preview

Alcoholics Anonymous ( Aa ) Meeting

Good Essays

Alcoholics Anonymous
I attended the Alcoholics Anonymous (AA) meeting held at the Westhampton United Methodists Church, 6100 Patterson Ave, 23226, which is 3.8 miles away from my home. The meeting started at 7:30pm and was structured as an open meeting that welcomed beginners. I utilized www.aarichmond.org website to search for AA meetings in the Richmond Area. There were about 30-40 meetings offered a day within a 15-mile radius of my home zip code. I selected the RVA YPG because I assumed Y in YPG stood for youth or something related to young people. Then I researched it and found one possible meaning for the acronym was Young Planners Group. I was interested in attending the YPG meeting because I am always fascinated with the progress …show more content…

I realized that I was trying to postpone it as long as I could, when I cooked dinner and started to clean an hour before the meeting time. I told my husband about the daunting task that I needed to complete and asked if he could join me. I felt a huge sense of relief when he agreed to accompany me. Although, he was with me and I felt a bit calmer, I still had butterflies in my stomach. I expected everyone to stare at me, either for him or her to be overly intrigued by the fact that a Muslim girl was in an AA meeting or completely ignore me. I also expected the meeting as it does on television, people sitting in a circle in a large-dim room with donuts and coffee on a side table along a wall.
In reality, the meeting was held in a colorful classroom, we sat in rows not a circle, but there was coffee on a side table along with wall without donuts. The meeting began with a unison recitation of AA material. Then a young woman named Amari was introduced as the designated speaker for the evening. She identified as an alcoholic and shared her past experiences of feeling like out of place. Her topic was focused on identifying the barriers and inner-struggles that prevented attendees from coming to meetings in the past or present. She (a Black woman) explained that she often identified outside the group and was unable to relate to the majority White people in the meetings. Amari discussed this before

Get Access