A guy who’d been sitting around Alcoholics Anonymous a long time said to me once, “You can’t save your face and your ass at the same time.” That one sticks. As alcoholics, we spend a lot of time saving face. Hell, who wouldn’t? Life’s hard enough, and doing it drunk makes it even harder. By the time we get here, most of our lives don’t look like a greatest hits album. It’s more like greatest misses. It’s not like any of us walked into the rooms on a winning streak. Most of us got kicked out of here, there, and everywhere before we stumbled into a meeting and found something that actually works. Now we’ve written it all down, the misses, the patterns, the stuff we don’t exactly want printed on a billboard, and here comes the part where we stop saving face and start telling the truth. This is where that saying comes alive, because we don’t get to protect how we look and get free at the same time. So yeah, it’s time to qualify. Time to go back through the greatest misses and lay them out with another person. No polishing it up. No excuses. No long speeches about why it made sense at the time. Things happened. Of course they did, especially when King Alcohol had us by the throat. But this isn’t about what happened as much as it’s about what we’re doing right now to deal with it. That’s what matters. That’s what people are actually looking at. And the truth is, most people don’t care nearly as much about our past as we think they do.
Are you trying to save face or your ass?
