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Life

How Alcoholics Anonymous Survived a Pandemic-Induced Existential Crisis

At first, online-only AA meetings seemed like an impossible challenge for the program’s structure. A year later, some members are hesitant to go back to the way it was.

On Sunday, March 14th, 2020 the North Brooklyn AA group I attended most nights at 10 p.m. switched from in-person to Zoom. Everything started off innocuous enough, with only a handful of bumps: we were still using Zoom’s free option, so at 40 minutes everyone was kicked off and had to sign back in. Nobody knew about muting their microphone. But as people got acclimated, an air of familiarity descended on the meeting. This was disrupted when a woman, close to tears, announced that someone had sent her a private message, saying they hoped she relapsed. 

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Incidents like these defined the early days of the pandemic, as Alcoholics Anonymous groups—autonomous, volunteer-run and leaderless—scrambled to adapt to the shifting landscape. Up until then, I had experienced my homegroup as a stable, slow-and-steady institution. Structural decisions were voted on at monthly “business meetings,” which anyone was welcome to attend. Sometimes discussions got heated, but they were almost never rushed. When the church we usually met at asked us to move to a huge, reverberant mess hall, the decision of whether or not to purchase a microphone and small speaker took months. 

I could roll my eyes at this unhurried constancy, but it also made me feel safe. My homegroup meets seven nights a week. I had arrived there on the recommendation of a friend one brutally cold Wednesday in November 2016, and I just kept coming back. Once the emotional whirlwind of my first weeks without alcohol calmed down, I found it was that ritual as much as anything that helped keep me sober and grounded. In this sense, meetings are simultaneously banal and life-or-death affairs, offering the steady drip of support recovering alcoholics need first simply to stay alive, and then to thrive. 

The switch from in-person to online at the onset of the pandemic was overnight. “It all happened really quick,” recalls Anne, the group’s elected “overall chair” for 2020. (All names have been changed or abbreviated in accordance with the interviewee’s wishes.) “When we got the call from the church saying we were shut down, we got it that day, like two hours before our Sunday meeting. It was all very trial-and-error, let’s just get it up and see what happens.” Without a clear protocol or time to convene for a vote, Anne and a core group of attendees made an executive decision. “I remember feeling anticipatory anxiety. My biggest concern was not just that we were going to lose our space, but how are we going to let our constituents and newcomers and anyone who wants to attend our meeting, [know] where and when and how to find us? We didn’t have a mailing list. We weren’t allowed to leave signs up. We weren’t even allowed to access stuff in the church—they just locked the doors and that was that. So it was very fly by the seat of your pants.” 

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AA’s most famous step is the ninth, the one about making amends. But tucked at the very end of the list is step 12, with its decree to “carry this message to alcoholics.” Whether by helping to run a meeting, sponsoring newcomers or just bringing cookies every week, service is an essential part of recovery. This dictum is expressed more casually as “service keeps you sober,” and when I hear Anne recall the stress of those days and weeks in March, I’m reminded how impactful this group effort is. 

“You expect recovery to be this thing where, like, yeah somebody’s running it and you all just go,” says Alex, a musician living in Central Pennsylvania. “And then you realize that the inmates run the asylum and everyone’s gotta do their part. I can’t just come in here and take what I need and move on with my day. If we don’t take care of each other, no one’s going to take care of us.” 

The single troll at our first online meeting gave way to groups of Zoom bombers almost immediately. As the lockdown took hold and the attacks escalated, the group entered a tense debate about whether or not to institute a password for the video chat. Back in March, the security controls for Zoom were less developed than they are now, and many meetings, not just 12-step groups, were getting targeted for harassment. “When the trolls started bombing, it was like trying to play whack-a-mole,” recalls Anne. “You would click on this name to remove and it would jump somewhere else on the list. It was populating my chat window saying, ‘fuck you you fucking n-word’ and I couldn’t even close the window.” 

