The Duluth Roundup in Duluth, MN

I have that effect on everyone. Okay. First, let me get through with the thank yous because if I don't do this, I always forget, and then I'm mad at myself forever. So I would like to thank Rex and David, our chair and co chair of this wonderful round up. It's a lot of work.

And all of the committee members, thank you so much for all that you do. I I appreciate it and I'm sure everyone else does here too. And my lovely hostess Penny, who's terrified to be sitting up here. Send her some love. And I have a lovely gifts I have in my room.

They called me up and asked me what I wanted, and that's what they gave me. It was really cool. What a wonderful idea. That was just great. So, okay.

And let's see what else. Oh, I want to thank Roger and the tapers. I wouldn't be here without tapes. I lived on them for years. So, okay.

I'm ready now. Hi. My name's Cookie, and I'm an alcoholic. And through the grace of God and the 12 step program of recovery from the big book of alcoholics anonymous, I have not found it necessary to take a drink since October 25, 1983. I don't know if that impresses you, but it impresses the heck out of me.

Okay. I'm getting here. Really, I am. Okay. So, you know, it was really funny.

One time, I was going to do one of my first talks, and I I called my sponsor and I said, I really wanna carry the message, and I wanna do a good job, and I wanna tell them that God is, and and I want them to know that they never have to drink again, and and I you know, it's really I I really wanna do a good job. And she said, well, Cookie, you were at that round up last year, do you remember the speakers? And I said, well, I, was one of them a woman? And, she said to me, well that's about how many people are gonna remember you, so don't worry about it. So, then the other thing I was worried about because I gained a bunch of weight and so so I'm standing up here and I'm thinking, oh, what am I gonna wear?

You know, I just haven't got anything to wear right now. Then I realized that most of you only see me from about here up. Oh, okay. I was born a rich white child. And, and from that and I love to talk about this part of my story because it's it's very different from a lot of speakers, and because that's different does not make me different.

It's just that my lifestyle was different. I was brought up in a family who loved and cared for me. I was told I could accomplish anything I ever wanted to accomplish. I have an older brother and a younger brother, and I was the middle kid, and I was a super achiever. I wanted to be the good girl.

I wanted to grow up to be just like my mom. My mom's a lady, and I wanted to be a lady just like my mom. And so all of those things, you don't hear about a lot, people telling their stories in AA. But the one thing I do know today is that alcoholism is an equal opportunity destroyer, and it doesn't really care where you came from, or how much money you have or don't have, or you're black or white or Catholic or Jewish or Buddhist or If you have the illness of alcoholism, like I have the illness of alcoholism, you get to die of the same desires, or you get to recover together with us. So we're here tonight, and this is our night, and I'm so glad you are here.

Makes my day. So okay. I was started out, and I remembered one time I was talking to my girlfriend, and we had just we're both about, oh, I don't know, about 2 years sober, and we we went back and we decided we'd talk about or we'd think about, when was the first time that ever that ever that alcohol affected you? You know, I mean, not necessarily when you drank, but when did alcohol affect you? You know, and I had to think about it for a while and, you know, I was thinking about it and I and then all of a sudden I remembered.

I remembered when I was young, my parents, my parents used to have these wonderful parties and they were like balls. And, and people would come dressed up, and that's when people actually used to all get dressed up to go to a party. And, and so I, they would come dressed up, and they would be beautiful, and the men would come in tuxedos, and the women would come in long dresses and they would just all look so sophisticated and I had to go around and curtsy and meet every one of them. And and I passed hors d'oeuvre and curtsied and all this kind of stuff. And, you know, I just watched all of it.

And going on for, you know, weeks beforehand to make the house look right, and it was just all that exciting atmosphere around the house. And, and and so I was there that night, and I saw everybody coming start to come in, and my mom had this gorgeous dress, and I had my little goofy outfit on. And I've never been much of a girly girl, so I kind of think some of those are like goofy outfits, because my mother like to dress me up like a real girly girl, and I usually made a big mess out of it in no time, but okay. So this lady came in and she was, you know, some people are just more than other people? They're just more, you know, and she came in and she was more.

She walked in the door and she had on this blue gown, and it started up here, and it was blue sequins, and it started light blue, and it was only on one shoulder. Whew, racy. And and it's up here, and it went down and down and down and down, and it was a form fitting outfit, and she had a form to fit. And and it went down and down and down and down, and it pooled around the bottom of her feet in this blue pool. And she was just gorgeous.

