The Banff Roundup in Banf, Alberta, Canada

My name is Joshua. I'm an alcoholic. That sounds a lot less lame when you're saying it to me. I, I wanna thank the host committee for asking me to, speak tonight, specifically, Josie and my friend, Tristan. It's, it really is an honor and privilege to be here tonight.

As you'll kind of hear, this is the city that I more or less hit bottom in before I found sobriety. And, Seattle is a wonderful place to do heroin and hit bottom in. I'd really welcome you to ever come here and experience that. And, I, I mean, this is an incredible experience for me just to be here sober. This is the first time I've ever been here sober, and that may mean nothing to you, but it's an incredible experience for me.

I'd, I'd like to thank, all my friends who specifically came here to hear me speak, which to my knowledge is nobody, but, it's always nice to, to have dreams. And, kidding aside, I'm actually I mean, like it said, I mean, as a result of Alcoholics Anonymous, I've had the experience of being surrounded by a host of friends, and, that's also another incredible thing. If this is, your first conference, I want to welcome you. If this is your first experience at Alcoholics Anonymous, I wanna welcome you. I have some disappointing information for you.

Just if you're new to these conferences, the spiritual experience is not in anyone's pants. I, you're welcome to check mine afterwards, but, I, I don't wanna discourage anyone from having fun, that is. But, this is my favorite conference by far. I've had the privilege of of coming to a number of them and, I like to tell my friends that have not come to Wackypaw that Wackypaw is a conference that all the young people that managed to stay sober still come to. And, that may sound pretty pretentious, but, being the fact that I'm in that bit, I I I can say that.

And I guess I'll just get kind of what I like to think of as housekeeping out of the way. Like I said I'm an alcoholic. My sobriety date is October 22, 1995 which puts me at a little over 11 years sober, which is impressive if you're impressed by numbers less than 12 and greater than 10. My, my home group is the primary purpose group in Toronto, Ontario. And I have some friends here visiting from there.

And, I, I spent the majority of my sobriety in the beginning getting sober in Southern California, of which I also have a lot of friends from there. And my, sponsor is, a guy by the name of Dan F from the Hill Group. If there's anything that I say tonight, what I would encourage you to do is go to Toronto, attend the Hill Group on Thursday night meeting, find Dan and just kick him right in the balls and say this is from Bill w. And for your obviously poor sponsorship skills, he he really loves that. And, and I love my sponsor.

He's this quirky old guy that drinks way too much caffeine for the amount of energy he has. And, I mean, I like the type of sponsorship that when I'm talking to my sponsor and I'm telling him my bull crap, when he turns away to kind of filter that, I get a little bit afraid that he's gonna turn around and slap me, and, I just kinda like that moment of tension. And that's the kind of strong sponsorship that I've been used to. And also if you're new here tonight and you don't quite know what a sponsor is, regardless of anything you might think that I say, let me assure you that my sponsors have always treated me with the utmost respect and love in Alcoholics Anonymous. And really, a level of love and respect that at the time I really didn't deserve when I first came in here.

And, that's really the kind of sponsorship that I've experienced in my sobriety. I guess my story. I I I was born in the Philippines, and I was born in Manila, and my mother was 16 years old at that time. And she was a heroin addict as far as I know and had some pretty serious political and wealth affiliations. And, it was kind of a bit of a scandal that I was born in the first place.

So I was immediately expedited out of the Philippines and sent to the United States and I was adopted by, for lack of a better term, 2 white people. And and in case in case I I don't get that moment to say it, my parents are incredible people and as a result of Alcoholics Anonymous, I have a relationship with them today, but they are absolutely batshit. They, adopted myself and 5 other children all from Asia, so they also have something of an Asian fetish. But, they're absolutely marvelous people, and I did not know that until I got sober. I I grew up in Denver, Colorado.

