A Sense of Belonging

Today’s passage opens the last paragraph of Bill W.’s essay on Step Eleven in the Twelve and Twelve, AA’s 1953 book of essays on the Steps and Traditions. Just before it, the essay grants that every member has days when praying takes all the will they have, and days they won’t pray at all, and tells them to start again as soon as they can. Belonging had come up before in the book, at more length, in the essay on Step Five.

There, belonging is what nearly every alcoholic had gone without. Even before the drinking got bad, the essay says, nearly all of them felt they “didn’t quite belong,” whether they hung back out of shyness or put on a loud show for company. It likens them to actors who suddenly find they don’t know their lines; drink let them improvise. Then came AA, and the thrill of being among people who understood. It wasn’t enough. Belonging, the essay says, waited on candor going both ways, telling their own conflicts and hearing someone else tell theirs. Until then they “still didn’t belong.” Step Five, it says, was where kinship with others and with God began.

Bill had his own story of not belonging. Years later he remembered his first term at Norwich University, the military college in Vermont he entered in the fall of 1914, as a time when no fraternity asked him to join: “I didn’t get a bid to a single one.” A letter home that fall told his mother that three had asked him, and a later one claimed they all had. Pass It On, AA’s 1984 biography of Bill, offers one explanation, which it says he suggested himself: he was trying to win her approval, and lied about the bids to explain why he hadn’t joined one. In the closing pages of the Step Twelve essay, he wrote of alcoholics who “had to be number one people” to hide what they felt underneath.

Two years after the Twelve and Twelve, the word turned up again. In 1955 the Big Book’s second edition added the story of Sylvia K., who had helped start AA in Chicago in 1939. She ended it on what had taken the place of the old ache of being alone: belonging, and being “wanted and needed and loved.” That July, at AA’s International Convention in St. Louis, loners, members who lived far from any group, met one another. They came away with “a fresh sense of belonging,” Bill wrote in AA Comes of Age (1957). They had kept sober mostly by reading and by mail, with letters from AA’s office in New York and from one another, and each had found ways of their own to keep in touch with God.

More on Bill at Norwich: The Bronx cocktail, in Number One Man. On Sylvia K.: Women aren’t alcoholics, in People Like You. On the loners at St. Louis: A loner at sea, in Jittery and Alone.