How Zoom AA Meetings Are Helping Me Stay Sober During the COVID-19 Pandemic

Originally published at GEN for Medium

Anyone who has traversed New York after hours is familiar with the ominous state we now find ourselves trapped inside. Wide, empty streets and the eerie silence that now extends well past dawn — the foreboding of still being awake during that fleeting antisocial hour used to be a secret handshake among hard partiers.

Now we’re all in it together.

I’ve lived in New York City for the past 15 years. Throughout many of them, I went out every single night. When I first arrived here from Boston, where I went to college, I had a job in fashion. I was young, eager, and more streetwise than I let on. I always made it a point to know the person who could get me the thing that I wanted. I wasn’t after sex or money or fame — I was just trying to use the high voltage of the city to breathe life back into my youth. It would catch up to me by the end of each week. On Sundays, a day reserved for a family dinner, I’d crawl out of a hotel suite, a loft in SoHo, a brownstone in Brooklyn, or a former factory in Bushwick then hurry to meet my disappointed sister, and we’d make our homecoming in silence. Struggling to sober up on the New Jersey Transit line to Dover, I’d feel desperate to break the mood between us but wouldn’t dare speak first. Eventually, she’d say, “Where did you even go last night?” I knew what she meant. What she wanted to say but couldn’t: “You scared me.”

“Virtual meetups are fulfilling the instinctual human need to bond with others when we feel unsafe and uncertain.”

Since Covid-19 has made clear how vastly unprepared we were for a pandemic, New York has felt like an independent state — fighting for the aid of the federal government, prompting its citizens to irrationally compete for supplies with each other. At 11 a.m., the line at my local Trader Joe’s curled around the block, and the manager at CVS told me people were buying out the stock of toilet paper to resell in an unregulated TP black market. Seventy-two hours after the official closure of all bars and restaurants, New York’s alcohol delivery services surged by more than 450% — a statistic so staggering it certainly influenced the decision to deem liquor stores an “essential business” that may remain open as Gov. Andrew Cuomo passed an executive order requiring 100% of the nonessential workforce to stay home, drowning our destabilized metropolis in a powerful depressant.

As I write this, I have not had a drink or a drug for 3.59 years. That’s 43.16 months or 1,316 days.

My commitment to my sobriety has helped me not cheat on anyone or anything since. While I don’t want to drink now, I am struggling to remain sober. As unrealistic as it may sound, I had no idea I was an alcoholic. Not until a stranger told me after pulling me off the Westside Highway, where I was attempting to cross through oncoming traffic in a blackout. She explained what was happening to me in a way I’d never heard before. “I say this with absolutely no judgment,” she continued, “but if you ever have questions about alcohol, my mother has been in AA [Alcoholics Anonymous] for over 30 years.”

The grace of being saved that night was too precious to squander — a gift I was determined to live up to although I was terrified of what my life would be like without alcohol. My therapist recommended AA, where I could begin my program with 90 days of abstention. I agreed without pause — it was local, free, and what the doctor ordered. I had no idea what to expect. I’d missed the cultural memo regarding AA entirely. I didn’t know about the praying, the coffee, or the basements. I just loved it — from the moment I sat on the floor of my first meeting, it felt like home.

When the coronavirus outbreak was officially classified as a pandemic, addiction treatment facilities and programs were immediately forced to operate without the key component of recovery: group meetings. In her award-winning book, The Recovering, Leslie Jamison interviewed Gary Kaplan, a professor of psychiatry and pharmacology and experimental therapeutics at Boston University, whose aspiration is to recondition the mechanism of dependence itself through medicine. While he believes strongly in the necessity of medication to combat addiction, Kaplan told Jamison, “You can give someone as much methadone as you want. But they will still need a social network.”

It’s a very different experience to have something taken away from you than to give it up. I had worked so hard to replace toxic coping mechanisms with tools for physical, emotional, and spiritual sobriety, and I deeply resented having them ripped away — even if this time, the rest of the world had curled into the fetal position along with me.

“The strangers who heard me speak understood in a way those closest to me could not. Just as I understood my cousin in a way the rest of my family couldn’t.”

Reagan Reed, executive director of the New York Intergroup Association of Alcoholics Anonymous and a member of AA, expressed her fears surrounding the closure of the organization’s central office and over 5,000 meetings in the New York City area. “It’s a tremendous difference. The way that our fellowship works is that we sit in a room together and we talk to one another face to face. The meetings are the cornerstone and foundation of Alcoholics Anonymous, so removing them is going to have a really big impact on people’s ability to remain sober,” she told the New Yorker Radio Hour last month.