It's a wonderful city as well. And, I I've always been very very hypersensitive to social hierarchies. And what I mean by that is I've always known exactly who's at the top of that social hierarchy and who's at the bottom. And my greatest fear was that I would at some point in time get stuck in that middle and just be there. And so I've always known who I was supposed to know and what I was supposed to do, And I've also kind of thought that the schools I went to are what kind of screwed up my life.

My elementary school that I attended, it was apparently very uncool to ever be caught going to the bathroom, specifically taking a crap. This was most commonly referred to as taking a load off your feet. And if you were ever caught doing this, you were endlessly ridiculed on the school yard until you either moved out of the city or killed yourself. And I I understood this, so I refrained from using the bathroom for, like, 2 years. And after years of constipation, I finally hit that level of popularity where I was invited to that party.

And I was 10 years old and I was invited to Dan Dustin's party who I was ironically dead because of this disease. Sorry, I don't mean to do a buzz kill, but I got invited to that party and appropriately my first drink was vodka and Kool Aid. And we started drinking that and we were running around the neighborhood shooting firecrackers at cars, which is apparently illegal. And, the cops started chasing us and they cornered us. And as the cops were going around asking us our names, and my friends were all visibly shaken, they came to me and I suddenly started beginning to feel the effects of alcohol.

And I felt a moment of peace that I had never felt before when the cop looked at me and said, what is your name? I said, my name is Richard Head. And he kinda cocked his eye and looked at me and he said, son, are you trying to tell me that your name is Dickhead? And I said, well, sir. I've always preferred Richard.

And, he smirked, and he let us walk away. And as we were walking away, my friends were patting me on the back, and they said that it's the coolest thing that they have ever seen. And I knew that was true. And at that moment, I had something of a small sublime realization that that moment came directly as a result of alcohol. And I would be an absolute moron not to chase it to the depths that I chased it because alcohol seemed to affect me in a way that it did not affect other people.

And, the other thing I've come to find is that I have a difficult time processing my feelings. To be honest, I have absolutely no idea what I'm feeling right now. If the best analogy I've always come up with in terms of my feelings is if you can picture a priest in a speedo with an erection, in as much that my feelings are always grossly inappropriate for the social fabric of any given context. And I was constantly overreacting. I mean, definitively, an allergy is an overreaction to a substance, and I had something of an overreaction to both alcohol and feelings.

And the thing about that whole processing of feelings is the only thing that seemed to level the playing field was alcohol, and that's exactly why I drank it. And one of the key things about the alcohol is in the beginning, it seemed to immediately alleviate the fear that I had, and I wasn't aware of that at the age of 10, but I came to find whenever I drink alcohol, I was able to do things that I was not capable of doing sober. And more moreover, at the very beginning, I was one of those social drinkers that immediately passed that invisible line about 20 minutes after I took my first drink. And, I knew that as soon as I drank, I could not stop drinking. And that was me at the age of 10.

And perhaps that's genetics or some sort of sort of predilection toward alcoholism. But ultimately, it's somewhat irrelevant in the fact that at this moment, I'm sober in the program of Alcoholics Anonymous as a result of the fact that I suffer from the disease of alcoholism. And, I was one of those people that went down very quickly. I did a lot of drugs. I don't know if anyone's here is familiar with that.

And this is Alcoholics Anonymous. And the thing about drugs is what I've come to find in my experience in Alcoholics Anonymous is, that and you're right, Moshe. Once you get sober enough, you do always say Alcoholics Anonymous, not AA. But one of the things that I've come to find about drugs is that there's certain powders, certain vapors, certain things that I can ingest that immediately seem to trigger the phenomenon of craving for alcohol, and ultimately that is what drugs how drugs affected me. And by the time I was 14, I had a very serious methamphetamine habit.

And, if you've ever done on methamphetamines or perhaps you're on methamphetamines tonight, you, you know that it's difficult to sleep at night, so you come up with nighttime hobbies. And, at the time that I was doing a lot of crank, the Internet had first become public use into consumer homes. And so my hobby is in the middle of the night I would get onto the internet and chat with crazy people. And, the beautiful thing about the World Wide Web is it's this cyber collective that allows crazy people to simultaneously and instantaneously communicate with each other much like myspace.com or mystalker.com. And and my other favorite habit was, to lie.

