The Proper Credentials

We don’t need certification, education, or credentials to share our program with fellow compulsive overeaters or to take service positions at our home meetings. ~ The Twelve Steps and Twelve Traditions of OvereatersAnonymous (Kindle Locations 1831-1832).

We girls were told growing up we would be college-educated,
and they set the examples. Toddlers during the War to End Wars,
they were college graduates with a masters they both claimed.
The requirements for us included becoming prepared to teach
or nurse so we could follow husbands' jobs. With three degrees
in my name, I carried an education-arrogance, an erudite bias
making me judgmental, ready to dismiss people based on assumptions,
on grammatical ineptitude. I'd been in OA a year or two, had chosen
two sponsors and dismissed them without telling them, and asked a third.
Tradition Eight says there are no professional members of OA.
Inherent in this idea is that education, credentials, professional status
to spread the message. I learned that innately through my sponsor.
Yes, I can easily play the grammar-police and use polysyllabic words
she doesn't know, but HP chose well uniting us, repelling
a favorite character defect if mine, blessing me with wisdom
inaccessible through classrooms.