But I Was 23 Years Old!
I went to three AA meetings in 1988, but my sobriety date isn’t until 1992.
I was 23 years old when I went to those meetings. I was astounded to find that alcoholics came in all ages, shapes, ethnicities, genders and sizes.
But I was 23 years old! I wasn’t going to sit around in a church every Monday night. I am not a fan of church. I am a fan of God, who tossed me a shooting star and with whom I feel a deep connection, but I have never been a fan of organized religion.
But I was 23 years old when that shooting star went across the sky. A few months prior, I’d been living with a guy who was nearly 40. For years I’d been hanging out with people who were old enough to be my parents, maybe even my grandparents.
At 23, my brain hadn’t even fully developed yet. And the prefrontal cortex develops last. That’s the part of the brain responsible for – according to the NIH – “planning, prioritizing, and making good decisions.”
I’d like to blame my streak of poor decisions on my immature prefrontal cortex, please.
Thanks to those many bad decisions, it took me 11 years to believe I’d reached the ever-elusive “cool” status I’d desired for so long.
I hadn’t actually achieved that, but I believed I had. It is very, very, very easy to be cool when you live alone and create your own determining factors for coolness.
Of course, the people from middle school and high school who had set my standards for cool had moved on to something called “adulting.” Meanwhile I was still fuming about the 15 cents I loaned to Mindy Ford in the sixth grade, since she never paid me back unless you count her pummeling me into the ground after school. I was still crying about being shunned by Max – the man I’d once deemed the epitome of coolness. I was completely stuck in the past, having never emotionally developed.
So at 23, my head was still fighting with demons I developed in adolescence. Alcoholism stunts emotional growth, and I was likely a tad autistic, too. Growing up was never something I actually wanted to do. Drinking and doing drugs kept me feeling youthful and alive, even as my death loomed around every corner.
And even though I didn’t always see the death looming there, I thought the way I was living made me more fully alive. In spite of my complete innocuousness, I continued to dream. I idolized Jim Morrison, Jimi Hendrix and Janis Joplin, who had all dropped dead at age 27. I wanted to live the way they lived.
Looking back, maybe I did.
I had no idea that they had all died as a direct result of their addictions. When I was 23, I didn’t even know they’d been human. They were larger than life legends to me, not real people.
But, at 23, I knew something was wrong with me, so I tried out Alcoholics Anonymous and discovered that I definitely fit in. And I had the opportunity to dive in and be a part of that group, but that is not what I chose to do.
While I was wildly entertained during those meetings, my heart was still stuck on stupid.
And I was right on the verge of discovering something brand new that I believed would change everything.