And so it'd be 3 o'clock in the morning, I'd be furiously, chatting away at the Internet and telling these people these horrendous lies like that my father would beat me, which was totally untrue, and, that my mother was a religious nut. And, you know, people being sympathetic and good in nature would say that's horrible. Come run away and live with us. And, so I did. And also, by the way, if you haven't noticed, I have a tendency to kinda talk fast.

This isn't because I'm nervous. In fact, I'm not nervous at all, but ever so often, like, when Josie first asked me to speak, she asked me if I was nervous. And whenever I get nervous speaking, I I just try to remember the fact that pretty much every single one of you here tonight have been a colossal failure in your lives. And That, always seems to reassure me. But, during the height of my using, I was forging, fake prescription scripts and cashing in on them and I was oddly enough mixing Demerol with methamphetamines which essentially makes you say a lot of very stupid things very quickly.

And, when I informed my sponsor about that fact, she said unfortunately that seems to become permanent for you. And so I apologize that ahead of time. And, so I was 14 years old. I'd been given the wonderful advice over the world wide web to run away from my home and live with people. And, I stole a couple $1,000 from my parents and I flew out to this little town in Texas called Amarillo.

And, no offense to anyone who is from Amarillo, but basically the only thing to do there is smoke pot, drink vodka, and go bowling. And I was 14 years old at that time living the high life of smoking pot, drinking vodka, and going bowling. And I'd more or less resigned myself to the fact that when things got really bad, I would kill myself. Perhaps at the age of 18. And at this point in time, I hadn't yet accrued that evidence as to why I should hate myself.

Really my main motivation about wanting to kill myself was this belief that I could do whatever I wanted and when things got bad enough, I could simply kill myself. And I constantly created these rationales in my head that always allowed me to do whatever I wanted. And suicide always seemed to be that answer to me. Years later, I would accrue the ample evidence as to why I should hate myself. And, eventually, I was apprehended by my father.

And the thing about this whole line and saying that, people were be or my father was beating me is, my father kinda went through this whole network of people that I'd met on the Internet, and they had assumed that he was beating me. And he found this out and he was not really pleased about that, and yet he continued looking for me. And eventually I was apprehended and brought back. And as we were flying back to California, we had a layover in I believe Denver. And, we were standing at the ticket agents, and he was talking to them, and I had to use the bathroom, so I wandered off to use the bathroom.

And my father didn't see me go. And I remember as I came back into the terminal, I saw my father running around with this absolutely desperate, frantic look in his eyes. And for the first time in my life, I suddenly became aware of the fact that my father really cared and loved for me. And immediately after taking this realization, I immediately forgot it because to believe that for a moment, my parents cared about me aggressively interfered with my ability to act without conscience. If I was for a moment to believe that I was hurting my parents, I would have to be accountable to all the things I was doing, and I could not do that, and so I simply forgot it.

And that was the beauty of the alcohol is this was the thing that allowed me to do whatever I wanted and simply forget about the consequences. And this is also one of those things that apparently separates me from a normal drinker. And this was the way I live my life up until I got sober and probably a good point of time into my sobriety. And as I came back home, my parents sent me to my first rehab. And I went there and, the counselors are trying to explain to my parents that I had a very serious drug and alcohol problem.

And being any parents, they are in denial and they felt that my problem was that I wasn't enrolled in a good Catholic high school. So, they yanked me out of rehab and put me into a good Catholic high school. And at the time I hit 15 years old, I hit what was my first bottom in active alcoholism, and I'd reached that point in my life that I thought the only way out of my lifestyle was suicide, and I absolutely despise myself by this point in time. And, so I attempted suicide for the first time. And when I was doing my original inventory and I told my sponsor about the details of the suicide attempt, he told me that anytime I was speaking, if God forbid I was ever given that opportunity, I should verbatim tell you the details of my suicide attempt because he felt it was a wonderful example of God working in my life at a time that I did not believe in him and nor would I have wanted him to.

