“Taking a commercial inventory is a fact-finding and a fact-facing process. It is an effort to discover the truth about the stock-in-trade.” (Chapter 5, Big Book)
“Here, of course, we have lost all perspective, and therefore all genuine humility. For this is pride in reverse. This is not a moral inventory at all; it is the very process by which the depressive has so often been led to the bottle and extinction.” (Twelve Steps and Twelve Traditions)
I’ve tried to create a personality for myself in AA with
extravagant, lurid, or morbid descriptions of my past self, as if I were
saying, “I’m better than you because I was worse than you.”
This is just peacocking in disguise. Strutting my indecorous
stuff. My aim was not to create an object of identification but to further
separation, with elan, art, and gusto.
When I’m talking about my drinking or my pre-recovery
condition, it’s best to stick to the facts and downplay rather than play up.
In a Yom Kippur service, a rabbi said, “I’m nothing!” The
chazzan then got up and said, “I’m nothing!” Then a congregant piped up and
said, “I’m also nothing!” The chazzan turned to the rabbi and said, “Who does
he think he is, being nothing?”