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The traumatic intensity of these attacks divided the group along this issue of security versus inclusivity. Some members, wanting to keep the meetings safe, urged the use of a password. Others felt it was our duty to keep the meeting as open and available as possible. Michael A. had been a fixture at the meeting since 2014 and was known for his devotion to AA’s core principles. “To me, the primary purpose of an AA group is to carry the message to the still sick and suffering alcoholic,” he says “The suffering alcoholic can be five years sober, one day sober, 15 years sober—doesn’t matter. I wanted it to be easy. And I know [this group] gets a lot of daycounters, a lot of newcomers. I liked the fact that at the 10 o’clock meeting we have that late-night, burning-the-midnight-oil vibe. To me, that should mean you might be coming there on day one, or even day zero, you might have been drinking… And you’re going ‘fuck, I’m getting blocked out with a password? Fuck AA, man.’ I thought the password-restricted meeting should be for”—he pauses for a moment—“not our group.”

This idealism butted heads with a more brass tacks pragmatism. Seven meetings a week meant training seven pairs of co-chairs, plus an appointed “Zoom Bouncer” on security protocol at a time when people were still familiarizing themselves with the interface. And even with systems in place, what good would a meeting serve if it was so regularly disrupted? Anne put it succinctly: “My feeling was we have to do whatever it takes to keep people safe.” 

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These concerns were not unique to our group. You can hear them mirrored in the trepidation expressed by Kathleen, an artist in Los Angeles who had returned to AA six months before the pandemic. “I hesitated because it didn’t feel as safe,” she says. “Early on, certain meetings would get bombed, and I heard someone put the AA meeting list link on Reddit, and someone recorded the meeting and put it on YouTube. It felt kinda scary. It’s something you’re trying to do to stay alive and people are disrespecting that or turning that into a joke.” 

Moreover, as nearly every AA meeting went online, the locality of a group was suddenly arbitrary. New Yorkers looking for something later in the night could attend a evening meeting in Los Angeles or San Francisco, a morning meeting in Europe or an afternoon meeting in Australia. Our meeting had previously been one of only a handful in New York that started after 9 p.m., but now we were part of a global network. Perhaps a rigid adherence to tradition would cost us more than it would help. Within a few days, a password was in place.

Getting sober is a challenge in any situation. What rock bottom means to each individual varies from the catastrophic to the lurid to the subtle, but I’ve never heard it described as chill. One of my favorite AA adages is that “no one comes in on the wings of victory.” My own reckoning occurred in a moment of profound loneliness and grinding frustration, without any slammed doors, nights in jail or blackouts. But it didn’t occur to me to go to meetings on my own. Chatting with a friend who happened to be in AA, the conversation turned to drinking and my frustrations with it. Suddenly, hearing myself describe it out loud to someone who understood, my life changed course. 

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I’ve heard many similar stories: a moment of clarity, an illuminating conversation. After a mental breakdown, Kathleen called the only sober person she knew. He had gotten clean just three months prior. “The thing I remember most about it was I met him outside the meeting and I said ‘how are you?’” she recalls. “And he looked up at the sky and he thought about it and he gave me a real answer. And I remember being like ‘what the fuck is he doing?’ And it was revolutionary to me, in a way, to not just go ‘I’m fine, don’t worry, I’m fine.’ And I went to the meeting, and it was the first time I heard people being really honest in this particular way. I was scared at first, but from the first meeting I felt like I was in the right place.”

Andy’s story starts similarly with a quiet epiphany. “I was at a joint in Detroit called the UFO Factory, with two other alcoholics. I was just sitting there, and they’re like ‘we’re about to leave to go to this meeting.’ Three days before, I’d told someone that I really admire that I was going to stop drinking, and then the very next day I went out and got drunk before I went and had dinner with them. So I was not in control. I was like fuck it, I’m going to follow them.” 

