The saturday night speaker at the Kentucky Regional Convention in Paducah, KY

Chair for that convention and I met her then and didn't know her. Brenda had, kinda suggested maybe that we might wanna listen to her tape and the committee did and we chose her to speak. And I didn't know it at that time, but this woman will become a very important person in my life and, became my sponsor. And we've had a long distance relationship since that time. And it's not for everybody, but it seems to work for us.

There are times, that I wish it was different, but it isn't. And I've I've accepted that, and I I have a tremendous amount of respect for her. And she is one of the few people that can nail me just dead on. And I'll take it from her because I know it comes from a place of love and compassion and concern. And I am so glad she's here.

I don't get to see her very often. And those of you who have heard her speak, she's been here before. You know you're in for a powerful message. And those of you who haven't, please just sit back and listen and, feel blessed as I do to have her in my life. I introduce Gina b.

Okay. Not a problem. Thank you. Hi, family. I'm an addict named Gina.

Hi. Can y'all really hear me? Yes. Okay. Because I talk loud anyway.

I wanna thank God tonight for allowing me to be back in Kentucky, it's been 7 years. And I have to tell you, I forgot how much I love you all and how much I miss being here, Crickna. I wanna thank God for allowing me to be clean all day today in Narcotics Anonymous and, you know, Miriam said it last night, I'll say it again, this is the most morose convention. You are the most morose crowd of people I have ever heard. We are people who were fucking dying.

We were people who were not gonna make it another day. We are people that society gave up on. We are clean. We are living happy, productive to We are not here to sit in our seats and stare at one another. We are here to celebrate, Make some noise.

It's a convention. Enjoy it. Soak it up. Suck it up. Take it with you because the 12 steps go with us in our pocket wherever we go.

The hour, an hour and a half that we spend in a meeting is not the proof of our recovery. The proof of our recovery is the other 22a half that we spend out there. To the people of Paducah to the people of Paducah, to the people of JR's Executive Inn, to the people in the shops here in the restaurants, for all of you who thought that you got out of doing service your entire recovery, congratulations. This weekend, you joined Public Information, whether you know it or not. Because to the people of Paducah, you are Narcotics Anonymous.

You are carrying the face of this program when you step out in the street, when you walk up to that hotel desk, when you deal with the person who is cleaning your room, and hopefully those people are all walking away saying, man, those people in NA got something going on. There is something to that recovery stuff. I wanna thank Kentucky Anna for asking me back. I don't know if I should do this and get it over with because I'll probably end up falling, which is okay. But, you know, the first time ever that that god asked me to serve him by carrying his message from a podium.

I was doing the Sunday morning meeting at Serenity Fest in Myrtle Beach, South Carolina. And when I went there, I met the Saturday night speaker and she told me that she was from Paducah, Kentucky. And in my typical New York arrogance, I thought, where the fuck is Paducah, Kentucky? And do they really have any attics there? We were 2 weeks different in, clean time, and we both had 7 years clean at the time, and we exchanged our medallions.

And I have to tell you that Sunday morning that I came up to a podium for the first time, I held on to that medallion for dear life. And since I have spoken at a convention, I have never gone to the podium without holding on to that 7 year coin. We became very good friends, and we would meet along the way at a convention and we would always exchange our medallions up, and 13 was the last year that we exchanged medallions in, in October of 97, Brenda passed. And I know that she was very influential in this area, and a lot of people remember her. I've been in Paducah, Kentucky before, and I was here for about 8 hours the day that I flew in and attended her funeral and left out again that night.

I'm real grateful to be back in Paducah for a reason other than a funeral, and I'm real grateful to be at Kentuckiana in Paducah and see Brenda's influence that she's still here with us, and how proud that I know she would have been to be out in this audience today and to see everybody here, you know, and I wanna thank her and wish her well. And I would say that I wish her well because, you know, I remember back in New York when I got clean, I got clean April 25, 1983, And when I got clean within a couple of years, the people who had been real influential in starting narcotics anonymous in New York, a lot of them started coming down with other diseases that were a direct result of our addiction, and they started to die because in the early and mid eighties, there were no ways to learn to live with HIV. And I remember saying to my sponsor, you know, why is god taking them? Why is god taking the people who were here, who sweated, who kept the doors open, who showed up no matter what? What no.

