An Open Letter of Thanks to the Seventh Avenue Presbyterian Church Community

Greetings from the AA Groups that meet at the Seventh Avenue Presbyterian Church!  My pen name is Mark Tyne and I have been attending AA meetings at 7th & Irving for almost 10 years now.  On June 6, 2009, I celebrated 10 years clean and sober.  The AA meetings at 7th & Irving are my AA home meetings and have been extremely important in helping me to get and stay clean and sober over the past 10 years.

For the members of the Seventh Avenue Presbyterian Church congregation who don’t know, approximately 25 AA meetings are held each week in the 2nd floor room (Cumberland Hall) on the south side of the Seventh Avenue Presbyterian Church.  Each of these meetings has between 25 and 75 attendees, meaning that each week multitudes of recovering alcoholics receive treatment for their alcoholism at 7th & Irving amounting to thousands and thousands of treatments each year.  On behalf of the AA groups at 7th & Irving, I would like to thank the Seventh Avenue Presbyterian Church for the lives they have saved at these meetings over the years.

I want to make it clear that I do not speak for AA as an organization.  If you wish to obtain official information about the program of Alcoholics Anonymous, I recommend contacting AA Central Office in SF: aasf.org, 415.674.1821, help@aasf.org.  Even though I am a member of AA, the information I am giving below comes from my point of view on AA.  As such, it is bound to contain biases garnered from my experiences in AA recovery.

First off, I would like to mention that most AA meetings at 7th & Irving are “open” meetings, which means that anyone can attend.  I’d like to invite all the members of the Seventh Avenue Presbyterian Church congregation to attend an AA meeting in 2009.  The coffee is on us.  These AA meetings are non-denominational and we encourage recovering alcoholics of every race, creed, class, sex and religion to attend.

 In AA “speaker meetings”, a member of AA talks to the group about their experiences, strength and hope regarding recovery from alcoholism.  The AA talks about what his/her alcoholism was like, what happened, and what his/her life is like now.  I will use this format to relate my experiences with recovery at 7th & Irving.
So what was my alcoholism like?  My drugs of “no choice” were alcohol and pot.  Since one of the traditions of AA is to confine our discussion to alcoholism, I’ll honor this tradition.  I started drinking when I was going to school at UC Berkeley at around the age of 20.  I continued drinking until I was 35 years old, when I got into AA and got clean and sober.  Drinking years 0-5 were fun, mostly enjoyable with few problems.  For the first few years, I had a fantastic time partying with close friends.  I remember night after night of laughing uproariously over the improvised comedy we enjoyed at our parties.  I still remember these parties as some of the most intensely pleasurable events of my life.  I decided to stop drinking when I turned 25 years old.  I didn’t’.  Drinking years 5-10 weren’t quite as fun, but they were still mostly ok.  I was still enjoying drinking, but it was becoming clear that I wasn’t drinking like normal people anymore.  My friends from Berkeley with whom I had partied had long since stopped drinking on a regular basis.  I wondered why, unlike them, I was unable to do so.  I decided to stop drinking when I turned 30 years old.  I couldn’t.  Drinking years 10-15 was nearly all downside. It’s not that alcohol didn’t work anymore it just didn’t work as well.  And instead of being something I could take or leave, I had to drink every day.  I had become a maintenance drinker.  Sometimes they call this a European drinker, which I took solace in until it became clear that I couldn’t stop even for a couple days.  I had to drink somewhere between 2-6 beers every day.  It was just something that I had to do, a drug to which I was enslaved.  As a man who greatly values freedom and independence, this was very painful to me.  And using was expensive.  I was paying about as much on alcohol as I did on rent in SF!  I was also becoming more and more isolated.  I didn’t drink with friends anymore, because my friends had long since stopped partying.  I didn’t drink at bars because it was too expensive.  And when I was drinking (pretty much during all my hours away from work), I didn’t answer the phone because it would mean answering the phone drunk, which would lead to my feeling even more ashamed of my drinking.

I spent those last five years trying everything I could to either moderate or eliminate my alcohol use on my own.  I stopped drinking hard alcohol. I stopped drinking at bars. I made a vow to not drink and drive which I kept.  I tried to limit my alcohol consumption to two beers a night (which would work for awhile until I would drink 8-10 beers one night, then try to rein the tiger in again).  I tried using massive doses of herbal depressants to replace alcohol and “take the edge off”.  I tried chewing nutmeg and smoking catnip cigarettes as a substitute for alcohol.  I tried months of acupuncture to get clean.  None of these attempts to moderate or eliminate my drinking worked.  There was no lock box so strong that I couldn’t pry it open with a crowbar out of desperation.  At one point, I distinctly remember trying to figure out whether a life of drinking or a life of smoking would kill me faster, so that I could choose the slower death.  I still wanted to live.  In addition, I was losing my connection with God.  I had always felt comfortable praying each day, but I read that in some religions, it’s considered disrespectful to talk to God while drunk.  So, out of respect, I stopped talking to God when I was drunk.  But since I was drunk pretty much every night, I stopped saying the Lord’s Prayer before going to sleep.  It made me very sad to lose this close relationship with God that I had all my life.  I put on about 40 pounds of weight from beer bloat.  This weight was aggravating a back injury I had previously sustained.  The problems that arose indirectly from my drinking made it difficult for me to hold permanent employment.  When I was “let go” from a job with one of the best companies in the US, I figured it was time to try to nip my alcoholism in the bud.  I admitted to my closest friends that I thought I was alcoholic and they encouraged me to make an appointment with my doctor and to tell him the whole truth about my condition.  I remember praying to God one night (drunk), telling God that I was dying of alcohol, drugs and loneliness.  I told God that if he had any tricks up his sleeve, I needed to see them now.  Within a week, I had told my doctor I thought I was alcoholic, confessed my symptoms, got into the Kaiser Chemical Dependency Recovery Program (CDRP) and got into the rooms of AA.  That was 10 years ago and I have been clean and sober ever since.  I believe that God granted me a miracle helping me get clean and sober.  This is the only way I can explain how quickly my recovery came once I prayed to God for help.

