We posted a blog a few weeks ago, in response to thefix.com’s article by Susan C. about “Anonymity.”  Seems like she got a lot more ink out of the topic since then. Looking at the article in the Sunday NY Times Style section, “Challenging The Second ‘A’ in A.A.,” I have a few comments.  It is the “Style” section the article is in right? Let me check, not the news, not metropolitan, nor the magazine sections? Right, the “Style” section. Just where AA needs to land, next to the headline about Pippa Middleton.

Anyway, David C., the author, refers to the anonymity he has experienced in AA over the years as “a kind of collective fiction.” I am not sure, but I would bet that ‘collective’ conscious is more weighted towards NYC and LA and probably those meetings where the entertainment and publishing worlds collide with recovery.  For me, in my NYC AA meetings, the anonymity is not fiction — and anonymity remains an effort to maintain some form of humility within sobriety — like a worker among workers, a drunk among drunks.

I’m glad that David C. finally referred to the components of ‘Anonymity’ in his closing paragraph — though he really does just that, refers to it (a quick coating to what is a the real primer of AA). He talks about AA and the concept of anonymity: “Unlike the more practical 11th Tradition, aimed at the outer world, the 12th Tradition takes a crack at our far more problematic inner world,” including the part of the 12th Tradition where “anonymity is the spiritual foundation of all our Traditions….”

The way the Steps and Traditions were taught to me as I journeyed through years of sobriety, my inner world was the most important world to pay attention to and the “inside job” was and is paramount to maintaining any level of serenity and sobriety in it’s purest sense.

Two other interesting segments in the NY Times article:

Speaking about Mr. Roshan, the creator of the new recovery website, thefix.com, and how he was a year or so out of rehab and was struck by how little information was out there about recovery … I would be a rich woman for the number of people I knew (myself included) who had ideas about creating a “recovery related” product or concept one or two years into sobriety.  Mine was going to be a recovery radio station (dates me) and also a board game called, “Wreckovery.” (Forget about stealing that idea, it’s a registered trademark and so is the game.)  I got over wanting to monetize AA by talking to a lot of old-timers and reading a lot about the Traditions.  For me, AA needed to be kept in the rooms of AA, and [I, ] the ego of “I” needed to be reined in.

I was really surprised and dismayed to read that Susan C. is an aficionado on Bill W. since she wrote a biography about him! It says, she ” is in a position to say what the idea of anonymity was intended to do as few are.”  I had no idea Susan C. was now the President of AA and the official voice of Bill W.  I will try to keep an eye out at meetings where I might run into her, the paparazzi will likely be right behind!