I spend the next week writing down my resentments, only taking breaks to go to Pledges for meetings. By now, I’m on the last section, where I write down the part I played in each resentment—whether I had overly high expectations or was being competitive or said something nasty before the person yelled at me. It’s starting to become incredibly surreal to remember details about all these things that I’d somehow forgotten or repressed. Yet owning up to my part doesn’t feel shameful; it’s actually a relief because it makes me believe my future can be less messy.
“You don’t need to do it like a speed demon,” Rachel says when I tell her that I’m almost done. “Most people take months. Some people take years.”
“I know,” I say. I’d heard as much. But for some reason, as soon as I started writing, some compulsion deep inside kept propelling me forward at this rapid-fire pace. I didn’t even know if I could stop. It’s like I sensed that if I didn’t take action now, my perspective might change again and I didn’t want to risk forgetting how important it was again.
It was hard to believe what I was learning about myself—essentially, that, except for my grandfather, who used to call me stupid for no particular reason, I played a part in every single resentment I had. I’d either had expectations from people that weren’t met or done something to provoke whatever I was now angry about. Kane, for example, couldn’t have screwed me over if I hadn’t acted completely inappropriate and unprofessional in the first place. Even my grandfather and my parents, whose transgressions against me, I’d always felt, were almost too numerous to mention, were just doing the best they could at the time. If I was too young to have played a part in what they did, my part today was that I was continuing to hold on to the resentment.
I go to a Pledges meeting and share about all the realizations I’m having, and for the first time, I’m not saying things that I hope will get a laugh or demonstrate how articulate I am. I finally understand what people mean when they say that talking about things in a group helps them to make sense of their emotions. And if they were right about that, wasn’t it possible that they were right about a whole lot of other things?
Finally, a few days later, I sit in Rachel’s fern-filled apartment and read her everything I have—an entire hundred-sheet notebook’s worth. And then I read some more. And smoke. And read some more. She nods and smokes with me, occasionally taking notes on a yellow legal pad.
“You must be bored stiff,” I say when we’re getting into our fourth hour.
“Not at all. Remember, you’re being of service by allowing me to hear all this.”
People with the most sober time at Pledges talk a lot about being of service and how listening to someone else talk about their problems takes them out of their own heads, and how almost all the problems we alcoholics have are the same—most of them related to our oversized egos—and how they find themselves giving suggestions that they probably need to hear themselves. To be honest, I’ve assumed that most of them are full of shit. But I’m looking at Rachel and, since she’s a teacher and not an actress and Pledges is always telling us how important it is that we work a program of “rigorous honesty,” I assume she’s telling the truth. So I keep reading and reading and reading, until after the sun goes down and my last page has been turned.
When I’m done, Rachel presents me with a list of my defects, and even though it includes words like “selfish,” “self-seeking,” “manipulative,” and “dishonest,” for some reason it doesn’t make me feel at all bad about myself. It actually makes me feel hopeful that I may be able to conquer the kind of relationship problems I’ve had my whole life, since long before I took my first drink.
“You haven’t been bad,” she says. “Just sick.” She tells me to go home, read through the first part of the Pledges book, and think about these defects.
“It’s that easy?” I ask. “I just think about them and then I’m done?”
“Done?” she asks, laughing. “More like just getting started.”