Not that anybody deserves to die, but why has he taken those people? Why has he taken our forefathers, you know, our founding members? And she said to me, you know, I believe that there's a meeting somewhere, and those people are going because they are the ones who got it off the ground. They're the ones who know how to open the doors. They're the ones who know how to get the coffee pot started.

They're the ones who know how to greet the newcomer at the door and welcome him in, and so they're the ones who were starting the meeting. So one day when I leave here, I'm gonna pass from where I am and I'm gonna go just to another set of my people somewhere else. You know, so Brenda, thank you for keeping the coffee pot open because I know my day is gonna come when hopefully I have a chair at that meeting, and I thank you very much for putting Paducah, Kentucky in my heart and on the map for me. So I said I got here in 1983, and I gotta tell you, I did not come to Narcotics Anonymous because I wanted to stop using. I didn't come here because I thought I had a problem with drugs.

I didn't come here because I thought my life could get better if I came to meetings. I came to Narcotics Anonymous for one real simple reason, I had no place else left to go. And a lot of us who come here, this is the last stop on the block for us. If you hadn't welcomed me, if you hadn't kept the door open, if you hadn't hugged me, you know, sometimes I see today when we're here for a while, you know, and I know that I catch myself being guilty of it too, saying, you know, if the newcomer wants it that badly, they can come and ask me for my number. I gotta be honest with you, I did not have the courage to come and ask you for your phone number.

I did not have the courage to ask you if I could call you. I didn't have the courage to ask you if you would sponsor me. I sat in meetings for 6 months and I would not get up and get a cup of coffee. I did not wanna walk across that room and have you look at me. I was somebody who was so broken by the time that I got here that I had felt rejected my whole life so badly that I was not gonna give you the opportunity to reject me one more time.

And I remember the women who came up to me and said, give me your phone number and here's mine, and they called me because they saw that I didn't have it to call them. They saw that I didn't feel accepted and they knew that I didn't feel a part of. I don't know why I kept coming back other than I didn't have any other place to come to. When I got clean I was 20 years old and I gotta tell you I met a lot of young people today and it's wonderful to see young people in recovery, and when I got here, you know, people looked like me and I gotta tell you I stayed here long enough to become a middle aged broad. And and I'm okay with that today, I really am, but you know for anybody who's young who's coming in and looking around and thinking there's a whole bunch of middle aged people in here.

I don't belong here. Let me tell you, some of us got here young and by the grace of god stayed clean to become middle aged broads. Getting older isn't always easy. You know what? There's parts on me that used to be up, then now we're down and grab gravity's taken the best of it and, any of you women who started menopause, you know how much fun that is.

But you know what? I'm grateful to be alive. They told me I wasn't gonna make it to my 21st birthday. I started using when I was 11 years old, and I've heard other people say that they never knew what that first one was gonna take them to. I gotta tell you, I knew from the minute I picked up where that first one was gonna go because I knew that for the first time in my life, I found something that didn't make me feel like I fit in.

It didn't make me feel like I was a part of, it didn't make me feel good about myself, it just made me feel like I didn't care about those other things anymore. And that was how I wanted to go through life. I wanted to go through life numb, and my addiction took off real quick. And my just about my 11th birthday when I started to use, another profound experience happened to me. I lost my virginity.

I heard that line that every female in the world has heard at some point in her life, and maybe some of you guys too, if you love me, you'll do it. So I did it because I wanted to be loved. And overnight, I went from being a nobody to being that girl that you wrote about on the bathroom wall at school. I was the girl that your mothers told you not to hang around with because they talk about you like they talked about me. I was the girl that you boys showed up in my house looking for one thing and one thing only, and you knew you were gonna get it.

You knew you would get it because I felt bad enough about myself that if you laid with me for a few minutes, I thought that it made me okay. When I was 15 years old, I started hooking. You know, and I hear us say sometimes that, my best thinking got me to Narcotics Anonymous. I gotta be honest with you. My best thinking never could have come up with a place like Narcotics Anonymous.

My best thinking at 15 years old was, you know, you've been given it away for free for, like, 4 years and they pay people to do this. I thought that was a good business decision. And by the time I came here at 20, I had been using for almost half of my life. I'd been hooking on the streets in New York for 5 years. I wasn't wanted by my family.

