If we are painstaking about this phase of our development, we will be amazed before we are half way through. We are going to know a new freedom and a new happiness. We will not regret the past nor wish to shut the door on it. We will comprehend the word serenity and we will know peace. No matter how far down the scale we have gone, we will see how our experience can benefit others. That feeling of uselessness and selfpity will disappear. We will lose interest in selfish things and gain interest in our fellows. Self-seeking will slip away. Our whole attitude and outlook upon life will change. Fear of people and of economic insecurity will leave us. We will intuitively know how to handle situations which used to baffle us. We will suddenly realize that God is doing for us what we could not do for ourselves. (Big Book 83-84)
I have found freedom and happiness. I have been given a new way of seeing and understanding the past. I've found enough serenity. I am not as selfish. I'm more open to others. But I'm prone to self-pity and self-seeking, and I've found economic challenges almost insurmountable. We're surviving financially; in debt, yes, but reasonably able to get from month to month. But my professional career, such as it is, since completing my Ph.D. has been stalled. I'm working full time now, but there's no guarantee that this full time work will continue. I've been unable to find a permanent position, in a teaching role or elsewhere, and if I do it could mean that we will be forced to move to another part of the country, away from the friends and support we've developed here.
The question, of course, is also about how important a professional life is to me. I lived a version of a fantasy professional life, while slowly going through graduate school, in a long cycle of deferral and drinking, that has now been burst. With the fantasy over, what can I build from the shards of my education? The advanced degree was, in part, a way of reshaping my working-class, druggy background into something respectable. I drank away most of this opportunity in the 13 years it took me to get there, though, so it's hard to know where I stand. I do have some professional credibility left, at least on paper, but it's clear that I've been unable to convince others to take a chance on me in the real world. In some ways, I'm still the twenty-something who got enough of his shit together to go to college, but now I'm forty-something and once again all I can really say is that I got my shit together enough to finish something.
The 12th step and the Big Book tell my to shy away from self-interest and self-seeking, to allow my fears and worries to lose their hold on me. This is what I practice most at the moment. It shows in my teaching. I've become a good teacher, a much different teacher, someone who absolutely loves to teach. I teach with my students' needs in mind, which is in part something I've learned from the program.
But what is to become of me? Will I intuitively know how to handle this situation, which does indeed baffle me?
At the very least, I will keep coming back.
