SOBER IN THE CITY

Boy Strike

July 5th at 2:34PM by Sara [280 comments]

For the next month, I worked on writing out my personal inventory. I kept my word and tried my best to avoid guys. New guys, at least. Hunter had joined our little trio, making us into an unusual quartet, and had begun to attend most of the meetings we went to. And to be honest, even though we'd started out kind of rocky, Hunter was becoming one of my biggest confidants.

Beyond that, my days had really become all about AA. I woke up, prayed (something that had been suggested to me early on, but I hadn't actually been serious about doing before), meditated (I know, sounds hokey, but I swear it has this way of centering me—that is, on the days where I don't fall asleep in the middle of it), went to work and tried to be helpful, showed up at meetings and raised my hand to share, went out to fellowship with Ashley, Tizzie and Hunter and then went home to work on step work. By the end of the day, I was so exhausted that I was lucky if I had enough energy to take a shower before collapsing into bed.

But being busy was actually a blessing for me. For one, I may never have gotten through the fourth step if I hadn't thrown myself a hundred percent into it. My resentment list ended up being five pages long. Front and back. I started out by listing Mr. Hollywood (for getting mad at me for being honest, not giving us a chance and for not giving me the credit for his "coming out" in his article) and kept writing until I'd written about Steven O'Brady from seventh grade (For asking me to go out with him and then when I said yes, yelling that he was just joking. Then he'd depantsed me in front of the whole lunch room, which earned me the nickname Sara O'Share-a until I graduated).

After that, I'd focused on my fear list, which was way easier to come up with. I'd honestly had no idea what a scaredy cat I was. Looking over the list of my top twenty-five biggest fears, I was surprised I didn't have "My Shadow" on there.

Finally, I settled down for several weeks and delved into my sex inventory. For me, this was worse than reading back over my diary from high school...and that time in my life was totally humiliating. So, I sat down with a pen and the notebook that I'd labeled "AA Stuff" and began to make a thorough list of everyone I'd ever had "intimate interactions" with.

This task was a lot harder than it sounds—and much more painful. At least it was for me. I guess the majority of people out there can probably count how many people they've been with in their young adult life on both their hands (well, maybe not sorority girls, but the rest of mainstream America at least). However, if you're an alcoholic, you're probably lucky if you remember half the people you slept with. In fact, quite a few of the guys who ended up on my list were labeled as "Bar None bartender" or "guy who looked like Jon Stewart" or "old co-worker's boyfriend."

But that wasn't it. I had to list everyone. Ev-ery-one. That means, even the people I didn't sleep with. Anyone I made out with once while drunk at a bar. Any guy I led on just to score a free drink. Anyone I had any sort of romantic entanglement with in the past 26 years went down on my list.

Once every single name was down on paper (twelve pages to be exact), I had to write out how I'd harmed the guy, what I'd done wrong and how I may have sabotaged the relationship. After going through the first few pages of my sexual past, I began to see patterns appear, that—to put bluntly—made me more than a little depressed. This new self-knowledge was both fascinating and embarrassing at the same time. Before I'd started writing all this crap out, I'd been under the impression that all my failed relationships had been the result of being with the wrong guy. I had no idea just how much of it was my own fault.

Needless to say, I felt like ass by the time I was finished. All I could think of was how I was so ready to get rid of all the guilt, shame and all-around ickiness, so I begged Thandi to let me to do my fifth step as soon as possible.