A Story of Recovery:

A Prize in Every Call

It’s been a year and a half since I began FA. I’ve let go of 125 pounds and my life is much different, but I still remember how I dreaded making outreach calls. This was my attitude: I just knew I didn’t have any information that would be helpful to others, and I couldn’t imagine that others would want to have their lives interrupted by me. It was like pulling teeth to force myself to make the calls. I was stuck in a sense of self-sufficiency and isolation.

However, I followed my sponsor’s advice to 1) invite my Higher Power along for the calls, and 2) to adopt the revised attitude that I might be surprised at how well the calls would go. Then I started to see the beauty behind our tool of outreach calls.

One day, I was getting ready to go on my first business trip after joining FA, and I was trying to figure out which abstinent foods were most portable. As my Higher Power would have it, the person I randomly called off of the FA Frontier List was a person who traveled for her job every week! She gave me some great ideas on how to stay abstinent on the road.

One time I called a fellow who I had sat next to at a workshop at an FA convention. When she picked up the phone, it sounded as if she’d been crying. When I asked whether she had a few minutes for an outreach call, she said that she was very glad I’d called because her pet had died while she was away at the convention and she was feeling very lonely.

Nowadays, I just trust my Higher Power to direct my outreach calls. I’ve built up quite a collection of FA fellows to call. I just speak honestly and listen compassionately. I actually look forward to the “prize” that will unfold during each call.

Just this past week, when I asked a fellow how her recovery was going, she said she was working on releasing resentment. She said that she’d been making progress because someone shared with her a quote from Nelson Mandela that “resentment is like drinking poison and then hoping it will kill your enemies.” Is that a keeper, or what? If I were recording sports statistics, I’d have to say that I average at least one “a-ha” per outreach call.