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.
