The 1984 Philadelphia Regional Narcotics Anonymous Convention

The following tape was made of Sydney R from California as she spoke at the 1984 Philadelphia Regional Convention.

Miss Sidney and I'm an addict.

Can you hear me back there?

I personally want to thank the Philadelphia, the Greater Philadelphia Convention Committee for asking me to be here this evening in Philadelphia. It's really a privilege. I want to tell you that I came in Wednesday and as busy as they were and it was insane,

they have made me feel so welcome and so loved.

I cannot tell you how much you're going to mean to me for the rest of my life because the gift of Narcotics Anonymous

these years that I had been around has been all of you people. I know so many people out here from the past years. We have done so much together and have shared so much together. And I want to just tell you all right now that I love you all very, very much.

Love you too.

I've got to tell you the first thing my old man said when he knew I was coming out here.

And this is only my old man's opinion of me or feelings about me,

he said. I told him. I said Bobby called and asked me if I'd be the speaker in Philadelphia. And he said, Oh my God, the gold in my air of not Narcotics Anonymous is going to the Liberty Bell.

Wait till I tell him the Liberty Bell has a crack in it.

In the middle of,

I believe it was August of 1975,

my eldest daughter Robin

brought her to a hospital in Los Angeles.

When she dropped me in, she never thought that I would come out alive.

You know they say that if you talk about hell, if an addict talks about hell and looks into another addict's eye, that only another addict would understand what that hell is.

Perhaps less than 100 lbs. I had used drugs for 25 years. I never had a day free of drugs,

the drug of my choice, Pills, scripts. I used other drugs, but that was a drug of my choice.

I got chills when I said that goes all of a sudden what happened was that I remembered for a moment my daughter bringing me into that hospital. And I don't remember how I got there.

And what I do remember was a moment when I woke up in the hospital room, apparently, and the hospital was all white, you know, And the first thing I saw was all this white. And I said, my God, I've made it to heaven.

And then I looked into my daughters eyes

and I said, Oh my God, what have I done?

You know when I use those drugs? And I started out with a few.

By the time I hit my bottom 25 years later,

the last five years of my using, I was taking over 150 pills a day.

Uppers, Downers. I get 5 scripts from one doctor and three of them with triple scripts.

I shouldn't be alive today,

and when I came into this program, I didn't want to be alive. And even what was more frightening was that I was legally insane. I know I don't have to tell you people what paranoia is.

I do want to tell you one of the things that happened about my paranoia.

I had saved over thousands and thousands of small little bottles that my scripts, my pills came in

right? What if the garbage man picks up the garbage and finds out how much I'm using

and two days before I supposed to get into the hospital because I knew then at that time, if that was it, I was going to have to do something or die.

I called up a friend

and she came over

and I filled the huge garbage bags filled with empty pills. Then I put the garbage bag filled with the empty bottles into a suitcase. Snuck that into her car. Had her drive me to a market where they had those huge bins. Garbage bins. Went over there and took out half the garbage in case anyone was watching me.

Blew my bag of empty bottles in there and then the garbage over it.

And you talk about pitiful.

And that was just one of many, many incidents. I mean, 24 hours a day, I was paranoid. When the garden came open, he was cutting off the hedge. I was sure he was cutting it to make it shorter so that he could look into the window,

and I couldn't talk in a room without bringing someone into the bathroom and turning the tub on the faucet on.

You know, I was going to say that I was less than a vegetable, but that isn't true because of vegetable had more life than I did.

You know, I lost everything except the love of my daughters. I had three daughters

and I remember watching them, the frustration in their eyes and then

in themselves. You know, when mother can't you do anything?

And all I could think of, oh God, if they would only leave me alone, if they would only give me enough, I'd be alright.

You have enough. I had to have more than one doctor

at around six or seven,

and when I couldn't get enough, even then, you could go across the border in Los Angeles. You get anything you want there,

never waiting till the last moment where I had just enough to get me there and get me back

and I went to any lengths to get my drugs.