I'd never been arrested. I don't know still to this day how I hadn't been arrested, but my institution of choice was the place where they locked you up on the flight deck and stuck the paper slippers on your feet and shot you full of Thorazine and you just kind of shuffled up and down the hallway. And I did the flight decks for a number of years and I gotta tell you, I never got locked up for being crazy. I always got locked up for acting crazy. And I knew the difference, I knew deep down in my heart that I wasn't crazy, I just didn't know how to stop the behavior.

And finally, you know, New York did not have Narcotics Anonymous for a very long time. We had something that an old governor of ours had had started. He had enacted a law called the Rockefeller laws, and good old governor made it illegal for 2 or more addicts to congregate. So narcotics anonymous was theoretically illegal in the state of New York. And it wasn't until mid 1981 that underground a couple of meetings started, you know, and by the time I came to NA in April of 1983, for any of you who have been to New York or seen a greater New York regional meeting list, we did not have 7 narcotics anonymous meetings in all of New York at that time.

And if you wanted to make 90 meetings in 90 days like was suggested to you, you had to go to other places. I don't knock those other places. They serve well for what they do. I just know that I sat on the fence for a while, and I believe that if you sit on the fence long enough, eventually the pickets start to stick you up the ass. And when it gets uncomfortable enough you gotta fall on one side or the other and make a decision, and when the time came for me to make a decision, I knew where my home was.

It was in Narcotics Anonymous. The Greater New York Region today has over 1200 meetings a week, and I am grateful to tell you that I don't have to go any place else for my recovery but NA. But when I got here, I did everything that you told me not to do, and I don't suggest to anybody that you recover this way, but this is my story. You told me to sit up front. You sat in I sat in the back.

You told me come early, leave late, so I came late and I left early. You told me to stick with the women, so I stuck with the men. I mean, people, this is what newcomers do, you know, and we forget that sometimes. I had just come off of 5 years of prostitution. I didn't come into the rooms of Narcotics Anonymous and in a couple of days figure out who I was and get in touch with myself.

I came into meetings with skirts that barely covered my ass, fishnet stockings, and spike heels. This is who I was. And I did what I had done in here, and it was only through your love of taking me by the hand and telling me you don't have to live that way today because, you see, I do believe what it says in the basic text that we are each other's eyes and ears, but I gotta tell you, when you're seeing me do something unspiritual, I don't grow because you walk out of the meeting into the parking lot and tell somebody else what I'm doing. I only grow from those of you who have loved me enough to be honest enough with me to pull my covers and tell me the truth. And when we sit in meetings and we hear people say to each other, Well don't take my inventory, I gotta tell you, goddamn it, take my inventory.

Take it. You know that line in the first step in the basic text where it talks about we rationalize the most outrageous sort of nonsense? Nonsense, and sense, and I need to be pulled on it. And I am grateful that when the student was finally ready, the teacher appeared because I spent a long time in here, not a long time, I spent about 4 and a half, 5 months without a sponsor. Let me tell you why I didn't have a sponsor.

We tell people to get a sponsor but we don't always tell them what a sponsor is. We just tell them if they should get one. So being a very intelligent addict, I don't know if you know I'm intelligent, so I'll tell you I am, and because I'm intelligent I don't need to ask questions, I can just figure shit out for myself. So you told me to get a sponsor and I knew what that was. A sponsor was like when you wanted to join the union or get into the country club, you needed someone who was in there already to sponsor you to member.

So when you said to me, well, Gina, do you have a sponsor? I said, yeah. Of course, I do. I didn't want you to think I walked in here on my own and nobody sponsored me to be a member. Well, it took a number of months of listening to figure out what a sponsor actually was so that I could go and get one.

There aren't any stupid questions in Narcotics Anonymous. The only dumb one is the one that you don't ask and it just might kill you. So when the student was ready, the teacher appeared. I got my sponsor in October of 1983, and I'm very, very honored and grateful to tell you that she is still my sponsor today. I have been through 2 husbands in recovery, and I'm still with my sponsor.

She is the longest continuous relationship that I have had in my whole entire life. And she is the woman still today that I most wanna be like when I grow up. And I absolutely love her. And any of you who know my sponsor or who have ever heard Fran share know that god sent me exactly what I needed. She did not give me suggestions because she knew that I would not take a suggestion, so she gave me orders.