You know, when she had this great big huge hairdo, I still suffer from that. And higher the hair, the closer you are to God. And, so so I, and I watched her, you know, and she and she had these little blue shoes and a little blue bag that hung off of her thing. And she had this gorgeous husband. He was in a tuxedo.

He was so handsome. I have always been a fool for men in tuxedos. I have got to quit marrying them. Glad there are none here. I'm single again.

So so yeah. I couldn't everybody watched them. And she had she had this big long cigarette holder. And on the end of the cigarette everybody smoked back then. And on the end of the cigarette holder, she had little blue rhinestones.

They matched her dress. I was so impressed. You know, and the butler came by and asked her if she'd like to have anything to drink and she said, I'll have a martini. Just like that. I have a martini.

I've been practicing it for years. I'm not much of a girly girl. Okay. So the butler came back and here was a v shaped martini glass, and got her one of little blue bulbs on the bottom. Oh, my.

How impressive. And so she stood there drinking her drink with her cigarette and she throw her head back and go, and all the men were around her and I wanted what she had. Attention. That's why I love it. I live in a suburb called Edina, and Edina stands for every day I need attention.

So, so anyway, she was just gorgeous and she had a martini and her drink and and, you know, everybody was milling around and her husband was talking to other people. And then my mother dismissed me for the evening. I had to go say goodnight to everybody. And, so I went around and said good night to everybody, and I went upstairs and sort of hid, so I could watch everybody down there, and, being the good, budding alcoholic that I was, I was fascinated by this. And so, it was a lot later.

And pretty soon, she was standing there, and she was talking to some people. And now her cigarette's kind of going over here. And her martini's kind of going over here, and even her hair sort of and, and her husband was standing there, and all of a sudden, he just she he just swooped her up and took her out the door. And I thought, isn't that romantic? I didn't know she'd passed out.

So I heard my father talking to my mother the next day, and he said, you know, dear, missus so and so is like quite a nice lovely lady, but when she drinks too much, she becomes a bit of a floozy. I didn't know what a floozy was. It was about a month later my father asked me what I want to be when I grew up. I said, a floozy. I'm here to tell you I achieved my goal.

Oh, bad joke on cookie. But, yeah. Add add alcohol instant floozy. Okay. Okay.

Okay. So when I turned 13, my girlfriend and I got together, and her parents were out of town for the weekend. And I decided to make my well, she we got into we broke into the liquor cabinet, the first of my illustrious career. And, we broke into the cabinet, and I had gone out, and I had purloined a cigarette holder. My sponsor pointed out to me in my 5th step that purloined is a fancy word for theft cookie.

Rats. So so I had found the cigarette holder and, and, and I also had a cigarette that I found shortly before somebody lost it and, just imagine how much fun I was to sponsor in the beginning, can't you? So so I decided to make myself a Martini. Oh, you guys have been paying attention. You've heard me before, girl.

Yeah. I decided to make myself a martini. Now, I don't know about you, but I have looked back upon this over the years, and I realized something. Did I think I was an alcoholic before I took a drink? You know, because I started obsessing about this from a moment of that party until the time I could drink that first drink.

Isn't that amazing? You know the big book about college anonymous talks about the fact that we have an obsession of the mind, and I hadn't even introduced alcohol to it yet. So, you know, I, I poured that drink and I knew there was no ice in it because there wasn't any ice in her pretty glass and so I poured myself a glass full of warm gin. And, it was a good starter drink, don't you think? And right into the big time.

And I, I lit my cigarette with my ratty little cigarette holder and, you know, good starter drink, don't you think? And right into the big time. And I, I lit my cigarette with my ratty little cigarette holder, and, you know, you know, Clancy I'm I don't know if you I'm sure most of you know who Clancy is. He's a speaker, and he talks about, he talks about alcoholism, and he's got a tape called the disease of perception. And I've thought about that many times over the years, and when he talks about that disease of perception, he talks about that alcoholics see things differently than other people do and I I totally believe that today.

And, you know, here I am, I'm sitting there, I'm 13 years old and I got a blue shirt. Big surprise. Right? And, my blue jeans, which at that time we were wearing elephant bells, And I'm really old, and now they're back. That's how old I am.