I had no hope.

I felt a desperateness that today I still find hard to describe.

And when she took me into the hospital

and I was told

that for the rest of my life I was going to have to do without drugs. I don't know which frightened me more. You know today when I think back and I think which was worse, the bottom that I hit

or kicking

When you stop using those pills after 25 years of use. I sat in those chairs and I shook for 2 1/2 years in my clean time

when I walked into this program. You only had 1 1/2 meetings at that time in Los Angeles. Call it 1/2. No one went to the other half.

When I went into that first meeting, people there didn't wonder whether I was going to make the program. They wondered whether I would live.

Now I want to just go back a little and give you just a little background. It's very difficult to give anymore because it's very difficult to go through 50 years. And that's how old I was when I came into Narcotics Anonymous. And today I'm 59, just had a birthday last month

and all I can tell you, I hope you Broads out there can feel as good as my age.

Zach, before I tell you a little about the past, I want to tell you I don't believe in talking about relationships. They have nothing to do with recovery.

The only reason I'm going to say something is to bring my old man into it. And also

to be able to say that so many people use that as an excuse for going out, got news for you? That's all that it is, is an excuse, a justification for going out and using.

When I had eight days in the hospital and a little band around my wrist,

someone called me up and they said, hey, I heard about this meeting. I think it's called Narcotics Anonymous. They have one out in Redondo Beach.

Now, you have to understand, I'm lying on the hospital bed, stretched out, shaking. I couldn't talk. I couldn't walk, I couldn't eat. I couldn't lift food to my mouth. And he's telling me to go to a meeting and something I had never heard about before.

As it was, I called him up seven times that afternoon. First I said yes, then I said no, then I said yes and then I said no

and finally something in me said Sydney go for broke. And I called him up and I said pick me up.

And I walked into

this rule. It was funny because at Los Angeles Regional Convention,

I was speaking to Bobbye sponsor and to my sponsor, who dear our dearest friends,

and I was telling them exactly who was at that meeting that evening, what everyone said. Yeah, I could. My brain was so fried I couldn't even read a sentence. But I will never forget the feeling in that room. I walked into that room and I didn't have to substitute one word for another. I sat in that room and I heard people talking about using drugs,

and I heard that there was recovery there.

And I said, my God, there's someone out there who understands.

And even though we didn't have very much of Narcotics Anonymous for the past six years, I myself have not had to go to any other meetings but Narcotic Anonymous meetings.

And I want you to know that I remember sitting at those meetings when I had 2 1/2 and three years and thinking, oh, my God, it's alone up here. I sat in that room with a lot more time, or the most time than most of the people in there. And I heard people saying, oh, I better have people around me, you know, with more experience.

And I said, what happens if I leave then? Supposing everyone else did that,

and for the new people in this room, I want you to know that there is recovery Narcotics Anonymous.

And my first love and the God, the passion that I have for this program, I cannot tell you. And how could you not have a love for a program that has given you back the gift of life?

I was born in New York City.

I love those accents. I live 40 years in California and I can't get rid of my New York accent.

And when someone says you've got a New York accent, you should see it get heavier and heavier and heavier.

Love it.

My parents

were the Russian immigrants that came over with all the immigrants in the early 1900s.

They suffered a great deal

in Russia at that time. There has great many programs. And my parents and my two older sisters that were born there did go through a great deal of pain and suffering. And they're about to take my father into the army. And they were taking the Jews at that time and sending them up to Siberia. And he escaped

as through the underground he came to the United States. And eight years later, he sent for my mother and my two sisters.

You know that I came much later.

My two older sisters are 17 and 19 years older than myself,

and I grew up and today I know it, with two very, very beautiful human beings, my mom and my dad.

My father, by the way, was 91 when he died. My mother was 87. So they lived long enough for me to learn how to forgive something that I did not understand and blame them so much all of my life.

