The First Time I Asked Someone to Sponsor Me Online

For the first few months I attended ACA meetings online, I didn’t think much about finding a sponsor.

Honestly, I was still getting used to being in the meetings at all. Sometimes I kept my camera off. Sometimes I wanted to share but couldn’t make myself raise my hand. I would recognize people from week to week, but they still felt a little distant—faces in boxes that disappeared when the meeting ended.

I’d heard people talk about sponsorship, but I wasn’t sure how it was supposed to work online.

In an in-person meeting, I imagined people stayed afterward and talked. Maybe they got coffee. Maybe you slowly got to know someone before asking them to sponsor you. Online, the host would close the meeting and suddenly everyone was gone.

There was one person whose shares kept standing out to me. They didn’t sound like they had everything figured out. That actually helped. They spoke honestly about their own struggles, but there was also something steady about them. I found myself listening whenever they shared.

For several weeks, I thought about asking them to sponsor me.

Then I found reasons not to.

Maybe they were too busy. Maybe they already sponsored several people. Maybe I hadn’t been in ACA long enough. Maybe I was supposed to know them better first. Mostly, I was afraid they would say no and I would feel embarrassed every time I saw them in the meeting afterward.

Eventually, I sent them a private message asking if we could talk after the meeting.

Even doing that made me nervous.

When we spoke, I told them I wasn’t completely sure what sponsorship involved, but I felt stuck trying to work through everything by myself. Then I asked whether they would consider sponsoring me.

They paused before answering, which felt like a very long pause.

Then they said yes.

We agreed to speak regularly by phone. At first, the calls felt awkward. I worried about saying the wrong thing or taking up too much time. I also had a habit of showing up with a carefully organized version of what I was going through instead of simply saying what was really happening.

Over time, that began to change.

Having a sponsor gave me a place to talk about things I wasn’t ready to share in a meeting. They helped me see patterns I could not always recognize on my own. Sometimes they shared how they had handled something similar. Other times, they simply listened and asked a question that helped me hear myself more clearly.

They did not tell me how to run my life. They did not rescue me or always know the answer. What they offered was experience, consistency, and another perspective.

That made a bigger difference than I expected.

I still value in-person connection, and I understand why some people want more face-to-face meetings. There are things a screen cannot replace. But I learned that a sponsorship relationship can become real even when two people live far apart and first meet inside little boxes on a computer.

What made it real was that we kept showing up.

Asking someone to sponsor me was uncomfortable. I did not feel brave when I did it. I just reached a point where staying isolated felt worse than risking an awkward conversation.

In ACA, we talk about the early rules we learned in childhood: “Don’t Talk, Don’t Trust, Don’t Feel”. I’m learning the value of “talking” in the visits with my sponsor. I’m glad I asked this person if they’d be my sponsor.