And, and I had poured myself this glass full of, of gin, and I was gonna take this drink. And now before that liquor ever hit my lips, I had turned into that beautiful lady in that blue dress before I took the first drink. It was amazing to me. Just amazing to me when I look back. It took me a long time to put all this together, but I took that first drink.

And, you know, I love the big book because it says something. It says when alcoholics drink, something happens. How about you? Did something happen when you drink? It talks about the fact that men and women drink essentially because we like the effect produced by alcohol.

The effect is so elusive, that after a while we cannot differentiate the true from the false. To us, our alcoholic life seems the only normal one. I pick up that drink. I start to drink it, and something happened. And what happened for me is ever since I was a small child, I had something that went on in my head.

I was very, gifted athletically, and I did a lot of stuff. And, and I wanted to be a winner. I always wanted to be a winner. And here's why. I would sit when I watch people and do things, and my head would say this to me.

Now, I don't know if you've ever realized your head talks to you. You may not know that you can talk back to it yet. But anyway, so I'm talking my head is just talking at me. It says things like this, you know, cookie, no matter how hard you try, no matter how good you do, you're never gonna be just quite good enough. You're never gonna be good enough.

You gotta work harder and try harder than everybody else, because you're not gonna be good enough. You know that you're too tall, too short, too fat, too thin. You know that there's something wrong with you. There's just something wrong with you. You know it's not quite good enough.

You better work harder, you better try harder, you're just not good enough. This was constant with me, and it kept me going. It kept me it kept me performing in all my sports. It drove me all the time. And, I took that drink of alcohol in a matter of about 3 and a half minutes.

It was gone. And I don't know about you, but I love the fact that it was gone. And that's the effect alcohol had on me. Gates of insanity and death. That one feeling that first time that got.

You know, but I did then what I do almost every time I drink. I sorta overshot the mark. And every time I've had as much alcohol as I want to drink, I drank until I got drunk and passed out and threw up in any order, whichever you like. That's what happened that night, and I remember I remember decorating the bathroom, and and I just I just thought that this was the most wonderful thing in the entire world. And why hadn't I found it before this?

Now, I have gone from in a very 3 hours of time, from this little girl who wanted to be like her mom and be a lady, to someone who's gotta figure out how to drink better, so they don't throw up. This is not normal. I know it's normal to most of you. It's not normal, and, and so I, you know, I remember that so clearly. The effect alcohol had on me was that I was free.

I was free, finally. In a matter of 2 years, every single one of my sports was gone. I dropped out of high school. I just wanted to drink. Thank you very much.

I started out drinking, and when I started drinking, I couldn't stop drinking. It was never any different. I was an alcoholic from the get go. I just had to plan it better and try harder. I was, like I said, I was brought up in a in a with very privileged surroundings, and so I didn't find it difficult at all to get all the liquor I ever wanted.

I just blackmailed the maid. No hobby. And, so you know, I was going along, and I was doing all this stuff. And, and I'm my life is totally revolving now around alcohol. And I was, I had gone out to California to visit my, my cousin.

And when I was out in California, I fell in love. And, I'm all of 19 years old, you know, 18 years old. And I fell in love. And I came back and he came back to my my my family and I was going back out east to meet his family and he was back in California. He was going to be a marine biologist and we were going to move to Hawaii and get married.

And he was driving back from surfing one day, and the axle broke in his jeep. And he was thrown from the jeep, and he was brain dead. From that moment to this moment today, I would turn off anything that had anything to do with the motion. That devastated me to such a point that I didn't even know what to do with it. I had never had any bad news in my life.

My life and my family, it was always fun. It was always funny. It was always do the fun stuff, and all of a sudden, I didn't know what to do. And, and so I did what I usually did. I drank a lot, and, and I was hanging out with my girlfriend.

I was I was thinking about what I was gonna do with my life since I was now a high school dropout, and I decided to go to college. Why not? And it's not too hard to do actually. And so I was, getting ready to go off east to college. I wanted to go to a broadcasting school.

At that time, there were no women in broadcasting. And so I thought this would be a great position for me. You know, you can rise really fast. It'll be really cool. It'll all be fun.

And, and so that's what I did. I I was getting thin. I was hanging out with my girlfriend, Kris. Every time I wanted to get thin, I'd hang out with Kris. And, Kris was about 6 foot 2 and weighed £7.

