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A Year of Awakening

by Mary C.

My one-year abstinence anniversary in Greysheet is September 5, 2002. It has been a year of physical changes for me. But even more so, there have been changes in the way I feel, in what I can see and understand. I am living in a different spirit.

I like my food better than when I began the program. In the years of trying various diets, fasts and potions, and I am talking about nearly fifty years of research, a growing satisfaction has never been my experience. Until now, whatever program I am using, whether successful or not, the longer I do it the more fragile my ability to keep doing it becomes. I find myself waiting to either hit the right weight or to give in to the right temptation or to bring back the old foods. On my Greysheet anniversary, I was reflecting on the scripture about Moses and the Jewish people preparing to enter the wilderness of the desert. It was a passage in which they are very cranky and tell him that it's a bad plan because there is no food for the people to eat in the desert. They will starve to death. But they go and they are given manna, food from the angels, so that they can live in freedom. That was how I felt when I began and I looked at the Greysheet food plan. I thought that I couldn't do it...it's a desert...there's not enough food to live. Like a doubting slave, I went and I have been given the food that I need to live in freedom. I have no desire to go back.

I like people better now than I did a year ago. Six days after I started my abstinence, the terror of September 11th happened. I ended up, without an airplane ride available, on a 23-hour bus trip trying to get home. I ate raw carrots, tomatoes and cheese, a few simple, portable things allowed on the GS list. That I ate "my food" was a miracle but an even greater gift was my state of mind and my response to the terrible events of that day. My heart broke watching the sorrow of it all. But instead of a fountain of resentment, anger and bitter assessments flooding me from within, what poured out of my heart was a desire to help. I wanted to give them my money, give them my blood. All that I wanted is to save their lives somehow. By the end of the day, I joined the collective grief and began the journey to learn the names, the stories, the glory of these lost people, their families, their unborn children. As the anniversary of 9/11 came around, I realized that I had woken up from a deep, food-induced torpor, just as the world was exploding with a fountain of human need. I had been given back my inner life just when I needed an inner life, and like the Tinman in the Wizard of Oz, I found most dramatically that I had a heart. That heart works better and better every day as I continue to find people to love in my family, in the program and in the world.

I feel a lot more gratitude and can better see the gift that I have been given. I go to lots of banquets, dinners and "food events" as a by-product of my work. Recently a women seated near me at the table noticed the scale I was using. She already had remarked that some major changes had happened in the way I looked. So she asked me about what I was doing. "Greysheet, a 12 Step Program, not OA" is my standard response. She looked back puzzled and clearly not having heard of Greysheet or OA or what a 12 Step Program might be. She tried again, "It must be very expensive. I probably couldn't afford it." "No, it's free. People who understand and work the program teach it to newcomers for free. Sometimes we give a dollar or two donation when we meet." The conversation went no further but she had caused me to recognize that this vital gift, that I had paid thousands of dollars and incalculable other kinds of resources to buy for myself in the past, was available to me for free in Greysheet. I began to think about the learning that we pay for: the schools, the workshops, the therapists, the consultants, etc. Most of these ways to learn are more than worth their fee and necessary to our daily life. But the most valuable and most crucial kind of learning, the foundational kind of learning essential to life, we have to get for free. We all had some people in our lives, usually parents, sometimes extended family who had to teach us to eat, to walk, to talk, to go the bathroom without incident, to cross the street, not touch hot stoves, to share our toys. This is the kind of learning and teaching that has to be for free. No one is ever wise enough to want to buy it and no one has the fortitude to convincingly sell it. It is this kind of most valuable learning, the kind of learning that one person must give another, that we are given in Greysheet. The Greysheet comes with a sponsor and a community and we get to keep it by giving it away.