Navel Gazing in the Extreme

I saw myself in a book one day when I was 36. Drugs and alcohol had driven me into the rooms of Alcoholics Anonymous, and there, in what we call the Big Book, the text of AA, on page 62, I read this:

“Selfishness—self-centeredness! That, we think, is the root of our troubles. Driven by a hundred forms of fear, self-delusion, self-seeking, and self-pity, we step on the toes of our fellows and they retaliate.”

It was an aha moment for me. I recognized myself, my essential problem with life. My role as a victim ended that day. Not long ago, I read a comment on a blog and it sparked a poem about what my life could have become had I never set foot in AA.

How to Be Invisible

Her vaguely alarming
binocular soul-searching
was tedious to her friends
of whom there were few
and fewer still as the years
trudged onward
and her lenses fixed
ever more inward.
By the time she shuffled
off this mortal coil
she was minute, a mote
of dust on a microscopic
lens, and her soul
had vanished.

This is a Friday Flash 55. Go visit the G-Man for more tales in 55 words.