Unfortunately, for me, I could never think my own way out of the panic room of my outsized feelings. By the time social distancing became the official declaration, I’d already received dozens of invitations to online AA meetings, but it wasn’t the same. Even so, sobriety in isolation wasn’t serving me. My partner and I decided to shelter in place across the Hudson River at my sister’s house in New Jersey. Adjusting to this ongoing proximity to my family added a new challenge to coping. I missed my friends, and I wanted to return to my fellowship but felt reluctant and skeptical — projecting my compulsive behavior onto exercise as every cog in the wheel of my family remained operational, each calibrating their corporate jobs to the new digital landscape.

I was rudderless, obsessively refreshing my email and pacing the half-mile straightaway along the riverbank. I ran repeatedly, rapidly, and relentlessly until breathless — desperate to break the despair I felt by shocking my body into motion. Activating the engines of my physical endurance transmitted energy to my mental reserves. That night, I decided to join a meeting where I knew I’d find familiar faces and after one of my dearest friends called me. “Jessica, we missed you girl! Where have you been? You know you can’t stay away too long.” I got to laugh as we joked about being the mental-health MacGyvers of the moment — just like the self-described “preppers” and survivalists. We weren’t nursing hangovers or desperate to score, and we were grateful for that. “I can’t imagine it, but then again I can,” we sighed.

The universal upheaval of this current crisis forces those unfamiliar with the practice of collective therapy to assimilate. Everyone I know is on Zoom working, worshipping, connecting, and TikTok-ing. Virtual meetups are fulfilling the instinctual human need to bond with others when we feel unsafe and uncertain.

After that night, I fell easily back into my recovery routine. My focus returned, and an opportunity for work emerged. AA once again became a reliable safe haven despite the veil of anonymity being broken by hackers who’ve infiltrated the now-virtual rooms — yelling insults, racial slurs, and expletives randomly, stealing precious time and sacred space from those who earnestly desire to stay sober. The violation of our protective community hurts, especially as everyone is starved for security and stability. “Zoombombing” escalated so furiously across the internet that the FBI issued an official warning to users. Though bored trolls cannot hijack our progress, the disruption feels personal. The measures necessary to guard the rooms cause debate among groups because they will inadvertently block some and sour others from joining in. I’m glad to not carry the burden of collecting consensus and enacting new procedures. I make sure to thank those who do.

New York is now the epicenter of the coronavirus outbreak, accounting for half the total cases in the U.S. I was prone to the dark morbidity of many addicts and alcoholics — I’d beat death once. That’s usually what lands us in the rooms. A while back, after I stopped drinking, I heard that one of my cousins survived an overdose. I felt an immediate solidarity with him and wanted to reach out, but I was afraid to admit to my extended family that I was an alcoholic.

On the 13th day of our self-quarantine, that little cousin died — not from the virus but from a disease. The cause was not explicitly Covid-related although no one will say what we all know: that his addiction drove him to take a risk that cost him his life. I called my closest cousin, the only one I’ve ever talked to about my sobriety, and we stayed on the phone together for over an hour. There are very few details known, but his mother was with him at the hospital when he died. Due to current regulations, only 10 people are allowed to attend funeral services. Once this is all over, the whole family will gather to celebrate his life. It’s been too long anyway. And I promised my cousin on the phone that I would contact another relative who has struggled in the past as well, knowing that the thing we addicts die of most often is shame.

“We’ve been discussing things that are very bleak,” Reed, the director of the New York Intergroup, told the New Yorker Radio Hour, “but I also want to say that we have a program that’s been going on since 1946 and has grown by millions and millions of people and is shared all over the world. It’s a very solid and remarkable fellowship. I think that within our own communities were going to find a way through and through it. And we should be OK.”

The distant, clinical tick of the rising death toll now registered our family name. Desperate to escape, I realized I had the ability to transcend my geographic constraints and decided to teleport to a Zoom meeting in Paris. I sensed the thrill of adventure and the freedom of total anonymity right away while the sound of unknown voices from all over the world lulled and soothed me. I felt safe, and now I desperately wanted to share. “My cousin died yesterday,” I began, finally able to release the tears that had been bottled up inside me. “To be honest, we weren’t close, but I remember how beautiful he was — a young beautiful boy who should not be gone. It makes me wonder why some of us stay and others don’t. Why me? Why him? So I feel guilty and grateful and all of the things. Thank you for letting me share.”

The strangers who heard me speak understood in a way those closest to me could not. Just as I understood my cousin in a way the rest of my family couldn’t. This is the gift of addiction, although it seems like a curse at first — healing anoints us. We become the healers.

My favorite AA tradition is how we close each meeting by holding hands and reciting the Serenity Prayer in harmony. I have never heard it out of unison, even in groups of hundreds. On Zoom, it’s always a hot mess. But it gives us a good laugh.

“Do you think when we’re back in the rooms, we’ll hold hands at the end again?” I ask a group of girlfriends in a Zoom party celebrating the sobriety anniversaries of our fellow alcoholics. The group hems and chats wistfully.

“I just want to tell you all,” I said, “we might have to wear gloves, but I will always hold hands with you.”

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