Why I Was Sent to AA: False Pretenses

Why did I end up in AA? Why did I end up going to meetings as long as I did?

It started with my return from college. I had just graduated with my BA, and not much else. Boy did I have attitude problems.

I lost my job.

I lost my job at a department store, where I was working over the winter holidays.

It was a seasonal job, and I hated it.

It was a terrible job. I had just returned from four years of college, and all that I had to show for it was the BA, but little else. I needed to get to work, apparently,  but I had no leading, no direction in my life.

I  had this terrible penchant of walking out of every job that I had ever had. I had no skill for tolerating conflict. For so long, I was convinced that life and all that was in life revolved around me. I had never realized it, nor how pernicious and dangerous it can become.

The last job that I had, I walked off the job because I was taken advantage of. It was at a gas station, and they made me train for free. No pay. The station was disorganized, the staff were rude, and the people who frequented the place were quite unhelpful but unkind.

It was a stuffy gas station job in my home city. I ended up walking off the job, I ended up giving up on the job because of confusing, mixed messages from my two parents, two people who were drifting further and further apart in their lives, and using my life as a battleground of their divergent wills.

I never realized how damaging a fraught marriage could be. I witnessed it, I endured it, and it caused more problems for me in the long run.

I walked off than job after one month, and now more than ever I was filled with fear about every subsequent job, that the employees and the employer were taking advantage of me. I would make sure to withstand anyone to their face, catch people taking advantage of me before they did anything wrong.

I had no capacity to judge anything. For too long, someone else had been making all the decisions in my life. I was often afraid of doing the right thing or the wrong thing.

I stormed off of one job after another from that point on.

When I graduated from college, I was back at home, and fearful about stepping out into the world. I walked off one job after two weeks, then I took the seasonal job for a little over one month.

Then I was laid off.

I was back home, cleaning up house, taking care of chores, when my mother began berating me for all kinds of terrible things. She then threatened to kick me out of the house if I did not go to AA meetings, to learn humility.

She was under the wicked delusion that I had lost my job because I was a bad worker, that I had done something wrong. I was laid off, simple as that. There were no hours for me to keep the job into the next year.

Shame on those people. I see now more than ever where the insecurity of most people comes from. A sense of disastrous abandonment had worked over me too much of the time.

My mother forced me to go to meetings because I had a "humility" problem, as if it was my pride which caused me to lose my job. Throughout the previous month, I was frustrated and angry because of the crude and unpleasant treatment which I had endured because of the workplace staff and the unmanageable conditions which I had faced. No matter how unpleasant and hurt I felt, my parents did nothing about it. They did not care one wit. They never taught me anything about this New Covenant.

To top if off, my other mother told me to go to AA, which simply made things worse.

I was sent to AA under false pretenses, as if I was doing something wrong to have lost a job, and thus I had issues that needed to be resolved.

The truth is, my mother lied to me at length, micromanaging my life and telling me what to do,  how to live.

I did not need steps to learn how to live. I needed life, and that more abundantly, which I have in Christ Jesus, not in AA, not in what my parents tell me, and certainly not in myself.