What do I understand by “the joy of service?” When I began attending meetings in 2008, I did not want to do any SA service. But on Saturday, August 5, 2018, my current sobriety date, I began to feel different. On Sunday, the very next day, a local group voted me in as its Intergroup Rep. Before that, I had only done things like putting out chairs, filling in as a back-up meeting secretary, making coffee, serving as a temporary sponsor etc.

This is Ameer, recovering sex drunk from Iraq. If I wanted to summarize the AA Big Book on the importance of service, it would be in one word: joy! I have been transformed from misery to joy by freely giving of myself to others. I have experienced the principle: “The measure we give is the measure we get back.” It’s true! I am now addicted to service (in a good way!). Joy in recovery is not limited to sobriety; it includes helping others and witnessing their recovery! For years I experienced the false joy, the emptiness of lust.

My experience of joy in service through making SA a better place for women includes how one individual, then a homegroup, then intergroup, and finally the SA international community made themselves better places by taking measures to more comfortably accommodate me, a woman.

A few years before I came to SA, I saw several therapists. I didn’t realize it then, but I was looking for a “higher power” that would save me from myself, that would carry me. Being saved and carried was exactly what I tried to find in lust.

When I admitted powerlessness and unmanageability (Step One), I began Twelve-Step recovery. Within one week my spiritual awakening began as I could believe in the experience of others and feel hope. For me this was Step Two. Beginning to learn and live the Steps in my life (with some assistance from professionals) enlarged and deepened my spiritual awakening.

Every morning my alarm goes off at 5:30 am. I get up, put on clothes over my pajamas and go outside for a 30-min walk. This is where my morning ritual begins, supporting the SA program with another method. This method is about mindset (attention, dedication, focus and meditation), about breathing and cold therapy.

You are the mother I have always longed for
Showering me with affection and overwhelming me with love
You are the father I never thought I had
Raising me into a man and leading me from above

In the April issue, read about the miracles that have happened in members’ lives since they started living according to our common sobriety definition.

Starting an SA meeting in prison is not an easy job, despite lust being a widespread problem. Although I had no experience with prison meetings to speak of, I did not let that get in the way. My own lusting experience and service had shown me how we can be uniquely useful to others.

The author of “Giving Time to My Family Is Service Too” describes how he had plenty of time to do SA service when he got sober in 2009 and was no longer filling up every spare minute with lust. He lists all the services he did in the first years of his recovery, services that are available for us to do too.

During my first month in our fellowship, someone tipped me off to attend the Sunday Easy Does It But Do It meeting— a literature study meeting with a very nice family atmosphere. That really turned out to be true. The group quickly felt like family.

Many of us first experienced the joy of service in early recovery when we started giving back to our home group—turning up on time, sharing respectfully and honestly, helping set up the room and welcoming newcomers.

Why am I still in SA? A simple answer to this question could be, “I am here because I have to be,” but that doesn’t tell the whole story. The pain of repeatedly hitting bottom lines was enough to get me in the door, but never enough to keep me inside.

If I had to choose one word to describe how I felt for most of my life, I would choose “disconnected.” I had a hard time making friends in both kindergarten and school. There were many engaging ways to escape reality—creating stories in my head, adventure books, and video games.

I’m Mike and I’m a sexaholic, sobriety date Aug 7, 2005. SA has given me my second chance at life and has been central to my recovery, but other things have helped too.

In active addiction, my slogan was “Being alone in heaven is harder than being with a girl in hell.” In early childhood, I could not imagine a world without girls. I used to be ridiculed for playing with girls instead of boys. Who cared, as far as I was concerned; I enjoyed playing innocently with girls

My job has nothing to do with graphic design, advertising, illustration of magazines, or anything like that … years ago in my beginnings in SA I combined the design of the bulletin of my parish with sessions of consumption of chat and pornography … only by a miracle of my Higher Power did I never by accident place a lust image in one of those newsletters… And, logically, the quality of my work was barely regular, the time invested twice as much as normal, I stayed up late and I used to be easily annoyed if someone criticized my work.

In my early days in SA I was single, had no job, no car, no money, and a lot of time. It was 2009, and because of the economic crisis I was unemployed. I attended three to four meetings a week, called my sponsor daily, wrote my Step work daily, and translated the whole White Book, Big Book, and Recovery Continues into my native language within a year.

In November 2022 I had the pleasure of travelling to Rome for the Italian-speaking fellowship’s convention (this is how I describe it, but I believe they called it a workshop). It was held in a beautiful spot, just behind the Colosseum, as you can see from the picture (taken from the gardens of the convention site).

Eager to improve carrying the message to sexaholics all over the world, the ESSAY team, supervised by the Board of Trustees, has built essay.sa.org, a website in responsive design, which means it can be read as a 21st-century digital magazine on your smartphone, tablet, and computer.