Perfect for Me

If I were to be really honest with myself, my idea of the perfect service position would look something like this. I would walk up to a bank of media reporters (imagine the White House press corps). Of course, someone else would do the work of bringing them there. I’d step up to the podium and talk eloquently about my favorite topic, myself. I’d share about my disease and my recovery. I’d say my actual full name; no anonymity, because I have to get credit, and I need for the booking agents to know where to find me.

The fellowship would thank me for the hundreds of new members who would come flocking to Food Addicts in Recovery Anonymous (FA) thanks to my “service.” I would be invited to interview on podcasts as a celebrity. I’d love having a team of bookers and public relations folks who arrange my travel as the FA spokeswoman. Really, it’s about service, don’t you know?

Fortunately for me, the FA Traditions, my sponsor, the tools, and weighing and measuring my food all keep me out of where I would like to go and instead, show me where I need to be. As a result, I recently volunteered for the simple service position of copying and pasting the meeting format in the chat box of my weekly zoom gathering.

Did I want to volunteer to do this? Not really.

Did I need to do this? Absolutely. After nine months of showing up weekly to this gathering that had greatly added to my recovery, it was time for me to give back in some way. I was not able to come early to set up chairs or put out literature, as I could at an inperson meeting, but I could come early to copy and paste the meeting format. As a sponsor once said to me, “Service keeps us out of disease. The more inconvenient the better.”

I thought this would be super easy, and frankly, a little beneath me. Weren’t they lucky to have someone with a few years of abstinence willing to do this task? How hard could this be?

Well, the first week I started copying and pasting the format, the Zoom platform suddenly kept making a sound as if to say, “Nope! Try again!” Nothing would show up in the chat box. The gathering was going on and I panicked. I was able to private chat the other fellow with the same service position to ask if she could step in because my computer wasn’t cooperating. She happily took over. I immediately thought of the promises of the program found in Alcoholics Anonymous (the Big Book), which talks about how we will inherently know how to do things that used to baffle us. In the past, I would have interrupted the meeting, panicking, not sure what to do! After the meeting, I asked for help and fellows gave me pointers on how to fix my issue. (Sidenote: Zoom has a limit on how many characters you can copy and paste at one time. Who knew?) In the past, my false pride would have kept me from asking for help or admitting to the group I had a problem, for fear of looking stupid. My fellows were happy to help.

The second week, after spending the minutes before the gathering chit-chatting, I realized 30 seconds into the gathering, as a fellow was pasting the format into the chat box, that someone was doing the service I was supposed to be doing! I completely forgot! I quickly messaged her with an apology and told her I would take over. As I started putting the format in the chat box for the entire gathering, I still had trouble. I realized copying and pasting was a lot harder than I thought.

Soon the old voices I had known my entire life started coming back. Next business meeting, I’m quitting. Here was my old pattern, I started something new, it was hard, I wasn’t that good at it, and now I wanted to quit. It was why I have a terrible backhand at tennis and never stayed longer than 15 months in a job when I was in my 20s. I know I want to be perfect with zero effort, just like I want a service position that has all the glory but requires no work. This is the insanity of my disease.

While I struggled, I asked God for help. God, please help me do this. Just stopping and calmly asking for help helped me to breathe and see the solution. The format was pasted. My service for the day was complete.

Soon after, the fellow I share the service position with messaged me and asked if I needed anything. I replied, “No, I just completely forgot I needed to do this service until about 30 seconds into the meeting!” Her reply, “Oh, I did that the first week I did this service, too.”

In my disease, I could never have shared with another person that I made a mistake. I would have looked for someone else to blame or swept it under the rug, hoping no one noticed. FA has taught me I can be open and honest about who I am, including when I make a mistake. God meets me with a hug and a fellow who can say, “Me, too.”

So my “little” service position isn’t so little after all. In two weeks, I have learned more about my defects than months of sitting and listening in gatherings. In the past, I would have flogged myself with them, but in recovery, I use my defects to bring myself closer to God. Before the pandemic, service was learning what ways to set up the chairs that would prevent a newcomer from sitting alone, to get to the meeting on time to put the literature out in an attractive manner, or thinking of how to greet a newcomer that was welcoming but not pushy. It may look different these days, but the effects are still the same. Even in a pandemic, I must continue to seek it out.