“Enough.”

I heard a speaker last night at a meeting I hadn’t been to in about a year. Something I love about recovery and also something that I’ve had to work on over and over is to “look for the similarities and not the differences.” For so long, I was convinced that my story was unique, that no one knew what it was like, that I was entirely alone in my suffering. But as time passed and I was reminded by others in the rooms to seek those similarities, the more I found, often in the stories of those to whom I least expected to relate.

The fact is that yes, our pasts hold many different situations, home environments, specific tragedies and traumas. There are parts of our stories that are circumstantially unique. But those are details. Underneath the tiny kernels of technicality, beneath the exquisitely-decorated armor that we’ve crafted to hide the pain, are the scars and bruises that we all share, the feelings that have been neglected for too long.

The woman who spoke last night had a story that brought many of her listeners to tears. Like many of our own, her past was one of tragedy. As if she were echoing my old thoughts of feeling unique and isolated, she spoke of feeling that because her story was different, she hadn’t earned her place in the rooms of AA. Looking at the details, the specific events that set her apart in her mind, she walked back out seeking to prove to herself and others that she wasn’t the same and therefore, didn’t have a problem.

Several months later, still digging and waiting for her shovel to bang against her acceptable and “deserving” perception of a rock bottom, she attended a meeting. She walked in, fairly intoxicated and sat down.

This part of the woman’s story resonated the most deeply with me:

As she sat in one of the circular formation of chairs and waited for the meeting to begin, a man walked up and started to talk to her. The stranger, having guessed correctly, asked whether the woman had been drinking to which she responded, “yes.” He nodded understandingly, asking one more question: “it just doesn’t hurt enough, yet, does it?”

This question became a pivotal message in the woman’s story, motivating her to stop trying to find this mythical state of “enough,” and to accept that “enough” might not exist for her. If it did exist, she would likely die trying to reach it.

I, too, spent a lot of time looking for this point of having had “enough.” It’s almost as if I expected an internal timer to go off when I was ready to stop drinking, to stop hurting, to stop killing myself before I actually succeeded. I was waiting for something or someone other than myself to tell me that I was done, that I could stop. My dad used to wrestle with me and tickle me, refusing to stop until I said the dreaded word, “uncle.” The game was about seeing how much I could take until I gave in, surrendered. I didn’t expect that game to become a metaphor for my life. In the midst of my dysfunctional past, there was no “enough.” I guess that’s what made me an addict. I had too much pride, too much stubbornness, to admit I couldn’t handle any more.

Looking back now with sober eyes, I can see where this quest for “enough” would have led me.

There was never enough alcohol in my blood.

I was never numb enough.

I could never weigh low enough.

I was never empty enough.

I never had enough scars, enough pain.

What was enough?

The trajectory of my defiance would have led me to my grave, a place to which I came dangerously close on several occasions. My “enough” did not exist, at least not in my lifetime. It existed only in death.

I’m grateful, today, that I stopped looking.

I’m grateful that I never had enough.