This program gives you the gift of not having to point your fingers to anyone.

You know,

my parents, my mother was very, very critical, very judgmental. And because of that, I grew up with so many feelings, terrible feelings of inadequacy. I felt unloved as a child and as a child I thought like a child understood as a child. And I did not know that my parents showed love in a different way. And it didn't mean that they didn't love me. I grew up in a very religious home,

my father part time. They had very, very small temples in New York City,

in the West Bronx at that time.

And my father was a part-time husband. That's a canter, a man who sings the prayers through the Torah, through the laws of God. And I rebelled against that religion. I felt it was being forced down my stone. I was brought up with a punishing God, You know,

All I heard was God is going to get you.

Why can't you play violin the way your cousin Helen plays the violin?

Thank God,

you know, in those days if someone had a disease like ours, although you never heard of it, of course. Jews don't get drunk,

take dopes. We have to put them in the closet.

Nice signal.

Never.

But that these feelings of inadequacy that I grew up with, and I'm talking about severe inadequacy, I'm talking about so afraid to speak up, so afraid of this person that could never do anything right, so afraid of this person that this God that I knew about was going to punish me.

And So what I did was I overcompensated and I built up an image of myself, a facade.

I wouldn't let anyone see those feelings of inadequacy. I wouldn't let anyone know about the feelings of guilt and of shame. Man, I don't know about you, but shame was my second name.

You know,

when my mother and my father died, they died exactly the same month and year apart. I was not on the program.

They died five years before I came into the program

and after that time, man, I went downhill.

It wasn't because of them, it was because of the drugs.

It was just at that time that everything, every burden, every problem that happened

was just so overblown in my heart, in my head, my mind.

The drugs were beginning to do its job well.

I want to talk to you about something that happened not too long ago,

because what happened then is so much a part

of what recovery in Narcotics Anonymous

is all about for me.

It's not easy and it's very painful.

17 months ago

my beautiful 29 year old daughter died.

Her name is Leslie.

And I used to. I remember I would go around and I would say to my babies,

you call them pigeons. Whatever

I would say to them,

God will never put in front of you more than what you could handle.

No matter what you go through

here in recovery, Narcotics Anonymous will never be as terrible as what you went through there.

When I had seven years and this all happened in one day,

my daughter woke up in the morning.

I rushed her over to the emergency hospital.

She was there for five hours and they gave her every conceivable test

and I couldn't find anything wrong, and they sent her home

and a few hours later, without any idea of what was happening, she died in my arms.

I thought that I had experienced every kind of pain

that a human being could experience,

but I tell you, in my life,

I had never experienced anything that was so painful, so agonizing. I loved her so very much.

You know, when something like that happens, you don't have time to think about whether you have a loving God or you don't have a loving God or think of anything.

From the moment that it happened,

there was only, and I know it would be heavy to say that this didn't happen, but I have to be honest and tell you how it did happen.

There was not one moment

and I did not hold on to the faith that I felt

because I could not get through one minute. I did not think I was going to live through one moment,

but the anguish, the loss that I was feeling.

Many of you know her, know her.

Let me do that thing to our home LA. I know how much you all loved her

and I tell you from this beautiful girl one could learn courage and what my was about.

And in a eulogy I said she truly was a child of God.

I thought I was going to go crazy

and every moment my sponsor came over and stayed at the house for five days with me a week

and every moment

I said, Oh my God, help me, help me to get through this next moment. And God did.

When I tell you that I know that there is a loving God,

I could only tell you that I felt His presence

in our home in that room that I never moved from.

I could actually feel God crying in that room

and there are many questions they had not answered or had not been answered for me

in my lifetime.

I don't think I have to ask. Tell you what were the two questions that were asked so much

and when was do you want to use?

And the other is, do you still believe in the loving God?

But that wasn't to use. I became enraged.

Is this all that the love for my daughter would mean to me? Is to want to use and destroy myself again.

