Now that I’m in my sixties, I find myself reflecting on the strange journey of my life. If I zoom out, it seems to have moved through three major phases: The Good Bill, The Bad Bill, and the Better Bill.
Bill #1
I grew up in a lower-middle-class household in an upper-middle-class suburb of New York, 18 miles from Manhattan. My parents had their struggles, but me and my three siblings knew right from wrong and how to say “please” and “thank you.” I was a good kid. Creative, friendly, kind, and sensitive. When my neighborhood friends and I would play “war,” I was always the priest who would bless those who had fallen on the backyard battlefields. The kid priest epitomized Bill #1.
For sport, I was a springboard diver. Eventually, I got a full athletic scholarship to West Virginia University (WVU), which enabled me to get a college degree. At the time, WVU was the #1 party school in the nation, and I partied with gusto. This was the beginning of Bill #2.
Bill #2
After college, I became a member of the US High Diving Team, a troupe of aerial expedition athletes who traveled throughout the country as part of an aquatic entertainment production. My high-diving comrades and I would climb to the top of a 100-foot ladder and hurl ourselves off at speeds in excess of 50 mph before hitting a small pool that was 10 feet deep. Yes, I actually did that. For seven years I lived the life of a carny, smiling for the audience like an All-American athlete during the daytime, and pillaging through the town like a drunken Viking at night. My drinking horn was never full enough.
The partying life is alive and fun. Until it’s not. I don’t know the exact moment things took a turn for me, but a turn they took. All the boozy carousing masked a slow erosion of my character, allowing me to lie to myself, and others, more and more. Before long, I had shifted from good to bad. I couldn’t be trusted. When I’d look in the mirror, I had to avert my eyes because I couldn’t stand the person who was looking back at me. My frequent trips to oblivion helped dull my self-loathing.
Bill #3
This Bill came as the result of a bad dinner date. I actually thought the date had gone really well. But when I called the woman the next day, she said she’d never date me again, and reminded me that I had borrowed money from her to pay for dinner. She also told me that I had a drinking problem and gave me the number of a friend of hers who had faced his own problems with alcohol. I was embarrassed enough to pick up the phone. I was sick and tired of being sick and tired.
August 31st marks 30 years of living a sober life. The decision to live free of mind-altering substances transformed me and my life. I live wide awake to every experience now. That means I go through every situation, good and bad, feeling all the feels. When things get tight or tough, I don’t escape to alcohol. I work through them. Bill #3 is anything but perfect, but he is far more centered, patient, generous, and present. And far less self-centered. These days, I live comfortably in my own skin. I’m good friends with the guy who looks back at me from the mirror.
Bill #4
There’s an epilogue to this story, and it involves Bill #4. Recently, to mark my 30th anniversary of living in sobriety, I traveled to the tiny little town of East Dorset, Vermont, to visit an anonymous little cemetery on the outskirts of town. There, by the humble graveside of a World War 1 veteran, 2nd Lieutenant William Griffith Wilson, I said a prayer of gratitude. Bill W., as he is more affectionately known, is the founder of a spiritual program of recovery that has transformed the lives of millions of people throughout the world, including me. Because of him, I am still trudging on the road of happy destiny one day at a time.