But what do you do if you’re quarantined in your apartment, with no one to witness your struggle and decline? Self-diagnosing alcoholism is difficult to do in a vacuum, and if your image of an alcoholic is limited to a few classically grizzled archetypes, you might not think to seek recovery out. Rose, a lawyer living in San Francisco, came to her first meeting right after Thanksgiving. “I had never been to AA before,” she says. “I come from a family of alcoholics. My grandpa was one, he went to AA, but he always made it seem like you had to be super into Jesus Christ. I didn’t drink for most of my life. Once I started, I recognized that I was a...problematic drinker, but it wasn’t daily. And then COVID came and I just started drinking right away. And things began to get progressively worse, and I began to drink every day, and earlier in the day. And on the weekends, that’s all I did. I’m single, I live alone, so that became my best friend.” 

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After getting fired from a job in September—“I don’t think it was related to the drinking, but I also probably wasn’t my best self”—she started dating a former co-worker, who attended AA. “I was like, holy shit. I had recognized my drinking during the pandemic was really unmanageable, I didn’t like it, I kept getting drunk and drunk-texting people, but I didn’t know how to stop. There was no reason to stop, it seemed. So, this person I respected let me know it was on Zoom. I thought about it for a couple weeks and then got really fucked up on Thanksgiving, for no reason, and woke up and was like, this is fucked up.” She went to a meeting the day after, and has been back every day since. 

“The specifics are different but the language is the same.”

Alex had checked into a rehab facility early into the pandemic following a mental breakdown. Although he had been off drugs and alcohol since 2008, he had never been to a meeting. “I thought I was sober,” he laughs. “I had been seeing a therapist for trauma and sexually compulsive behavior, he was like ‘come to the facility, we can do a year’s worth of work in a month.’ It was into the fire right away. My first full day there, we did role playing,” he says, describing a cathartic psychodrama exercise common to group therapy where members act as surrogate parents, siblings or inner children for each other. Meetings were also held for a number of 12-step groups. “In there we did SAA and SLAA [Sex Addicts Anonymous and its related program, Sex and Love Addicts Anonymous] meetings every day. We started doing AA there, and I was like, yo… this shit is good.” 

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Even with this exposure, he found himself adrift once he was out of the facility. “I called my [band’s] manager and I was like, ‘hey I’m going to kill myself today.’ She’s like ‘let’s not do that right away.’ She got a hold of somebody who got a hold of somebody else,” and soon Alex found himself at a meeting with some other musicians he knew. “It was weird to get out [of rehab] and just not know, really, anybody.” When I ask him if he thinks he might have found his way to recovery on his own, his answer is a flat “no.” 

In addition to its 12 steps, AA has 12 traditions. These serve as a counterpart to the steps, guiding the group on matters of money, outreach and basic day-to-day function. On this list is a line about “attraction rather than promotion,” which prohibits groups from advertising their services broadly, or proselytizing for abstinence. Instead, it is urged that members live according to the principles of the steps, and let newcomers arrive on their own accord. This can work beautifully in person. You can walk into the room and sense what Andy calls “the comfort… a really true display of individuality.” 

What I hear in Andy’s words is often referred to as “wanting what they have.” I remember when I was six months sober, relatively stable but still filled with anxiety, hearing an older member describe returning to his music in sobriety after years away from the piano. The way he spoke— with a calm, assured gratitude bolstered by 40-plus years off alcohol—riveted me. Whatever it was that he had, I wanted it. I approached him after the meeting and we began to work the steps together. But the “comfort” can also come in looser, more informal hangs after the meeting. Referred to as “fellowship,” a kind of ritual debriefing and bread-breaking with some other attendees can bring the newcomer into a group in a way that the meeting alone might not. Back in 2016, on my third day sober, I went out for late night soup with a few people from the meeting, and that moment of simple camaraderie helped to soften the tumult of my upended life. 

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Unsurprisingly, during the pandemic, I’ve heard many people yearn for any kind of face-to-face contact. Where might a newcomer meet a sponsor, or connect with a like-minded fellow, or even get some perspective on that evening’s topics of discussion? Sharing into the void of the screen can be a challenge. Meetings are defined by a strict format, set in place to respect each person’s right to unburden themselves without judgement of comment. “It leads to me feeling reluctant to want to share,” says Andy, “because I might not get an answer.”