And, what happened is I had stolen my friend's van, which was something of a habit, and I'd taken it to his father's business complex, and I was gonna kill myself through carbon monoxide poisoning. And one of the beautiful things about Orange County is there's not a lot of tall buildings to jump off of, so this is how I try to kill myself. And I took a hose, put it in the exhaust pipe, and put it back into the van. And I remember as I was sitting in the van, and the fumes started creeping in and I lost I began to lose consciousness. For the first time, I had this moment of peace and serenity steal over me for the first time.

And, I felt completely right with everything that was going on in my life. Ironically, that happened at a moment before I thought I was going to die, but I felt okay with the world. And now that I've been sober, I've come to believe that you can only feel like that in the way that I was living if you've completely lost the ability to hope and dream. And, that was what I was doing. Sitting in a van hoping to die without the ability to hope and dream.

And one of the things that happened to me when I first came into this program is I read our big book of Alcoholics Anonymous. And there's this one line in that book that really seemed to jump out at me. And that line was pitiful incomprehensible demoralization. And I remember I've done a really crappy job hooking up the hose because I came to it one point in time I wasn't and figured out I wasn't dead. And I took the hose off the bottom of the van and I put it directly into my mouth and started sucking sucking off it in the hopes that it would kill me faster.

And, there I was sitting in the van with a hose sticking out of my mouth hoping to die. I knew intimately what pitiful and incomprehensible the moralization was. And, then what happened was kind of described to me later. At this point in time, it was a Sunday morning, and again, I'd done a really crappy job hooking up the host so I wasn't dead. And, this group of people decided to come in their work for the 1st working lives ever on a Sunday morning.

They went into the front. This one guy went into the back. He said as he was opening the door, he looked over, saw the van and had a strange feeling come over him. So he went over and investigated, found me in the van and dragged me out. And they brought me into the office, and I was in and out of consciousness, and, they started talking to me.

At this point, I was kind of pissed off that they'd screwed up my suicide attempt, so I wasn't really hearing it. But one of the things I would remember is the guy that found me said, sometimes he believes God gives us the opportunity to write what was once wrong, and that years ago, his brother had committed suicide, and, that he believed that moment was now for him. And, I, I remember as my father came in with the ambulance, he was crying, and that was the first time I'd ever seen my father cry and I remember absolutely despising myself. And I went to the hospital and I was treated for carbon oxide poisoning and I stayed in ICU for a week and the doctors explained what I had done to myself. And they said, an average human would have a carbon monoxide level of a 2 or 3.

A smoker might have double that which is like 75% of us are pretty asked out. And, when I came in, my level was a 35, which was literally minutes away from dying, and, there's no logical reason why I'm still alive. I like to believe that I'm somewhat on borrowed time. And the reason I like this particular story in the Fellowship of Alcoholics Anonymous is by no means is this an uncommon story. Pretty much each and every single one of us can think back in a time when we shouldn't be here.

I mean, we're very fortunate to be sitting here tonight. There's absolutely no reason most of us should be here. There's a infamous speaker who since passed in by the name of Norm Alpi, and one of the things that he often said was seconds and inches. And what he meant by that was it was a mere seconds and inches that alcoholics that get the fortune to come into Alcoholics Anonymous escape death if not worse. For me, it was simply what if I had been in the car 30 seconds longer?

What if I'd been sitting 6 inches to the left? It's seconds and inches that I arrived to Alcoholics Anonymous, and I know that it's by seconds and inches that you 2 arrived here. And, at this point in time, my parents realized that if they didn't do something drastic, I would kill myself. So they relinquished custody of me, and I was sent to a long term rehab or a long term juvenile lockdown center. And, this was a full on state institution, and I was there for about 2 years.