Man, I spent my life out there being a victim. I came into this program not to be a victim again.

And about God,

I had absolutely no doubt as to this loving God, but I had a great deal of searching to do.

You see, at that time, if I would have said that I did not believe I had a loving God. My love for her and the pain, the anguish was so great.

My love with this program is so great

that how do I justify this loving God that we have in our program of Narcotics Anonymous?

And when I began to understand

we're a number of things,

I had long thought

that most of the things that went wrong in my life were my own doing.

But then there came other things. How come an airplane goes up in the air filled with people and just those particular people

died or crash died? You know,

How come some innocent children are killed

by a man or a woman or whoever? Why the innocent child?

Certainly this loving God that I believe in does not test me. I can't believe that a loving God would say, Sydney, you have to learn more faith or you have to learn

to depend on your God or whatever lesson you're supposed to learn. I don't believe a loving God

would take away my daughter to prove something to me

and when I began to understand

is at the very things that give us life on this planet.

Gravity. Gravity

that allows us to stand here, sit here.

When a plane goes up

and some unknown wind factor comes along and that plane crashes, the gravity will cause the death of people on that plane, but it allows all of us to live here on this planet.

You talk about the killer that goes out and kills this innocent child.

God gave human beings free choice

and it's that person. It is not God that goes out and will do that deed.

I began to understand

nature's law, lifes laws,

they had nothing to do with what God wanted for us. But I do know one thing, that we have a loving God and that no matter what happens in our lives

this loving God will help you go through it when you never have to use again no matter what it is.

I guess every mother's parents dread is the thought of losing her child.

And I didn't know what the future was going to hold.

A few months after Leslie died,

my sponsor and I were driving in the car

and she said to me, Sydney, you know, we were so concerned, we thought you were going to lose your mind. And I looked at her and I said God would have helped me through that also,

because that is all that I knew I had. If I was to let that go, I would have nothing. And let me tell you, left to my own devices, without the program of Narcotics Anonymous, I would be out there so fucked up. Or better still, I would have taken a gun to my head and ended it sooner.

Nothing can convince me or make me feel otherwise,

my eldest daughter said to me, She says, mother, where's the justice? She loved her so much,

she said. Mother, where is the justice

that life isn't fair? Such a damn right it isn't fair. That's the way it is. And then later on, I thought, Sydney, can I ask all of you this? Do you really want justice? Would you be willing to pay the price

for what you have done to hurt another human being

in your life?

I began to understand after seven years, the first step of Narcotics Anonymous and the reason why I was so afraid of that step because I knew I had no control, no power over my life or anything that happens in life. And until you experience anything like it, you begin to understand the depths of these steps. And it's not something that you just read that sounds so simple to repeat,

or you memorize it and say, I've done it, I've got it.

That's not what the steps and the conditions are about.

When it comes to the second step, I've got to tell you something. I think the first step that most of us forget is we get into recovery, into clean time is the second step.

I take it so much for granted that God will restore me to Saturday. I have found it ever so important to find out what the insanity is. I'm supposed to be restored from

hear someone say I had enough meetings this week. That's insanity.

Hear someone say I'm going to go down and visit the old neighborhood.

That's insanity.

It is so important. I could go on along with the insanities. It is so important to be able to recognize what the insanity is,

to surrender my life

to a loving God.

I took it back just as fast at the beginning

and self deception had me believed that I had completely surrendered it and that was that. I was through with that step.

You know, self deception means that we lie to ourselves.

And I really had to learn. I had to learn everything. It was not easy.

There always has to be a beginning to learning.

I wanted the answer the day before, I wanted a written guarantee, and I wanted God to sign up in blood.

And I had to learn patience.

I want, I want, I want

great takers.

I swore I would never do my 4th step.

How dare these punks tell me

I've got that buried so nicely. All those 50 years and yet telling me to stir this up.

They're out of their minds. Those punks taught me a hell of a lot.

