evening, and at a church on the edge of downtown, he and the two women who showed up used hand sanitizer. They didn’t share food like usual, didn’t hold hands, didn’t hug.
But still, the man felt the thing those meetings provide: an emotional connection to real, live human beings, to people in the same room as he is.
Isolation is a killer for anyone with addictions, he told me then. AA was hustling to move its meet
ings online, and he hoped that would be enough.
“We need that contact,” he said. “I need that contact.”
It’s been a hard month since then. Because of the coronavirus, the man has lost a lot of work. And even worse, he’s recently separated, probably headed for divorce.
“Sorry to reply so late,” he texted me Wednesday. “Have been having an awful bout with depression.”
At first, online AA meetings helped give shape to his empty days. It was easy to go to more meetings than before: He could find the times on the AA website or the app, and there was no commute. Old groups moved their meetings to Zoom, and entirely new groups started. For awhile, he did a 10 a.m. meeting every morning. Sometimes he did a men’s meeting, too.
He was amazed to see people new to sobriety in those meetings, and people who’d relapsed and hadn’t been to meetings in a while. He wasn’t sure that, in the same state, he’d have had the nerve to log into a
Zoom and face a bunch strangers. Then he thought again, and decided maybe that’s actually easier than walking into a church building where you don’t know anybody.
Then the depression began to kick in. He started sleeping late, missing the morning meetings, sometimes not getting out of bed at all.
He’s manic depressive, which isn’t that unusual in AA. Roughly half of people with substance-use disorders struggle at some point with another mental illness.
Normally he manages his up-and-down cycle well. He takes his meds. He exercises. He sticks to a schedule. And he does the meetings, which help. His therapist says he’s high functioning, uses him as an example of success.
Still, the lows come about once a month. This time, he sank deep.
It had been five days since his last meeting. “It’s so easy to isolate,” he said.
“It’s something addicts do.”
“I have to ask,” I said. “Are you drinking?
“Oh, God no,” he said. “And I don’t feel the desire to drink.”
He laughed, sounding tired: “At least there’s that.”
Maybe he was pulling out of the darkest part. He had returned my text: That was something. And too, he’d gotten out of bed: That didn’t always happen. He had a therapist’s appointment that afternoon. And there were work-related things he needed to do.
And meetings. Maybe soon they’d be in-person again. In the groups, he said, there’d been a lot of discussion about that — about when it’s safe to resume, once the church buildings reopen. Some people will probably continue meeting online, he figures. But other people need to do it in person.
Either way, he said, he’d be back in them soon.
“When I feel low,” he said, “the best thing I can do is go to a meeting. It’s not a cure-all. But for an hour, I’ll feel lifted up. I’ll listen to somebody else’s story. I won’t just be thinking about me.”