And, for the 2 years I was there and, oh, also I forgot to say this. For the near year that I spent in Seattle, I'm gonna kind of deviate, I spent the majority of that time in a blackout. If you recognize me and you are from Seattle, please do not hesitate to come up to me and tell me if I owe you amends. And I mean that quite seriously. But, so I was in this long term rehab or lockdown center, and, the most common form of punishment there was demerits.

And demerits were 25 minutes spent standing against the wall, and if you moved or talked, you started over. And they're usually given out in groups of 3, and on a good day, I got 12. And, the other most common form of punishment was getting your ass kicked by £300 Samoans, and those were the counselors. And at one point in time, me and my friend, Hai on LSD, decided that we wanted to run. So we, we stole a van and we'd drive a couple state lines.

And, in a moment of ecstasy, we'd reached, Washington, I believe, and I called them up, said, we painted the van. We're in Mexico. Fuck you. And, they said, hold on for a moment. And they got our girlfriends to get on the phone and tell us that if we didn't come back, they'd kill themselves.

And so we felt a strange moral obligation that indeed we will feel bad if they did kill themselves. And also, we'd been gone for almost a week, and the only thing we'd been eating was a bag of granola that I'd stolen from Safeway, We were hungry enough to eat our belts, and they said, if you turn yourselves in tonight, we'll buy you Chinese food. So we said okay. And, we turned ourselves in. They drove out and got us, roughed us up a bit, brought us back.

And when we returned, we had, an excess of 1,000 marriage, which is roughly 25,000 minutes spent standing against the wall. And for the 2 years that I was there, I spent 3 months in solitary confinement, staying against the wall. And, eventually, I got out. And I wanna tell you about my last Christmas, or my Christmas that I had in lockdown. I'd just been released from solitary confinement, and I made a promise that I would not try to run again.

And immediately after that, I tried to run. And I was apprehended. I tried to attack someone with a pool cue and I was put back into solitary confinement for 3 weeks of which was Christmas time. And, that was how I spent Christmas prior to coming to Alcoholics Anonymous. And I finally was released when I was 18 years old.

And I'm actually quite grateful that I was put into this place. Had I not been there, I realized that I would have killed myself. There's something about the alcoholic stubbornness that I'm either trying to kill myself or desperately trying to survive. And there's something about the daily conflict of this place that kept me alive. And for the entire 2 years I was there, I never achieved anything over 30 days of sobriety.

And the other thing that I'm proud of is I graduated high school as a result of being in this place. I was expelled from high school when I was a freshman and I never again darken the doors of an academic institution until I got sober. And, I was also asked not to touch a computer until I was 18 because apparently some of the things I was doing on them were illegal. When I was in this place, I accessed a computer hacked into the school mainframe and as a result, I graduated high school with a 3.56 GPA, of which I'm still pretty damn proud of. And, when I told my sponsor that, he told me that I had to make that right before I returned to school.

And I called someone up that was affiliated to this place that I thought would be sympathetic to me, and I told him what I would done. After a moment's pause, he said, well, if you're if you're smart enough to do that, you probably could have graduated in high school. Good luck in college. And, I did return to college in sobriety. And I was released when I was 18 and I was absolutely psychotic.

One of the things about this place is it was temporarily shut down by child protection agencies because of the rampant accusations of physical and sexual abuse, and I was absolutely psychotic and I wanted to kill the people that were in there, and I just wanted to kill myself with a determination that I've never felt before. And at this time, my big, goal was to move to Seattle and become street junky and, being something of an overachiever, I did that very quickly. And, I was in Seattle when Temple of the Dog was a cool band, And I moved out to Seattle and I also became horribly afraid that I was becoming an alcoholic for some reason and I tried to stop drinking. And I needed to tell you what I mean by trying to stop drinking. I had literally barricaded myself in this shabby apartment in Seattle right off the Ave.