And let me tell you the value of that fourth step

that were all so frightened of

here it was there and doing it, the 4th step that I was able to see my character defects. I was able to see the people that I had harmed.

I was able to see where patterns, destructive patterns

had started, the patterns that kept going and going and became such a great part of my life that that's all I knew how to do was to destroy.

And my fifth step

I was just going to do by my God.

Of course I didn't.

I'll tell you one thing that I wanted. You know, we come into this program and we're hurting. There's a spark in every single one of us. There's a little spark that says I want to live. And it was that spark. As much as I kicked an ice cream,

I went to any lengths, my God, so that I could be clean.

Another two steps that so many of us seem to forget or we go over so quickly to six and seven steps. I want you to know

that until the day I die, I will have to work the 6th and 7th steps

one day at a time.

You know, I used to think that if I became aware of something,

I had it. Let me tell you something about awareness. Awareness is alike assholes. Everyone has one. Now, what are you going to do about it? Because every single step means you take an action.

When they talk about just a few steps having action or action step, every step that we have means you take action. God will do 99% of it for you, but you've got to do that 1% and you've got to do it to the Max.

Gotta earn clean time. You got to earn the gifts that this program can give you. You know, I shared a great deal of pain and I've shared a great deal of sorrow with you here this evening.

But I want to tell you something else.

Not only before Leslie died, but now soon afterwards,

there is so much joy. I don't believe that God put us here to suffer.

That is only part of living. You know, there are so many gifts and you think about the love

that we have here in this program to care the concern.

I can accept you. You can accept me with all of our character defects. Where else in the world can you have that?

You learn to be forgiving,

not wait forgiveness first.

Learn to be understanding, and it is more important than to be understood.

Yeah, I spoke in another state a few days before I came here, and there was a little girl there, a young woman

who had five days, and she started to speak and she said, Oh my God. She says I'm hurting, it's too hard, I can't do it. It's too hard, it's too painful.

And I spoke to her after the meeting and I said you're damn right it's hard. You can't expect to be out there all your life killing yourself and then walk in and there's a magic wand that takes it all away, man. You've got to earn it.

And I took her hand and I said, let us love you until you can start loving yourself.

8-9 step, of course that one. Another one I was never going to do. I had some very hard time with that because I always tried doing that step,

coming out looking good,

man. I sit there and I would shake and I would think, now how can I justify this one? But of course I want to say I'm sorry, but do you remember what you did to me

and then all of a sudden write a spark, a light came along, said Sydney. You're supposed to be sincere, you know? You're supposed to not want to hurt another person again or do this thing again.

It was so easy for me to say I'm sorry.

It was a different thing for me whether to do that again with that person again in the same way

I 10th, 11th, 12 steps, my maintenance steps. Glad to know about you, but I came into this

program. I used to call it.

What was it? I used to call it

procrastination. I used to love it. Procrastination. I went into a 10 year depression when I found out that was sloth

evening would come along and I did not want to do. Oh well, I have too much to do. I got to help this chick. You know that you know, you know God, I'm sorry and all that, you know. Let me tell you something. I wrote a tense step for three years to discipline myself

and doing that 10th step,

I don't say everyone. I'm just talking about what I had to do. I was very sick when I came in

the 11th step. There was another procrastination.

As Baba was saying last night, you could fly down in bed and do it. God understands

then I tell you I get down on my hands and knees and one thing my daughters death told me was how precious this life is and that maybe this is what it's all about. To learn how to live and not have to die the way we died and killed ourselves out there

hurts,

you know?

I am so grateful for this loving God

that has allowed me to be able to live

and to know what it means

and to know what love means. I love them to death and I don't own them. They're their own free souls. But I do enjoy every moment with them when I'm with you people.

And I have never met an addict that I couldn't love.

I do love you. It's a gift.

I had no feelings when I came into this program. They were dead.

