Training Wheels

Is it possible to ride without them?

As long as I can remember, I have always had doubt. I have doubted my parents, my teachers, jobs, society, the system, money, relationships, friends, advertisements, T.V., famous people, and most importantly myself.

I have always been competing with God. I never liked the way He was doing things, so I was always looking to fix and alter the people and things around me. I have always had the innate ability of knowing what is best for people and society, for a very long time! If only God let my basketball team win, then I could feel superior. If only God let me have the beautiful girl I was obsessed with, I would be able to be loved. If only God gave me intelligent, wise, forgiving, helpful, rich, strong, connected, utterly perfect parents that let me do whatever I wanted to do, then I could be happy. If only my friends, family, and acquaintances did what I told them to do, then they could be better and improved! Yet they never listened...

If I was in charge (like I should be), nobody would be poor, nobody would be unhappy. No one would have to worry about cancer or mean people. No one would have to worry about performing well in school to appease parents, no one would have people judge them for the things they didn't want to do. I knew I could do a hell of a lot better job than God. He was just letting injustice after injustice occur without even the slightest sign of care. What a joke religions and church are, what a joke life is, what a joke it is for anyone who believes in such made-up imaginary ideas such as God. I'm glad at least I knew better.

My world was always unsatisfactory. Everyone and everything let me down. Poor me... I never got my way. Why couldn't people just do what I wanted them to do? Why was there so much pressure put on me to succeed in school? Why did people pick on me? Why couldn't the outcomes I depended on so deeply for happiness ever turn out the way I needed them to? This was the whole of my thoughts until I had found my purpose and reason to live in life. That purpose arrived in a glass bottle just in time to give my madness some relief.

Alcohol instantaneously fixed every shortcoming and injustice in my life that ever occurred. All the negative thoughts I had completely vanished. With the breakneck speed of however long it takes to turn a bottle upside down. I didn't mind whatever terrible things were going on in the world anymore, I didn't mind that my basketball team had lost, I didn't mind that the girl didn't give me the attention I wanted, I didn't mind whatever my parents were doing, I didn't mind that I was poor and without direction. I didn't mind all the fears and resentments I had been grasping onto like a life preserver in the middle of the ocean. I had entered a new world of fun and feeling good about whatever came next. The only cost of admission was keeping a steady amount of drinkable enlightenment within my reach.

Every dollar and every moment I had was devoted to my liquid God. It gave me more than anything else ever had in my life. More than any friend, more than any girl, more than any family member, more than any object. With every shortcoming in my life propped up and crutched with beer, I was finally able to live a life worth living. Pain and anxiety would no longer be my regular experience. Pleasure and spontaneity would replace it.

Thanks to my superior intellect, I refused to live a mundane normal people life of going to work and trying to promote myself up the societal ladder with anxious effort. I would choose a life much more suitable to a man of my caliber.

Fast forward 14 years.

The crutches that once propped me up into the highest echelons of fun living have been overworked into dilapidation. Every video game, movie, conversation, party, experience, drug, had been done to extreme excess and repetition. Everything I did now bored me. My life had not progressed a single iota since participating in the pleasure prison. I had not learned anything about myself or how to live without altering my mind with beer. I didn't know how to learn anymore, I didn't know how to be with myself alone, I didn't know how to handle my emotions, I didn't know how to pay rent, I didn't know how to make money, I didn't know how to live without a woman taking care of me, I didn't know how to do the things I wanted to do, I didn't know how to be ok while I wasn't drinking, I didn't know how to be an adult. All I knew how to do was get drunk.

After my first few months of sobriety, I could feel the anger of everything roaring back to me. The vicious thoughts of how much time I had wasted, how many opportunities I had lost, how many relationships I pissed on. I had come to realize that I had been living my entire life with training wheels on.

Instead of learning how to properly ride a bike, I had learned that I could get on my bike as long as it had training wheels on. I was more than satisfied with this way of living. The only problem was that I was dying now. My health and wealth were abysmal, the training wheels worn out beyond reasonability. I wasn't aware that those wheels were diminishing, that they were never intended to be used 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, for years and years on end.

The hardest part of getting sober is being told that you can't live life with training wheels on anymore. That you have been cheating yourself of learning how to balance a bike without them. That the reason you cannot turn quickly or ride quickly is because of your dependence on such a childish crutch. That a device that was intended to temporarily help you is now a massive and crippling burden. That every time you get on that bike to ride, you fall over and hurt yourself without those little cute wheels to give you the stability you desperately need just to sit on the bike. The pain and embarrassment can be too much; many convince themselves that they can't live without it and go right back to putting them on, over and over again.

AA would never work if all they did was tell you, "Don't drink." The alcoholic is much weaker and sicker than they could ever realize. AA provides a place that teaches you that you can absolutely learn to ride a bike without those ridiculous, dangerous wheels you've been using to get along in life. They give you emotional support like none you’ve ever had before. It goes by many names to some, such as mean, rude, harsh, heartless. But at AA we just call it the truth. Any good sponsor will quickly tell you that it is pathetic of you to be this old and still need training wheels. Stop blaming the world, or the roads, or the bike and be willing to learn how to ride without them. It shows you that there are many other people out there that also don’t know how to ride a bike without them, that some even go back to thinking they need them even after months or years of proving that they didn’t need them to ride! That some insane characters have 10, 20, 30, 40, 50 years of proven time on the bike without those blasted training wheels yet still have ideas every now and then about wanting to coast through life with them back on. They even teach you that a lot of your misery comes directly from your attempts at playing God. The bliss one experiences when you learn to stop trying to control things you can not, is an experience no one should miss out on.

Where you had once thought you were all alone in your unique and awkward and embarrassing situation, you were just like all the others that enter those rooms. They even put on social events every now and then to show off in real time how possible it really is to live without training wheels!

I’ll end it with this; Don’t let your mind wander off too far into the realms of fantasy and romance that is the sweet embrace of alcohol. It lures and baffles, confuses and compels. You'll think to yourself in hard times and good, how much easier life was, how much better life was, how much more fun it was, to ride with training wheels on. That it isn't fair that other people get to ride with them on sometimes but you have to never put them on again. That it hurts when you fall off the bike and scrape your knee. That it’s painful to develop new muscles and skills for learning to balance and ride your newfound bike.

The reality is, that when I see people overindulge in alcohol, depend on alcohol, structure their life around alcohol, defend alcohol, worship alcohol — all I see is an adult child terrified to take their training wheels off.