And I was on a strict diet of crack cocaine and methamphetamines and I was trying not to drink. And what I would do is I would listen to the song Suspicious Minds by Elvis Presley on loop over and over and over. Absolutely convinced that hidden within the lyrics was a secret message to me and ironically enough, I was not far from the truth. If you're unfamiliar with the song, the opening words are we're caught in a trap. And there I was living in Seattle barricaded in this apartment trying to quit drinking by smoking crack and doing amphetamines, and eventually I went absolutely nuts, resigned myself to the fact that I might indeed be an alcoholic and started drinking.

And, eventually, I was evicted from that place, and I burned every single bridge that I would have. And the thing about Seattle is I ended up hooking up with all these friends that I had been in lockdown with, and, I mean, we were tight. We had been in this horrible place together, and we were really tight. And in one one time I burned every single bridge. I mean every single bridge.

I polarized every single relationship I would have and that's what active alcoholism does. It polarizes every relationship that is sacred to us, and I did that very quickly and I ended up homeless in Seattle. And this is a beautiful city to be homeless in. And, I ended up doing things that I never thought that I was capable of doing, and that I ended up in this place where I just never thought that I could be at. And the funny thing about alcoholism is when I was 10 years old, it worked.

And by the time I was 18, the only thing I was shooting for was apathy. Just that moment to not feel anything. And I remember when I came into this program and people told me that I was immature and grandiose and I was totally offended by this. Just because I'd been trying to relive a moment that I'd had when I was 10 years old did not make me immature and grandiose. It just made me highly nostalgic.

And I was living in the streets of Seattle and I finally ended up getting out of here. And I took off from Seattle with my underage runaway girlfriend, and we were living out of the back of my car. And, you know, I converted the back seat to a single bed and we were kinda really living it up. And I moved out to California. What time is it?

And, I moved back to California, and this is where I hit bottom. And I ended up getting very involved with a scene, and I think it's important that alcoholics get involved in a scene. And I got very involved in the club scene. I remember I was kind of at that posh scene in the back room. And the thing is is I'm a blackout drinker.

I've always been a blackout drinking drinker. Being roughly the size of a large owl, I've always drunk past my weight. And and you know, if you're new and you're a blackout drinker, and especially newcomers, I love blackout drinkers. I I was just constantly in a blackout. And, and I remember near the end of my drinking, I was apparently attending AA meetings in blackouts.

I I guess what I would do is I would get drunk, feel guilty about drinking, and attend an AA meeting all in a blackout. And I remember one specific time that I did that. I attended a Pacific group in Los Angeles. And, the Pacific group is a very large meeting in an auditorium. I remember I just came out of a blackout, like an audible snap, and I was in this auditorium.

I'm like, am I in a ballet? And I looked around and I'm like, oh, shit. I'm in a meeting of Alcoholics Anonymous. So, I mean, if you're like me and you are now currently coming out of a blackout, I wanna welcome you to Alcoholics Anonymous. And, I moved back to California and I got involved in the scene and I would be in the the, you know, that special backroom in the clubs and I would come out of this blackout and I'd be like, oh, man.

I love this song. Why am I naked? And you know, you begin to have these kind of increasing indicators that something is not right with the way that you use drugs and drink. And I remember I looked at my face out of this pile of outside issues and I looked to my friend who I just met 15 year minutes ago, and I said, do you ever think that other people do not live like this? And he looked at me and said, what the hell are you talking about?

Who are you? And, you know, I thought that would work and and then that it didn't work. And I remember my last job that I had, this was the last job I had before I got sober. I was working in a company that my father had gotten me a job at and this was a really nice company. And, not to scare you, but I was working for a company that built bridges in California.

Don't worry about here. And this this one day I had been done doing ample amount of drugs and drinking, and I'd been up for about 11 11 days. And 11 years seems like it. And, my boss ironically called me into his office to discuss my job performance. And I came in, had a sudden pain in my neck, cracked my neck, dropped to the ground and went into convulsions in his office while trying to have a talk about my poor job performance.

And and they rushed me to the hospital and I was treated for a drug overdose. And when I came back they said you have 2 options. We can send you to a rehab or we have to fire you. And when I was released from that lockdown when I was 18, I promised myself I would never go back to any place like that, and I said you have to fire me. And so they fired me.

