Hi Nic...big hugs!!!!

I myself am grateful for your honesty, thankyou. I do live in a city but my shift at work is 4-11...which prevents me from going to the meetings that i want. When i was in treatment i was doing 5-6 meetings a week. I really miss that. I  really relate to alot of what you said, although i am fairly new to the program and sobritey i need to get honest with myself to.

Its strange how i read your post at this time..for the last couple of days i've been feeling quite disconnected. Lonely, i have work,,,but thats work.I have my 16 year old daughter here with me but she has her own life, her own friends. I don't know I just feel out of sync.Lonely.For me meetings aren't enough to quell that lonliness either. I do identify with the fellowship but it's a short share ya know? I know alot of people in the program who just relapse too much for my liking, so i choose not to hang around too much. Negativity has its affects on me. I try to be positive. And need that positivity in return. And too face to face. I thank God for the online stuff, but...its really not the same.

Keep sharing how you're feeling nic,please, you're helping me more than you know. \\//Wendy

Aw thankyou both.

I was so afraid I'd be misinterpreted or brushed off with some quip or cliche. Thankyou for both understanding and letting me know you do. It is strange really, but that shared understanding is so important, isn't it? When we share in a meeting...the room can be chocka block from desk to door, but you stand up and trust that someone...maybe only one person...but someone will understand and relate... and you see it in their eyes, or they approach you later or just smile, and you know you are a understood... And it makes all the difference to your world.

When I found sobriety I was just another messed up alkie who had forfeited my chances at an education and career. I'd walked out of a marriage and was struggling to rebuild a business and keep food on the table for my kids. I had no concept of life beyond the struggle, and life was just plain bloody hard because I expected it to be.

My sponsor absolutely enchanted me...she had overcome so much in her sobriety...learned to read and put herself through uni, found peace in an incestous and violent family and established a career working in these areas and helping others. She had travelled and visited the places she wanted to see or understand. She had bought a house and turned  it into the home she'd always wanted, then another, and she continued to remind me that I too was capable of all these things.

Back in the city amongst my AA friends it was very different. They all know where I come from..that I am no different in essence... they understood that my education was just one facet of my recovery...something recovered from the mess. Here in the bush, people just figure I have come from the city...they are unable to look beyond the city and country differences and I often feel very different and seperate. I find I am talking less and less. The things I have learned, in agriculture for example, are dismissed as "all that silly city stuff", so I just do what I have come to know works...(a bit like just working the program, I guess) and wonder how on earth they can argue it, criticise it and me, when the evidence is in front of them... People come here to the farm, and say Wow, this is great..some call it the oasis... and I stand on my verandah and look across the hills at the brown and lifeless land that people keep stripping for their cattle, and think they too could have this too, if only they cared...if only they would stop arguing and condemning me, and just start caring about what is theirs.

It has become me and them hasn't it? Reading back over that...

I remember my sponsor saying once.."Tis a lonely road we trudge...the road marked recovery needs stamina. You will see a lot of folk heading back the other way on this road and you just have to let them go where they want to go. Sometimes you meet up with people travelling in the same direction and you fall into step with them. You can share a bit of the journey but ultimately you have to learn to walk alone."

Thankyou for letting me know you both are also on this road. I may not be able to see you, but it is reassuring and encouraging just knowing you are there somewhere and that we are all travelling in the same direction, doing the best we can and striving for progress. I don't feel so lonely today. It makes all the difference knowing you both understand and relate. Thankyou. Maybe together we can help each other feel the sense of unity we are missing?

Raising teenagers is hard work...they are so full of activity and so bloody social...that it is hard sometimes, not to feel caught in the wake of their rushed communication, bombardment of mates demands and their new freedom of spirit. Those little kids who used to wait for us to tell them how to do things, now don't need to...they know what they are doing, they have choices and dreams of their own, new friends and lots of them. I miss my kids sometimes even though they are still here buzzing about and living their lives.

It is fun being a Mum though, I think...I love watching them grow and they are nice people. I was so relieved

I realise too... my mate and I don't share a lot of AA anymore...His program has always been based on the KISS method and he describes me as a very deep and thoughtful type, so we laugh and roll our eyes at each other and have always just accepted that while different, both ways work, and that is the blessing. It has always meant though that we tend to move outside of the relationship for AA support, which is probably good...since I figure relationships really don't need any additional problems... and things can be magnified or distorted or misinterpreted when we try sorting them "inhouse". He's a nice person too. He knows how to make me laugh when the last thing I feel like doing is laughing, and I think that is a special gift.

I feel grateful today. Thankful that you both responded and shared a bit of your world with me and helped me feel like I'm not alone out here, or slipping into a feeling of uniqueness. You have reminded me that I can still have AA friends and it doesn't matter where they are, or I am, we are still on the same road.

All the best girls,

Nic

Hey Gammy,

Not many...nearest town has probably 300 in the district, I think. And when you say there are bound to be people here who need AA...*laughing*...well, yeah the whole town probably needs it, but if they don't want to consider it, then they're unlikely to get it...alcoholism and recovery, like many things out here is a "city thing" apparently...

It is very different, and at time difficult to understand how 'backward' things seem here. My mate says it is the town that time forgot. Just got to laugh, I guess. Shake my head and get on with living sober.

Glad you're back Gammy.

And girls - Have tucked your msn's in my list...will keep an eye out for you and see if we happen to strike it lucky with the international clock.

philipld@sympatico.ca

anytime my freind, from the other side of the world--and anyone else on this board that wishes at any time to use it also.

Its a WE thing:)