And she was great to hang out with, and she had she had a lot of hair, blonde hair. And she was one of those really annoying people that could lay out 90 degree heat in a full set of makeup and never perspire. You know, and she'd lay out in this perfect and I'm a tomboy, so we go out together and she lay in this perfect lawn chair position with a little pink bikini on. And I'm out in a swimming suit swimming laps, you know. And I come back and look at look at her, and I take a drink of my beer, and I come back out.

And pretty soon, I saw this this x k e drive by, and I'm a car freak. So I see this car drive by and drives by 7 times. So I think, well, This is interesting. So I figure, he's looking at Chris. You know, I'm I'm looking like a drowned rat, and and he walks down and he walks right up from me.

He walks into the water, and I said I just looked at him and he said, gee, you look refreshing. I said, you want a beer? Anyway, it was about a month and a half later, I decided I was gonna marry him. My mom was really happy about that. I think it was the 3rd date, actually.

And, and, I have always wanted to remind myself of this because it's some of my really clever and wonderful thinking because I'm ever so bright, and I have to remind myself of how bright I am every once in a while just so I can bask in the glow of my Duraflame log. I I'm standing near, and I'm I'm thinking about all this, and and I'm thinking back when I'm thinking about this, and I think, why did I marry him? And, I had two reasons. 1 was he never said anything about my drinking. Guess why?

I promised my sponsor I wouldn't take his inventory from the podium. But suffice it to say that he's been in 17 treatment facilities. And, the second reason was because he asked. You know, the really sad part about that is I married the second one's sobriety for the same reason. Oh, golly.

Sometimes quickly, sometimes slowly. But, yeah. And we started off and we were just we were quite the couple. We were both tall, dark, and handsome. And, and he we had I had an ability and he had the ability to make a great deal of money at that time.

And I'd started my own company when I was 20 years old. And through the grace of God and this fellowship of this program and a lot of very good luck and a lot of very loving friends. I retired from that business with 35 years, just last year. So I started my business then, and, I was in a field where there were no women, of course. And because, you know, you know how we are about other women.

I don't know about you women out there, but I'm sort of that way about other women. You know, I mean, I don't really want to be around because most women don't drink like I drink, and they always tend to notice. Like, they see things like, are you having another? Haven't you already had 2? Yeah.

I'm warming up. So I don't know about you, but I eliminated friends who didn't drink like I drank. They just sort of got pushed to the sides. And so I, we, we started living a very fancy lifestyle. And we had fancy cars and fancy things and everything was fancy, and I hung around with some pretty important people.

And I traveled all over the world, and I did a lot of fancy stuff. My husband used to travel on the road Mondays through Fridays, and we had a nice little 5 bedroom house for 2 of us, and, and he was gone. My girlfriend lived upstairs. You never knew she lived up there. It was great.

I love hanging around with her because she was slowly working her way through an entire football team. It was kind of like a, you know, a spectator sport. And, and so, you know, she'd be off with all these football players all the time. And and I go out drinking with her because I just wanted somebody to drink with and go out and have fun. And I have to give you a picture of what it looked like at that time.

For some of you that are young enough, you may not remember any of this or you may have seen it on old movies. But, yeah, I had I had 2 sets of wigs. My hair was about out to here, and I wore 2 sets of eyelashes up here and one set down here, and and I had, I had white go go boots, platform go go boots that came up over my knee and folded over. They were vinyl. They were really sexy.

And then I wore a little I wore a little hot pants. Do you remember hot pants? I have my little hot pants. You know? And and that was when we wore that real light lip stick, you know, and then we had the white and the brown and the white, and we drew the little twiggy under our eyes.

I was just gorgeous. And so I would hang out with her, and and she would be working her way through the team, and and I'd be watching this, and it was great fun. And I'd hang out with all of them, and and I kind of made a I kind of made, I like to sort of lip off a little. I know you find that hard to believe, but I would, make jokes with these guys and have fun and all kinds of stuff. And I was a little girl that really lived in the suburbs and had been very sheltered all of her life.

I had parents who loved me. I didn't know there were bad things that went on in this world. I really didn't. That was some place over there. It didn't make any sense to me, and it was a different world then.

And so I, I was kind of laughing with these guys, and one of the guys was kind of rather slow. And, you know, I'd tell jokes and he'd come up and go, hey, I got that cookie. And I used to say things like good in this millennium. And, you know, and I was not nice. And so this is not any to give any kind of an idea or reason for anything.

