“We find it a waste of time to keep chasing a man who cannot or will not work with you.” (Chapter 7, Big Book)
When asked how I am, I have a tendency to complain: in fact, my instinct is to cast around for some small, spindly woe, on the spurious grounds that I’m somehow being dishonest if I do not offer up on a silver platter whatever has irked or troubled me, in a sea of placidness and industry. If I am actually beset or preoccupied with something, that same instinct is thrilled, because now, it believes, I have licence to elicit sympathy for my long-suffering pains, although I am skilled at ‘spiritualising’ this by coating the exhibitionism with some sop to the programme, love, or God, which is all part of the dramatisation. I’ve stacked up vicissitudes, front-loading them into my narrative of the week, to so impress others with the burdens under which I am labouring that they will not dare attempt to cheer me up or offer perspective. I’ve even, to my shame, misused what are conventionally viewed as hardships, adversities, or even tragedies to elicit sympathy by playing up my bravery or bravura in the face of grief, challenge, or sadness even though I’m actually perfectly bonny.
This is all a hangover from my pre-AA days and my early days. Before AA, my identity consisted in my self-image as the tragic hero, sensitive, misunderstood, and maladjusted (oh, how titillated I was to see that in the Big Book: ‘Yes, maladjusted, that’s me! I’m simply not built for this world! There is no world where I might feel at home! I am but an exile from heaven knows where!’) Early in AA, I defended myself against solutions, because they seemed to require me to think less about myself and more about the tasks of the day. This seemed a betrayal of my ‘true self’ and also dreadfully inconvenient and time-consuming: the idea that I would have to do things, just like others, that I was one of a sea of humanity: what would be the point in going down that road? For a while, I actually preferred the unhappiness, because it had a rawness and urgency, and, I thought, an authenticity that the Stepford Wives, the sappy programme automata with their niceness and their Filofaxes, seemed to lack.
During this period, I was a ‘cannot or will not’. No one could yank, reason, or even attract me out of this state. The system had to degrade from the inside out: firstly because of the fear of alcoholic death, and secondly because of the fear of alcoholic life. Once the system collapsed under the weight of its own pomposity, I was willing and able. Turning this round, if someone else ‘cannot or will not’, I am best off remaining friendly but refraining from any attempt to convince or cajole. It does not work, it aggravates them, and it exercises me. Once someone ‘can and will’, then my job is to rise promptly and diligently to the challenge.