One way people have worked around this sense of lack is by creating smaller meetings, sometimes native to Zoom. Very early in the pandemic, it was a pleasant surprise to see people criss-crossing New York, and then the globe, as online meetings became more and more available. But larger groups, which could exude a powerful authority in-person, felt more like a classroom online. Conversely, the meetings with only 10 or 20 attendees phoning in from different time zones often have a loose enough pace and sense of connection that can make up for the absence of traditional fellowship. 

And the international availability means new communities are being forged. Rose co-chairs her San Francisco meeting with someone from the Midwest. Kathleen was invited to speak at a Melbourne women’s meeting by a friend who she has only met online. Alex’s first meeting is one of many native-to-Zoom groups, with attendees regularly logging on from Texas, Los Angeles, Berlin, Vermont and Milwaukee. Andy’s homegroup opened up its Zoom account to a “sprawl” of different groups, including a women’s and nonbinary person’s meeting, and an Adult Children of Alcoholics meeting. The original group’s physical meeting space would likely not be able to support these new groups, and it’s unclear if the same amount of people would show up in person. 

With this wide availability, the focus of one’s recovery can easily shift from the initial drug of choice to a wider spectrum of issues. Twelve step recovery principles have been applied to drugs (NA), gambling (GA) and money (DA—Debtors Anonymous), various sex and relational compulsions (SA, SLAA), the “family disease” of alcoholism (Al-Anon) and family dysfunction (ACoA, CODA—Codependants Anonymous), overeating (OA) and underearning (UA) and many other self destructive behaviors. Before the pandemic, it was relatively common to hear AA members discuss Al-Anon, but the more specific communities often seemed off the beaten path. In the last year however, I’ve watched as literature for some of these splinter groups swiftly made the rounds among my sober friends. It’s now quite easy to explore whichever fellowship you might be curious about.

“The specifics are different but the language is the same,” says Alex. “Ultimately it’s all trauma; these are all trauma responses.” One meeting that has become a fixture of my recovery this year started as an AA group but gradually shifted to become simply a 12-step meeting, drawing no barriers between addictions. 

Shawn is a member from Montreal who I met online last summer. He notices that his community during the pandemic has become more “specified” to other “musicians in their 30s,” like him. “I do in many ways miss just having random people who don’t share my lifestyle or goals being in contact with me a lot.” He’s noticed that “older people, their ranks are thinning out on Zoom meetings,” but is also scared of his online community evaporating. “I really do value these bonds I’ve made over the past year, but there is something ephemeral [about them],” he says. “I mean, you and I have never met.” 

Alex is less excited by the idea of leaving Zoom. “I don’t hit any meetings in PA. I felt like an alien amongst aliens when I was in rehab, as a musician, and here’s a bunch of guys… older men, some guy works for Monsanto and another guy is a forklift operator from Long Island who voted for Trump. So when I got out and found a group that works, it makes it so much easier. A part of me dreads the in-person thing.” 

Isolation is one of the hallmarks of active alcoholism. Even if your drinking takes you out to bars every night, people invariably describe an abiding, gnawing separateness that can be numbed but never quite overcome. I remember this feeling vividly, as well as the humiliation and shame of trying, and failing, to treat it with a steady stream of liquor and beer. This is why each person’s bottom is so important: it is your teaching tool, your lesson you keep learning from over and over. It’s why alcoholics, including myself, are so driven to connect with each other. 

On paper, this would make 2020 seem like an existential emergency for anyone in recovery. And yet this past year has been one of the least isolated in my life. Though the quarantine has been undeniably confining, I haven’t gone a day without sharing something intimate with another sober person. Some of my warmest memories have now been mediated through Zoom and FaceTime. 

“I really miss in-person meetings,” says Kathleen. “There’s something almost religious, or spiritual about being in a physical space with other people in that way. I can’t wait for the sense memories of coffee smell, and folding chairs. But I really do hope that some of these meetings that were born in Zoom stay alive, because some of these meetings literally cannot exist otherwise. It’s something a lot of us were not expecting, to get this other type of community. It’s such a surprise, such a gift.”