It's just this fact that set this thing up. And so I came home one night, and unbeknownst to me, he followed me home. And, I was home for about 15 minutes, and he came to my door. And I said, what are you doing here? And he got himself in, and he ended up raping me.

Now, this happened in my own home. And, I had no system in place to deal with what happened to me. None. It was, I wasn't I was sober for a number of years before I could even talk about this, and it was hard. I blamed myself.

I thought if I had just not said that stuff, if I just had not worn that outfit, if I just had not And I didn't know. I didn't know anything. And I carried that shame with me, and it was to light the rest of my behavior for the rest of my drink. There's something I wanna say to you if that's been your experience, and I do know that for the women in alcoholics anonymous, only over 85% of us come in with some sort of form of abuse. And, and I wanna hear you if they're out there and and this has happened to you.

I want you to hear me. It is not your fault. It is not your fault. No matter what happened, no matter what you wore, no matter what you said, no matter anything, nobody, absolutely nobody has the right to hurt you, to downgrade you, to rape you, to hit you, or anything else. Nobody has that right.

I carried that shame for so long and so hard. It was shortly after the next day I woke up and and I couldn't I didn't know what to do with this. I had no idea what to do with this. You know, I was this happy go lucky kid that I wasn't even an adult yet really. And, and I tried to commit suicide because you figure I figured I was damaged goods.

This doesn't happen to good girls. This doesn't happen to girls that live like I live and grow up where I grow up. There's something very wrong with me, and now I know it. And, I remember I took all the pills I had at the time. There weren't good enough pills.

Obviously, I'm not very good at suicide. So, but I woke up and, and I was mad. I was real mad. I was mad at the fact that, that I had not killed myself. I thought I was a loser because I couldn't even kill myself right.

And the thing about that is when I woke up, my husband was there, and I didn't know what to say to him. And, you know, we're amazing people for alcoholics. And if you're an alcoholic like I'm an alcoholic, you might relate to the fact that we know how to rally. And you know, one of the things I did was I just sat there and I I didn't know what to do, but from that moment on until the moment till I was close to 2 years sober, I could not look in the mirror and look myself in the eye. I'd look at whatever piece of me I was putting makeup on.

I'd look all over like that, but I could never never look at myself again. And I didn't know that I had let somebody steal my soul. I didn't know that. So what I decided to do was I'm just gonna I I've gotta get this together, Cookie. This is ridiculous.

You've gotta get this together. You've always been good at everything. You can win at everything. Get yourself together, and I rallied. You know, I rallied and I said, this is it.

I'm not gonna think about that anymore. I have always lived from that day until I did my 5th step with the Scarlett O'Hara theory of living, which is, I don't think about that today. I'll think about that tomorrow when I'm in Tara. So, you know, I just threw things back here, and I didn't think about them anymore, and I was gonna rally, and I was gonna be that person, you know, that just gets out there, and I'm gonna do the right thing, and I'm gonna be this right person. Person.

And so I, I stopped drinking, and I stopped smoking, and I stopped doing everything, and I went to work, and I did my job, and I came home every night, and I did needle point in front of TV. I'm not drinking. I'm not gonna drink. I'm not drinking tonight. I'm not drinking tonight.

I'm not drinking tonight. I'm not drinking. I am not going to drink tonight. I did this for 30 days. You think I don't have willpower?

Yikes. You know, and that's the interesting thing about alcoholism. You know, I'm sitting there and I'm doing that, but what am I doing? I'm thinking about drinking when I'm not drinking. You know, and that's what they talk about the mental obsession.

I have never had a problem with the second step in the program of alcoholics. Never. Because I can sit there and my insanity says this time, it's gonna be different. It took me 30 days, and in 30 days, you know what happened? I'm sitting there one night, after those 30 days had passed, and everything's going cool, and I said to myself, well, you know, I've been suffering for 30 days.

This time it'll be different. It was. If you know anything about alcoholism, it gets very different. It gets worse, in case you didn't know. So don't go back out there again.

Anyways, so I, I You know, it did get worse. And I started drinking. I had vengeance for drinking now. I didn't really care. I didn't care much about anything.

I didn't care about you. And I didn't care about what happened to me. And I didn't care about anything because I figured nothing. Absolutely nothing is gonna stand in my way of doing whatever I feel like doing from now on. I've always tried to follow the rules.