I went home and being the blackout drinker that I am, I got thoroughly hammered, went into a blackout, completely forgot about that entire day, woke up in the morning and thought to myself, something's not right. I better get to work on time. And I showed up to work on time for the first time ever, and I surprised the hell out of my former employees. And because of my father, a guy took me aside and he said, what the hell are you doing? I'm going to give you this option again.

We will send you to rehab. And I think I gave him the line, again, when I was 18, I promised myself I would never go to rehab. He's like, I know you told us that yesterday. And, I got fired a second time. And that was my last job before I got sober.

And by the time I was getting, by the time I reached that point that I needed to get sober, I mean, I was literally physically dying and spiritually dead, and I I had hit bottom. And when I came into this program, I mean, I met guys that had been drinking longer than I had been alive and had been sober long in their longer than I had been alive, and they had had thing things in their lives that at the age of 19 years old, I had never had the privilege of having. And they had experienced things that made my worst day out there look like a day at Disneyland. And quite frankly, I think my worst day out there was a day at Disneyland and mushrooms and Jack Daniels. And I did not immediately identify with the depths of their external bottom that they talked about, but when they said when I drank, it made me less afraid, I identified with that, and that initial bit of identification is what allowed me to stay in Alcoholics Anonymous at the age of 19, and I hit bottom at the age of 19 simply because I reached that point of painful undeniable realization that I am not who I think I am.

And what I mean by that is the alcohol and the drugs had ceased to work in my life in the way that they used to because no matter how drunk and high I got, I knew exactly who I was, exactly where I was going, and for some ungodly reason, I was no longer okay with that. And the alcohol had ceased to work in my life in the way that it used to work. And I believe that typifies the bottom that every alcoholic will hit is simply the fact that the alcohol has ceased to work in your life in the way that it used to. If you have reached that point, welcome to Alcoholics Anonymous. This is a beautiful place.

And after that, I had my moment of clarity which I believe is the painful undeniable realization that there might be another way to life. And I remembered Alcoholics Anonymous when I came in here. And the thing about coming in here initially is one of my motivations for coming to Alcoholics Anonymous is I had come to find that I could not kill myself. I was waking up every morning absolutely disgusted by the fact that I seemed to lack the courage to blow my head off. And I figured that the simple pain of being sober in Alcoholics Anonymous would finally give me the courage to kill myself.

And that's one of the reasons that I tried to get sober in this program. And I came here at the age of 19 and again, people treated me with a level of love and respect that I did not deserve. And I'm gonna talk about, all 12 steps as they've, worked in my life. And, this is simply my own experience. If if you're working these steps, get your own experience.

And, I'll also make a quick excerpt about, the traditions. When I was doing my amends, apparently one of my amends was the old people. And I would have to drive around the circuit speakers in Southern California that were too old to drive their own cars. And this one lady that I would drive around was, this lady by the name of Marie. At that time, she had 55 plus years of sobriety and she had gotten sober when she was in her early twenties, which at the time was completely unheard of for a young woman to come into Alcoholics Anonymous.

And she was around when Bill W was still alive and the traditions had not really fully been instated in this program. And whenever I was with her, I would glean her for that kind of information. And she told me about the Alcoholics Anonymous that existed before these traditions had fully been in place. And unbeknownst to me, these meetings had not always been the all inclusive thing that they are. They were highly exclusive and segregated by race, segregated by gender, segregated by religious affiliation, segregated by sexual orientation, segregated by business affiliation, and people were dying because they could not get into meetings of Alcoholics Anonymous.

And Bill w and his foresight realized that for in order for Alcoholics Anonymous to remain and survive, things needed to change and these traditions needed to be put into place. And moreover, he realized that in order out for alcoholics to stay sober, new people needed to get the opportunity to be sober. And this is my understanding of the traditions. And I could talk about all 12 of them too, but that wouldn't really be sexy, so I'm not going to. In regards to, the 12 steps.