And that was what I needed to do. You know, I needed to get that and she wasn't easy and I came in, you know, I had spent a lot of years on the flight deck and I'd spent a whole lot of years with professionals, and I started talking to her about, you know, all the things that the professionals had told me and, you know, well maybe I need to come up with a 6 month plan. She said good, you could start with picking up the chairs. You know, I mean, there was no there was no kinder, gentler narcotics anonymous, and I did not need somebody who was going to let me get away with anything. I would tell you, Fran's had a number of strokes in the past couple of years and her short term memory is shot to shit.

You call her and ask her what she had for breakfast and she has no clue, but I'll talk to her about something and she'll say to me, you know, gee, isn't that just like, you know, da da da? And I say to her friend, that was 1989. And she says, well, guess what? It's 2,006 and you're doing it again. And you know that's a whole bunch of old cliche bullshit that we run on ourselves about well, I'm engaging in old behavior.

Well, check it out if you're doing it now it ain't old. It's current. Work on it, it's only old till we do it again. But she started me on a journey that I never imagined possible, and the journey came in a way that I tried to steal it, I tried to make it easy on myself, I tried to get it any other way that I could than sitting down with a pen and some paper and writing the steps. And once upon a time in here, we used to say work the steps or die, motherfucker.

And they don't say that anymore, and maybe because it's kinda crude, so excuse me, but the reality is is that we work the steps or we die. Because all of the easier, softer ways that I tried to think that if I memorized the text up and down and if I went to service meetings knowing Robert's Rules of Order better than any of the rest of you, and all of the sponsees that I had around me, and all of the people with clean time that I hung around with, you know, what happened is that at 5 years clean I found myself being very socially acceptable and wanting to blow my brains out, you know, and that's the reality because recovery is an inside job and no matter how much I tried from the outside to look like I was doing okay, at 5 years clean, I had got married and we had a house and we had a little bit of money in the bank and things were looking okay from the outside, but but I hadn't sat down and done the work to come up with what was inside of me that still hurt. You know what?

There were times that I was still a 4 year old kid whose father walked out on her, and, you know, it needed to get past all of that pain and all of the hurt and remembering the boys throwing me in the mud puddle and the kids talking about me and the girls calling my mother up and telling them your daughter's a whore. And I had to get past all of that shit because I realized today that I am almost 44 years old and my happiness is my responsibility and I can't blame my mother anymore for not breast feeding me. It doesn't carry. But I also found that life changes, and, you know, the first marriage was not for the right reasons, whatever the right reasons are, and I ended up getting divorced. And I said that I wasn't going to get married again.

And anytime that I ever say that I am not going to do something ever again, But I have to tell you that in the time after I got divorced, at 8 years clean, Fran put me back on another 4 step, and she put me back on a lot of hard work because I really came to understand that my picker was broken. And I didn't understand why my picker was broken and she said to me, you know, if you wanna have a healthier relationship, you need to bring a healthier person to the table. And she was right. And you know, I did some work, and God has a sense of humor. You know, when you finally take a third step in your life and you really step aside and turn it over.

God always brings you what you need, even if it isn't exactly what you want or what you thought you wanted. This man came into my life and I gotta be honest and he I mean, he knows this, he was not the person that I ever would have chosen. I was clean 9 years, he was clean 2 and a half, a year in the street and a year and a half behind the walls of New York State Prison. And for those of you who do and love HNI, I thank you. He's a product of hospitals and institutions.

And if you don't know what it is, he's cleaned 16 years because of you. And thank you. I'm with my husband today for 14 years. I don't know if that impresses you, but I gotta tell you it impresses the shit out of me. But more than that I've been monogamous for 14 years which really impresses the shit out of me.

And you know, not too long after we got together before we got married, you know, recovery is wonderful, but life has some pain along the way. And this is just the way that life is, and, you know, my sponsor always explained to me that when we come in here, you know, I'm so self centered that I think that because I got clean, the sun should always shine, every day should be perfect, there should be a parade in my honor, and the reality is is that when I came to Narcotics Anonymous and I decided to join the human race that I signed on for life, and signing on for life on life's terms means that along the way, I'm going to have job problems, I'm going to have relationship problems, I'm going to have financial problems, people are gonna get sick, People are gonna die, and that's just life. And what I have are the 12 steps to take with me so that no matter what happens, I don't have to use over it. So in 1993, I found myself pregnant. And when I got over the surprise, I was very excited.