I always tried to be a good girl. I always tried to, you know, grow up just like my mom and be a lady. What good has it done me? You know, and I gave up on myself. And that's the problem with women when we go through these things.

We throw ourselves away. And if you threw yourself away, I wanna hear you something. I want you to hear something that I'm saying. We have 12 steps here. And 2 of them are 4 and 5.

And in 4 and 5, you get free. You get free. You know, the steps are like an inside shower. You're the person that's gonna get free. So I, we went around.

It got even crazier after that. And and my husband came home one day and said, you know, I bought a boat and I thought, oh, good for the lake. And he said, no. We're gonna move to Acapulco and live on a yacht. And I thought, did I miss like 6 months of this marriage or something?

And, which wouldn't have been surprising at that point, but yeah. And then, I mean, he just thought these things up and he would say, you know, and I've sold the house. Really? Where am I going to live now? You know, and but I didn't care because, you know what, at this point, I didn't care anything about anything.

I didn't care about what I did or who I did it with, and I didn't care when I did it. Did it. And what I would do is I'd go out and I'd go drinking with my friends, and I'd pick your boyfriend, your husband, or any other person that would say hello to me. And, and I'd just sorta walk away with you, you know, and I just wanted somebody to drink with me. I wanted somebody to drink with me, and to play with me, and to pay attention to me because my husband never did.

He was too busy working. I just love the way we rational things. Anyway, so there I am, and I'm doing all this crazy stuff. I'm going everywhere. I'm doing all whatever.

I'm living, we had that time, we had a house in Florida and a house in Minnesota. We had a jet to drive go back and forth with me. We had a couple of yachts, and I drove a Ferrari and a Porsche. I had everything in the world I've ever wanted. Everything.

Everything. And this is a bad place to be if you're an alcoholic, because, you know, it's always that thing that says, you know, well, if I only had that, it would all be okay. I had that and that and that and that and that. So, So, you know, I'm really grateful for that today, because I know something is coming back to give me a second chance of learning it, which is, if my life depends upon the car I drive or the watch I wear or anything else, I'm in big trouble. If my life depends upon anything you think of me, I'm in big trouble.

You know? The thing that brought me here was, I had, I had, been out working one night and I got, I was coming back from a job and, drunk ran through a red light and hit me. And I spent the next 2 years in hospitals. Pretty much destroyed my back and a lot of other parts of me. And, and so I, I just became a recluse.

I they gave me lots of drugs. I needed lots of drugs to get along with things, you know, and I go to my doctor and say, I can't sleep, and so he'd give me sleeping pills. And I'd say, I'm in so much pain I can't stand. They give me painkillers. Then I said I'm really depressed, and so he gave me antidepressants.

And and and then I said, you know what? My muscles are in constant stress. He gave me muscles relaxers. And, you know, it's kind of interesting because I was doing all that and drinking a quarter booze a day. I didn't move a lot.

You know, and I became that recluse person you hear about. The one that's all by themselves, all alone. And that's who I was. I'm sitting in this wonderful morass of self pity, and, you know, I don't know what to do with myself anymore. I don't know what day it is, and I don't care what day it is.

I'm very, very large. I'm an attractive shade of yellow, and, I'm dying of the days of alcoholism, and I don't know I'm an alcoholic. I don't know anything about the mental obsession. I don't know anything about the physical compulsion of alcoholism. I don't know I have an allergy to alcohol.

All I know is that that stuff makes me feel okay. Please don't ever take it away. And I'm now in the position where my body's shutting down from alcohol, and I'm crawling across my $40,000 Persian rug to go into the kitchen to shitty myself up on a cabinet, so that I can drink and throw up, and drink and throw up, and drink and throw up, and drink and throw up. And maybe the 5th or the 6th or the 7th one will stay down. I am now a chronic alcoholic, and I'm living on a Skid Row.

It's a very fancy Skid Row, but it was Skid Row for me. And there was nothing left of cooking. I was gone. All I wanted to do was to just die. That's all I wanted to do.

I had been beaten into a state of reasonableness by alcoholism, and I didn't know I was an alcoholic. I was, loving this life. My husband was doing really crazy stuff, and it was just like a it was like a circus, you know, and and I've heard many people say that if you marry an alcoholic and you and you live in an alcoholic marriage, you gotta dance to death. And that's what we had was a dance to death. And, I decided I was finally gonna kill myself.

