On Saturday mornings I have a tough choice to make. There's an Al Anon meeting I've been attending regularly for about 8 years, but there's also an AA meeting. The Al Anon one has been very big in helping me get a handle on my life and manage through some challenges during this period, but I am increasingly drawn back to AA.
Here's why. I've said before that the task and the success metrics of Al Anon are more complicated than those of AA. To succeed in the latter, first and foremost all you need to do is not drink or do drugs for a day. If you do that for any given day, you get at least a B for the day. Since Al Anon is about disentangling more complex interdependencies in how we approach the world, it's harder. Learning and recognizing those complexities has been absolutely essential for me. But the very complexity of it makes it more difficult for people to really get and keep the message in their bones.
By contrast, the simplicity of AA makes for a more consistently grateful and happy group of people. Everybody gets it and can express it. Or, on the flip side, when somebody is angry and confused, everyone can see some of themself in the other person, recognize what's going on, and offer relatively simple support.
The contrast between the two is not unlike the problem of happy endings in movies and books. My sister Leslie more or less foreswore complex movies sometime around the time of her cancer because she just decided she had plenty of pain and complexity and didn't need it from her entertainment. I get that and am drifting towards her. Which doesn't mean that there's not a function to complex narratives and difficult books. It's just that maybe they are more appropriate to different lifestages.
Though I guess I did enjoy Knausgaard and Ferrante, so maybe it just comes and goes.
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