And I went to the doctor and I saw my belly start to grow, and I heard a little heartbeat, and I was going into my 5th month, and I went into the obstetrician's office for my regular appointment, and he put the stethoscope down on my stomach and he moved it around and he finally looked at me and he shook his head and he said, I'm sorry you don't have a heartbeat, your baby's dead. You know, I walked out of that parking lot into the parking lot from the doctor's office, and I just thought my world was over. And I held on to my husband and we stood there and we cried, and he finally said to me, what do you wanna do? And I'm so grateful that in a program of repetition, you have told me repeatedly what to do when I don't know what else to do with myself. I said, please take me to the meeting.

And I went to the meeting, and I let you hold me, and I let you love me, and I allowed you to tell me that it was going to be okay, although it didn't feel okay at the moment. You know, I believe that at our lowest points that if we hold on and we rock through the storms, that god does not give up on the blessings that are yet to come if we continue to show up. About 3 years before my miscarriage, I had a call from a convention in Texas, and they had asked me to come and I wasn't able to make it that weekend and I said if you ever call again I'd be happy to get down there. And when I got home from the meeting that night 3 years later on that night, that convention in Texas had called again asking me to come down. And it didn't take the pain away and it didn't make it all better, but I believe that god is constantly reminding me that at the lowest moments when things seem hopeless, that the blessings are yet to come, that I just need to hold on to my chair and not give up 5 minutes before the miracle.

You know, we're a well meaning bunch of people and sometimes in our well meaning manner, we say some really stupid hurtful things. And when I went into that meeting and mistold everybody that I had miscarried, a lot of you told me, it's okay. You'll have another one. I've never had another one. I had 3 inseminations and 3 in vitro fertilizations, and I never got pregnant again.

And the doctors finally told me that it was time to stop and accept that I was never going to have biological children, And I have never felt so worthless, useless, and defective as a human being to know that the parts that God and nature gave me and intended my body to do we're never going to do that. And I was so angry with God. And my sponsor said to me, you know, do you wanna be pregnant or do you wanna be a mom? And I said, I don't know why. And she said, well, if you wanna be a mom, there's other ways you can be a mom, you know.

And I sat down and I did some writing and I realized that once again in my recovery, I had come to a pissing contest with God. God said, you're not getting pregnant? And I said, oh, yes. I am. Here we go in vitro number 3.

This time it's gonna work. And he said, no, it's really not. There's another way. I finally said to her, okay, I'm ready to be a mom, and I started to pursue adoption. I went to see an adoption attorney and he said to me, it's about a year or a year and a half process and I went home and I took all these papers and I threw them on the counter because I want when I want when I want it.

And I said thank you God for another brick wall. So about a week later, my husband calls me up and he's at work and he said, what are you doing? I'm gonna come home and pick you up. There's a land auction going on at this hotel near our house. I wanna go over and check it out.

I said, what do you wanna go to a land auction for? He said, oh come on, it's gonna be fun. So we go over to this land auction and we walk in there, and they've got those red velvet ropes up, you know, and they look at me and they say, Where's your certified check? And I said, What certified check? They said, Well, you can't come in here without a certified check.

Now mind you, I don't even know what I'm doing here, but goddamn it, don't tell an addict you're not coming in. I am not gonna lie and tell you that this was my most spiritual moment to act in the program of Narcotics Anonymous and being a goodwill ambassador of recovery in action. So I hold the little ad up that my husband And I'm making enough noise about calling the New York State Attorney General that finally the man pulls the red velvet aside and says very quietly, why don't you go in and sit down? So I go in and I sit down and, they're auctioning off 1 piece of land, 2 pieces of land, and the 3rd piece of land comes up and I see my husband across the room going like this with his hand, and I'm looking at him like, what the hell are you doing? And they raise the bid and his hand goes up again, and then the next thing I know, the guy slams it down and he says sold, and there's a stack of papers in front of me and they're telling me congratulations, I own 5.1 acres in bum fuck New York, nowhere, and by the way, you owe us $98,000.

