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Part 2

A week later, I went back to DA.

And for the next six months I went back to most meetings, unless something suddenly came up that night.

The routine very quickly fell into place – catching the train over there two hours beforehand; having dinner at the nearby McDonald’s; looking in the nearby bargain-bookstore and sometimes buying books; walking to the meeting venue past the café with the white and black-spotted cat sitting outside most evenings; and usually being the first or one of the first to arrive about ten minutes before the meeting began.

Soon, I would help set up the room for meetings.

Eventually, I would also chair some of the meetings – and most times when I read out the preamble, I would stumble over reading out the word ‘anonymity’. No, it wasn’t psychological – but whenever I saw that word, my brain and mouth would start processing it as ‘anony-mity’ and then get it right as ‘ano-nym-i-ty’.

I got to know more and more about some of the other regular attendees, and how and why they’d arrived at DA. Some had been coming regularly, or on-and-off, for many years.

Some weeks, only a handful of people would turn up – while other weeks, we’d have to find extra chairs.

There was often laughter, or tears, or both.

Each meeting I attended was remarkable in its own way.

*

Soon, I also resolved the DA component that had troubled me greatly at first – what, or who, was my Higher Power?

One night at one of my first meetings, as I was looking past a few people at where the Twelve Steps banner was hanging on the wall behind them, I got an idea.

Another meeting or so later, after having mulled over it some more, I described to my fellow attendees what my Higher Power was.

It was a mental image I called the Future Me, a smiling vision of myself somewhere in what I then thought would be the distant future where I was debt-free (or well onto the way of being so) and living a much better and stress-free life thanks to the action I had taken and the financial literacy I had learnt.

As I explained to my fellow attendees, the Future Me was what I was striving towards and what was keeping me going. That was my Higher Power.

And for some of the time, it worked.

*

Going to DA encouraged me to seek more help and resources about my situation.

As well, thanks to DA literature and other information I found in books and online, at first I did the right things like proactively contacting creditors and working out with them when I could make payments.

But soon, the growing stream of letters and ‘phone calls became an overwhelming flood.

Unfortunately, I became very scared.

And because of my growing embarrassment, fear and shame, I stopped being proactive.

Unopened mail and ‘phone messages piled up.

And as a result, my weekly trips to DA became even more important.

Those meetings became 50-minute sanctuaries from the mess I’d made of my outside world.

Apart from my psychiatrist, my fellow attendees were the only people I was comfortable talking to.

Not only did they give me an outlet so that I wouldn’t keep my fear and terror bottled up and festering inside, but after many of those meetings I was compelled to stop putting off calls I had to return or correspondence I had to reply to.

One week at a time, DA was helping me to cope and take some action.

But as more time passed, it wasn’t enough.

The end, it seemed, was coming faster and faster.

I had to take major action.

But what?

*

And then a few nights before Christmas 2010, I unexpectedly found my answer.

Until next time, stay well and take care 🙂