And as a gift

of loving and being able to see love, to appreciate, to be grateful, everything that our program tells us about,

it's right here in the 12 steps of Recordics Anonymous.

I

to get into the 12 step.

A few years ago I met someone that I had known quite some time in the program who had a great deal more time than myself.

And he said, Cindy, you're also busy in this program, always doing. Do you still ever do anything for yourself?

And I looked at this man. I said, Oh my God. I found out by then that I didn't have to defend anything or explain anything.

Do you know when Leslie died?

There are hundreds people that came into our home night and day. I was never alone.

Hardly anyone said anything. They just sat there. They hold my hand. They were bringing food. I don't even know how anything got done. All that I know

was that I was caught in this pain

and they were there every moment of the time.

I should have known that they were praying for Bobby and I and my daughters, my other daughters at the meetings,

at the funeral. There were, I don't know, maybe around 200 people,

all of them from Narcotics Anonymous. There are a few family and

frittles that love took very much. By the way, her friends still call me up. I can't tell you. Sometimes I get ashamed of the feeling and when I have to understand that I'm human.

Yeah, we're having a road to perfection.

They crawl up in a light jar and I think, Oh my God, my wrestling isn't here.

And people say, my God, what you do, Sydney, in this program? I said forget that

we do things not to pat ourselves on the shoulder. We do it because we're supposed to be doing it because we must give back what was given to us and give it what love.

And I tell you that all the years that I have been in service,

a hundredfold was given back to me.

Unconditional love. It was there and you could feel it when you could touch it.

You know, I could go on and on and on and talk about

this probe of Narcotics Anonymous that I love so much.

Before I close off a few things I want to say. I want to say especially

to the new people here this evening,

you don't ever have to go out and use again. I love

there are many of you that may not make it, no matter how much time, including myself. We don't know what the future brings.

You've heard us say over and over again that we have no answers, but there is an answer, and the answer is in the 12 steps in the 12 traditions of Narcotics Anonymous and the principles of this program.

I want to tell you a story, a short one.

Some of you have heard it. I know Rogers heard it,

but it happened very close to here. It happened when I was a very young girl. I was around 16 to 17 years old.

My mother took me out to Lakehurst, New Jersey, right

for the Christmas vacation. It was snowing and the lake was frozen over.

I got up this one day that was dressed warmly, went down to the lake and they were skating and the sun started to come out

and I said we're going to take a nice walk. New York, you walk. LA you don't.

I was walking and I was walking and I was walking. All of a sudden I felt something.

I looked around and everything looked strange and different

and the snow weren't top of the branches of this tree and underneath it, underneath the branches, underneath the snow, you could see this burnt, charred wood. And as far as I could look, I could see both.

And there's something snowed, funny,

burnt, read, whatever it was. And then something even stranger happened. There was a silence there. You couldn't hear anything or anyone. Further back when I was walking, you could hear something running through the woods, but in this area there was nothing. Manic was starting to set and I said Oh my God, I've got to get out of here. And I started to run and I ran back to the village.

In the first place I came to was a mom and pop's place,

you know, serving that age. I was drinking hot chocolate.

It was freezing cold and frightened and I didn't know what I was frightened up.

And his mom said, where are you from? And I told him, you know, and we started talking, says what were you doing today? And I told her about the strange rock.

I said I got to this place and it was weird and all these branches and the burnt branches underneath. She says, Oh yes. She says we've had a terrible, terrible fire. It burnt this whole part of the lake. She says it was terrible. People came for miles and miles around

and they would look at the sky and burning and all the animals in the forest were killed. You could hear it screeching. You could hear the sounds coming out of the barst.

That's the front. All the birds escape.

When I had a few years in the program, I was thinking of that particular story and I said, my God, that reminds us, reminds me of us. Aren't we like those birds that escape that wreckage in that room, only to find a home here in Narcotics Anonymous?

We hope you enjoy this tape of Sydney R Talks from other any members can be obtained from the World Service Office at the address on the tape.