And I'm like, Oh my god. I mean, I literally threw up. I said, what have you done? He said, I don't know. I said, why were you raising your hand?

He said, I don't know. I just got caught up. So my worst character defect that I have to be honest, it was only when I turned 21 in this fellowship that I started to have an inkling of a desire to work on it is procrastination. I wholly believe in doing nothing today that you could put off till tomorrow or possibly get away with never doing. So I have a bad habit of making plans and not telling anybody about it.

So my husband bought me this chalk board and I'm supposed to write all our plans down, so now I just don't write them on the chalk board. So he comes home about 2 weeks after that on a Saturday about 5 o'clock at night, and he just walked in from work, he's in his uniform, and I say to him, I'm speaking in Roselle Park, New Jersey in about an hour, and he's like, what? I said, Yeah, I'm supposed to be speaking at the speaker jam in like an hour. Goddamn it. You never write anything on the board.

We never know where we're supposed to be. And we get in the car and we're going down the Garden State Parkway in New Jersey and he is cussing me the whole way there. We get there. They're running late. They were having a basketball tournament and a fish fry and they're running behind and we get into this auditorium and I get up to speak and there's no microphone and it's about 98 degrees in there and everybody's tired, and they're running out the door.

I can't tell you. They were knocking each other over to get out the door, and I'm thinking, god, why am I here? For the first time, I said from a podium that we had just begun to pursue adoption, and a man I had never seen before walked up to my husband and said, there's a young addict in our area who just came out of treatment, who's pregnant, and she's looking to place the baby. Can I give her your number? I tried to get pregnant for 7 years.

19 days after making the decision to adopt, I was introduced to my son's birth mother. As if god were telling me all along, when you're ready to let go and you're ready to do it my way, I've got everything worked out. I have all the plans in place. You just need to surrender. Once again.

My son is 5 years old today, and he is and he is everything that I ever dreamt possible. He is everything that I waited for and you know what? I know that you didn't promise me, you know, whiter teeth, fresher breath. You didn't promise me a house and a picket fence. You only promised me freedom from active addiction, but what you have given me, I can never ever repay you for.

And Debbie always tells me that I never ever tell. Okay, so what was the point of all that land story? When I met my son's birth mother and I called the attorney back, the attorney said, this is gonna cost you about 25 or $30,000. And I said, okay. I said, David, what are we gonna do?

He said, we're gonna sell the land. And we put the land up for sale and we got an offer that was a little under, and then a week later, we got an offer that was a little over. And when all was said and done, I walked away without a bill and my newborn son out of the hospital. And if you think on my best day that I ever could have put that series of events into action the way that it worked and the way that it went down. On my best day, I never could have pulled that off.

I am so grateful to you for allowing me to come all the way back into life. I am so grateful to have people in my life like my swansy Debbie, you know, like Mike, the people that I have known here for years and into my 2nd decade because I don't know if you're the kind of addict that I am, but if you are then you'll know that if I drank with you in the bar for an hour, you were the very best friend I ever had in my whole life and I meant it with my heart. I didn't have long term relationships because I didn't have any integrity. I'm only gonna talk about one thing which is, something that's become a real big part of my life, and it's changed my recovery very profoundly. I heard you talk for a long time about staying in the moment and just for today and live each day to its fullest, and I never really internalized what that meant.

And I talked about just for today and I said to everybody stay in the moment and I didn't really understand what you were talking about until about 4 and a half years ago on a late beautiful summer Tuesday morning in New York when I was sitting in my office about 9 o'clock in the morning, and I was drinking coffee and reading my email and basically minding my business, when my sister-in-law called me and said to me that a plane had struck the World Trade Center. And I walked down to the other end of my office and I was watching the first tower burning out the window when I watched the second plane come around and slam into tower 2. And I remember when I was walking down to the window, the first thing I did was I looked out at that beautiful blue entirely cloudless sky and I thought to myself, how the hell did he miss that tower on a day like today? But as I watched that second plane hit that building, I realized at that moment that that wasn't an accident, that I was stuck on this island that was under attack.