Step 1. I I, when I was early in sobriety, I often, based very important financial decisions, with the idea that I would win the lottery. And, which really does not make me an alcoholic. It might be very financially irresponsible. But, I remember this time in sobriety.

I'd moved to Europe and I was living in southern Turkey. Every morning, I would get up and jog along the coast and I would go to my little corner store and get water. This one day I jogged into the corner store and suddenly realized that the beer was cheaper than the water. And out of the blue, this thought entered my head. You know, you ought to practice getting financially responsible.

Why not start here? The beer is cheaper than the water. And for that moment, that seemed like the sanest idea I had thought in a while. And we typify these moments in the big book of Alcoholics Anonymous as a mental blank spot. And it goes on to say that those mental blank spots will only be escaped by service to other alcoholics.

And I truly believe that those mental blank spots that I've had in sobriety have been as a result of my intensive work with other alcoholics. And, these mental blank spots come out of nowhere and that's one of the things that this step one talks about. In terms of step 1, when I came in here, the only thing that was asked of me is when when you find that you drink, do you find that you have little to no control over the amount you drink? And when you honestly want to get sober, do you find you cannot get sober on your own? If you've answered yes to 1 or 2 of these questions, you are probably an alcoholic.

And the most important question that was simply asked of me is do you like the way that you are living right now? And that was perhaps the most important question that was asked of me when I first came in here. Do you like the way that you are living right now? And I didn't like the way that I was living. And, that was ultimately step 1 for me.

And I remember also when I was living in Europe, I had this Austrian girlfriend and we worked at this resort and you could drink and it was free and they kind of encouraged you to do it. And I remember I asked her if she drank and she said yes. And I didn't know if she drank because I'd never seen her naked dancing on a table top. But I said, but why don't you drink all day? It's it's free.

You're allowed to and you don't get in trouble. And she looked at me absolutely puzzled and said, yeah, but who would want to be drunk all day long? And the first instinctive thought that came to my mind is what the hell is she talking about? And, you know, I I continue to be an alcoholic to this day. And then I moved on to my step 2.

And, I remember when I came to step 2, I did not believe I could work this step. I said, I've never had any manner of faith in my life. I I cannot do this step. And, my sponsor often used simple analogies based on my past to help me understand the steps. And for step 2, one of the analogies he helped me, use to understand this was a story I told him of when I was in lockdown.

And, when I was in lockdown, the general rule of thumb was anytime you're at the doctor's office and you saw anything that looked like prescription medication, you stole it. So I was in the doctor's office and I saw this box of medication. And on the box, it showed 2 old people walking down the beach hand in hand and it had the word for the ease of pain and discomfort. So I stole it assuming it was muscle relaxants, brought it back to the place, shared it with my friends. And about an hour later, I suddenly realized that 2 old people walking down the beach hand in hand and the words for the ease of pain and discomfort, me and my friends had just overdosed on prescription strength laxatives.

And, for the next couple hours, we turned our will our lives over to a power greater than we understood. And the reason my sponsor used this specific story is he told me that I had lived my entire life based on faith. It was not the quantity of faith that I suffered from, but rather the quality of it. The only evidence I had needed to instantly turn my will and my life over was a picture of 2 old people walking down the beach hand in hand and the words for the ease of pain and discomfort, and immediately, I turned my will and my life over to it with the assumption that it would take me where I wanted to go and that I came into this program in bulk with the very idea of faith. And one of the beautiful things that I understand about this step is that the only requirements that we suggest in regards to your higher power is that your higher power have the ability to restore you to sanity and that it be something you can understand, which means by default it cannot be you.

Otherwise, that's it. The only requirements we place on your higher power is that it be something you can understand, and most importantly, it be something that can restore you to sanity. If you're here tonight and you've done these things and you do not believe you've been restored to sanity, I encourage you to look at who your higher power is. And that was simply my experience with this step, and then I moved on to my 3rd step. And, my understanding of having made that decision is that having made that decision, I needed to follow-up with vigorous action.