This time I was gonna make it for sure. And, I had lots of good pills now. And I remember looking up and it was a gray day. And it was, right about now. The window.

I was looking up and I was I said one thing. And I said, God, if there is a god. Now, I'm gonna tell you, it's been a long time since this cookie had talked to any kind of guy because I didn't figure he wanted to have much to do with me with all things that had happened to me. I had to I said, God, if there is a God, please, this time let me die. I don't wanna do this anymore.

Don't make me do this anymore, please. Now I don't know what your 3rd step sounded like, but I think that qualified me. It was interesting because I was gonna take all those drugs, and the doorbell rang. You know how annoying it is when somebody interrupts your perfectly good suicide plan? I mean, really?

How rude. So I, I can't believe I opened the door to this day. But, you know, it's what I did. And, and it was my father. And we do not have a drop in family.

We're a very formal group. And, usually, if my father is gonna come over, he'd call and say he was gonna come over. So here's my dad standing there. I said, daddy, what are you doing here? And he said, honey, I've come to take you home.

I can't watch this anymore. And I said, okay. And I left. And I left everything. The cars and the yachts and the planes and everything.

I just left. Well, I took my makeup. Hard to cover up that much yellow. Anyway, so at this point, I had no clothes because I've been living in this really lovely kind of horrible chenille bathrobe that was all had, like, had cigarette burns all down the front and dribbly stuff. And and it was all funny in the front because I kept crawling everywhere in it.

And I had decided a couple times to perm my own hair and color it so it's straight out like this and frizzed to death and black. You know? And, I was not looking pretty. Okay? And I'm yellow, and I just remember walking out the door.

And it was quite a few years later. I remember what I said to myself, and and, what I said to myself is one of us is gonna survive this, and it's going to be me. I don't know when you made your decision, or if you've made your decision yet, but I knew something right then. I knew it was never gonna be the same ever, that everything was gonna change. My, parents I came home to my parents, and my mother had to lend me a dress because I didn't have anything to wear, so she found this lovely moo moo.

I still think of this. And and so we had to go see an old friend of theirs, and so I I put on this moo moo. And I tried to cover up as much of the yellow as I could. It's kinda hard to kinda get your eyeballs looking right though. And so, you know, and I I wasn't really good at putting my makeup on, so I didn't really put much on, but I kind of got it together.

And we go out to this place and it was a place where I'd grown up in and their house and their home and these people, and I hadn't seen any of these people in years. I'd become, like I said, a recluse. And so we came there, and they said, well, make yourself a drink cookie. My parents have never understood alcoholism. I don't think they ever really will understand alcoholism.

It is not their job to understand alcoholism. It's my job to understand them. And so, you know, I, I made myself a drink. You know, one of those drinks we make ourselves. You know those drinks.

You know, glass, rum. Filled glass, put in a ice cube. Perfect. So I had now got to the point that I would throw up all the time before something would stay down. So I was kind of wondering whether this one was going to stay down or not, and, and it did.

Thank God. And I made myself another one. That one didn't feel like it. So I, my parents said that they were gonna go home, and so I thanked the hostess for inviting me on short notice. It was very lovely to see her again.

And I went out and I walked on the way to my parents' car, and I walked around my parents' car, and they were still talking to this missus Jones, and so, I threw up in the bushes. Now I had been raped. I have had a lot of stuff happen to me. This certainly wasn't the highlight of my drinking career, but it's the thing that got my attention, And I hope you always remember the one that gets your attention. Because the real strength in being us and me sharing with you and you sharing with me is when we remember who we are so we never forget who we are.

And, as we drove away, I said to myself, so this is the lady you've become, cookie. You throw up in bushes. And at that moment, I knew. I knew my problem was alcohol. I think the hand of that god that I had anything to do with for an awful lot of years came and took me away and said, it's okay, honey.

And he started making things clear to me. And I knew from that moment on that I could never drink again. Now, that was not something I thought up on my own. Trust me. And so I did that and I, I remember I, my parents had a friend that owned a treatment facility, so they sent me to the treatment facility.

You know, it's nice having money. And, and I went there, and the lady interviewed me. And the lady one of the people that was a secretary there today, I still see in my Friday meeting, and she always looks at me and goes, you're such a miracle. But it's wonderful to have friends for, you know, 22 years that have seen you come all the way. That's one of the gifts of sobriety.