My son was a week away from his first birthday, and I remember praying, god please just get me out of here and let me get home. When I got on the train to go to Grand Central, the conductor told us as we were underway that we were the last train to be allowed out of the city that Grand Central had shut down after we had left. When I got home and I started to watch the news and the enormity of what happened sank in, I realized that 3,000 other regular Joes just like me got up and went to work that day and were not sitting at home that night. Just like that. And I finally understood what you meant about just for today.

I had put such a profound importance on. And you wanna know the things that I put such a profound importance on that you were trying to run this, and you were talking about that one, and this one was dating this one, and why was this one in that business? And you know what? It was all bullshit, and it really didn't matter. None of it mattered.

What mattered was showing up and being okay today that I don't need to put that front on that I felt I needed to put on for you for a lot of years. I am okay today to stand in front of you and to be vulnerable and to tell you that today I truly wanna be a kind, loving, and gentle woman. And I don't wanna just act like that to your face and stab you behind your back when you turn around, because we are each other's eyes and ears. And no matter what I say in a meeting, no matter what I say to you on the phone, no matter what I say to you at the podium, if I walk away and do anything contrary to what just came out of my mouth, Anything that I said just went out the window. I know how to talk the talk.

I don't wanna talk the talk today. I wanna walk the walk. I don't wanna be just abstinent. I don't wanna just collect key tags and medallions. I sold myself short in this program for a whole lot of years.

I want today everything that you have to offer. I wanna be happy, joyous, and free, And you have allowed me to do that. The greatest gift that recovery has given me has been the ability to put my head down on the pillow at night and close my eyes and go to sleep without having to listen to the committee that meets inside of my head and talks to me in my own voice and tells me that I'm worthless, I'm useless, I will never make it, and why am I even bother trying? I am grateful to Narcotics Anonymous. I am a proud member of this fellowship.

My home group for anybody who has ever come in through Catona, New York is Tuesday nights at 7:45. We are the when at the end of the road meeting. We are a rotating step meeting. And I find it rotating step meeting. And I find it real important to tell you that I do have a home group because otherwise I am homeless in Narcotics Anonymous.

And there was once upon a time that I used to say if you don't think your home group in NA is the best one, then you need another one. Today I'll tell you if you don't think your home group in Narcotics Anonymous is the best one, then why don't you stay around and make it the best one? Because if you're not part of the solution, then you are part of the problem. My gratitude to Kentucky, Anna. My gratitude to God, first and foremost.

How blessed I am to be able to meet up with old friends and make some new ones. There are no strangers in NA. The only strangers in here are the friends I have yet to meet. To be able to see my grandsponsees and my Kentucky family of sponsorship, and to see them grow, and to put some faces to the names that I hear about on the telephone has been a wonderful privilege, and they are a wonderful bunch of women. And I am so glad to have you in my life.

And, Debbie, I love you very much, and I'm so glad to spend the weekend with you. So I will leave you with the story that I always tell. And if you've ever heard me share, you've heard it before, and I apologize about that, but it's my favorite story. So there was a woman who wanted to learn all that there was to know. So she found a guru and she went up into the mountain and he gave her a pile of books and he said to her, you study and I'll be back.

And he came in some days later leaning on a heavy wooden cane, and he said to her, have you learned all that there is to know? And she said, no. And he picked up the cane and he whacked her over the head with it. So he came in the next day and he asked her the same question and he got the same response and he did the same thing. And this went on for some time.

And one morning, he came in and he said, have you learned all that there is to know? And she said, no. And he raised the cane to strike her but she reached out in mid air and she grabbed it before he could hit her. And she was scared, she didn't know what he was going to do. And he put the cane down and he looked at her and he smiled and he said, congratulations.

You have learned all that you need to know. You have finally accepted that you will never learn everything that there is to know, and you've learned how to stop the pain. And I believe that this is the message that you give me on a daily basis. If my life has gotten this good, I have no reason to believe that it can't get any better, and I want more. And I have earned my right to the seat, and I am not giving it up.

I had still, 22 years and some later, have no place else to go. And I am so glad that no place else to go meant that I ended up in the rooms with you, and I thank you for everything. My gratitude to this fellowship and my gratitude to this region for having me. If nobody else has told you that they love you today, let me tell you, it is a quarter to 9 at night, you better look who you're hanging out with. But if in fact there is someone out there that no one else has told you that they love you, let me be the first to tell you that I love you, and God loves you also.