When I was in early recovery, Kaiser recommended that I find an AA home group (a group that I felt comfortable going to and could commit going to on a regular basis).  I spent months going to lots of different meetings around the city of SF, but had problems finding one where I felt I fit in.  Then I came to a meeting at 7th & Irving.  I liked the fact that there were people with a lot of good recovery (quality and amount of time) in the rooms.  I liked the layout of the room, and I liked the neighborhood where the meeting was located.  The members of the AA fellowship found it easy to go out to coffee at Tart to Tart, or have cheap breakfasts at M’s Café to work with sponsors and sponsees after 7th & Irving AA meetings.  I found a wonderful sponsor when I was about six months clean and sober.  He was a musician and songwriter, too and had a wonderful sense of humor.  He helped me work the 12 steps of AA, which was essential to my maintaining my sobriety.  I hit a few road bumps in my early recovery, but through the help of the rooms of AA and re-developing a close relationship with my higher power, I was able to stay clean and sober.

As of late, my perspective on AA recovery has changed substantially.  When I was in early recovery, my challenge was finding an AA room where I could feel comfortable.  I am grateful that the good vibes in the rooms of 7th & Irving allowed me to find such a space, which allowed me to get traction on my recovery.  Lately, my challenge has become finding a “me” that can feel comfortable in any AA room.  This requires my being able to stay in the moment at meetings and paying close attention to what people have to share during the meeting.  When I do that, I lose myself and greatly enjoy my time in the meeting.  I have come to believe that when I am really in the moment and enjoying my life, I’m manifesting pure spirit.  However, all it takes for me to lose that spirit is to be haunted by ghosts of the past or fears of the future.  Working the 12 steps of AA has given me a toolkit to overcome these fears and resentments.  One technique is for me to write down my fears and resentments and ask my higher power to remove them (4th and 10th step),   another is to use prayer and meditation to be able to improve my conscious contact with my higher power (11th step), another is to work with another alcoholic and/or be of service, which gets me out of my own head (12th step), and another is to turn my will and my life over to my higher power (3rd step).  All of the 12 steps are designed to help me “relieve my bondage of self” so that my higher power can come into my life and allow me to find some peace, joy, and serenity, no matter what is happening in the outside world.  I’m not sure if this qualifies as an amazing story of recovery and spiritual growth.  But from my perspective, my philosophical shifts, my being able to stay clean and sober for 10 years, my finding ways to best be of service to my fellow man and God, my being able to find peace and serenity, and my willingness to help others tap into this kind of spirit is miraculous, considering how bad things had gotten when I was hitting bottom.

I have gained many precious gifts from attending AA meetings at 7th & Irving.  I have had the honor of working with many sponsors and sponsees over the 10 years I have been clean and sober.  As far as I know, all my sponsors have stayed clean and sober.  Some of my sponsees have been racked up long term sobriety, some have had relapses, some have stopped working with me, and others have moved on to work with other sponsors.  To me, the most important thing is that working with the sponsors and sponsees has allowed me to be of service, get out of myself, and remain clean and sober.  One of the greatest blessings I have gained in recovery is to mend relationships with my family of origin.  My mother’s father was alcoholic and she saw first-hand the damage alcoholism can do to a family.  My family is very proud that I have been able to stop drinking.  They even occasionally attend AA meetings with me to support my recovery.  In 2008, I earned a Masters Degree in Nonprofit Administration from USF and I have had the great good fortune to be of service to over 600 graduates of the USF MNA program in building a mutual benefit society (a “brain trust”) to help USF MNA graduates network, job hunt, work problem solve and form business mentor/mentee relationships.  Since being clean and sober, my creativity has bloomed.  I am a musician and songwriter.  Over the past three years, I have been the Music Director and Video Producer for the SF Theater Company Primitive Screwheads.  I have also produced and edited my own show on SF Ch76, called the “Mark Tyne Good Bad Movie Review” (www.marktyne.com/gbmreview; You Tube search: Mark Tyne).  I have reviewed over 850 movies towards a first goal of reviewing 1,000 movies and publishing a movie review book.  You can read some of my reviews at the website listed and I have included one below.  A year ago, I started a wonderful romantic relationship with a woman who is an excellent songwriter, and who is also a member of AA.  My life is not perfect.  However, any life problem that arises is one around which I can work the AA 12 steps and tap into my higher power to come up with positive, action based solutions.

It is my great good fortune to have been able to attend AA meetings at 7th & Irving over the past 10 years and look forward to 10 more years of excellent meetings at the same location into 2020!  If any of the members of the Seventh Avenue Presbyterian Church have questions for me about alcoholism or my experiences in AA, I would be glad to talk to them by phone:  415.675.9963.

On behalf of all the grateful recovering alcoholics who attend AA meetings at 7th & Irving, I would like to wish all the members of the Seventh Avenue Presbyterian Church well. 

Cheers!

Mark Tyne