The Tuesday night Surrender Group of Alcoholics Anonymous in Portland, ME

Tonight's speaker, Donna,

glad to be here today

with you. I haven't been here in a while and it's really nice to see so many people at this meeting. It's not very big. It just gives me hope that there are people recovering and trying to recover just like me.

That's one of the things about alcoholism for me was that I felt very much

isolated, alone, like I really didn't know what was wrong with me. So it was really troublesome Every time I would get myself in a jam or have a situation involving alcohol. I

I don't know, the strangest thing for me about this whole alcoholism thing was like,

I really did not understand it. Like I couldn't relate my problems with the alcohol and I was having most of my problems when I was drinking alcohol,

but I couldn't make that connection.

I was thinking about,

you know, who knows what the heck I'm going to say, but I'm sitting there thinking about the part in the big book where it talks about fundamentally deep down within every man, woman and child, you know, there's that God lives within us. And the other day I was eating dinner and my daughter came up behind me and said, Mom, if I

was in your belly, then how was the room for God to fit in your heart? And I thought, how do you answer that? But anyway,

reminded me of that line and and what I can tell you about that is that I did not really know that God lived in my heart or within me for a long time. There was an enormous void for me because of my use of alcohol and because of the things that I continued to do around alcohol and the things that I let be done to me. So I had like this complete disconnect from any God of my understanding. And, you know, as a kid, I was one of those kids that really was raised with a nice set of

morals of the youngest of six. And my parents were Irish Catholic and we went to church every Sunday and,

you know, we, I don't know, I, but I always felt like I was never enough. I was never good enough. And I can remember when I was like 12, I was asked to bring the baby Jesus down the front of the, you know, the aisle at Mass and midnight Mass. And I had this complete and total anxiety attack, like, you know, other kids in my class that were youth group, this kind of thing

that would have been like, I all of a sudden had this attack. I started crying. I'm like, Oh my God. And you know what I know about that as I felt completely unworthy of whatever that honor was. Like so many things that happened to me before I was 12 and I had already picked up booze at like 9-10 years old. So there was a span there that it was already tearing me up. So that when I was asked to do that, it was this sense of like, I am so not worth this. I cannot do this and I did not do it.

And so when I look back and I was doing my work with my sponsor about, you know, I love and we agnostics where it talks about no matter how limited or how inadequate our relationship with God may seem, it's enough to begin. And so even though I felt limited when I got here and people were talking about God or like, you know, Are you ready to believe or even now willing to believe, that's all you need. I was like, I don't know, I'm just so whacked from alcohol drugs that

I'll get on my knees in the morning and ask God to keep me away from a drink.

I'll say the serenity prayer in the middle of the day when I start to get freaked out. I'll do whatever you guys want me to do because I at the point when I gave up drinking and tried to stop drinking, I had really had enough. Like this looked really attractive to me and

really attractive to me. And prior to I really tried, I would try to stop. Like I was married. And I remember thinking, honest to God, if I stop drinking, that everything is going to get better in my marriage. Like if I could just get thin enough and I could be pretty enough, everything else would work out OK at home. And so I'm eating this freeze dried food. I'm on Nutrisystem. I'm walking the Boulevard every single day.

Tell myself like I'm not drinking, I'm not doing it and

and in my head I knew there was a wedding that we were going to in May. So I told myself, look at this wedding I'll settle down things at home and I will drink at this wedding in May. What happened is because I'm an alcoholic, I couldn't hold out till May. I would sit at the bar every night next to my husband and he would drink and he was one of those drinkers that was not asking people to spot him for back handspring on the back of the bar and he's not telling dirty jokes out in front of the bar and he was not doing he just sit and have his maintenance beer and

he did fine. I, on the other hand, was like, my money was my money and his money was my money, but my money was not his money. I, I would be like in every single bar. I had to go all through the old port. He'd be right there where I found him. Like, we were different kind of drinkers. And I don't know what his deal is now or whatever, but I know that we were different. And, you know, so I'd sit there with him and we would, you know, And I was like, OK.

And the bartender said to me, have a shot of tequila. It's got 80 calories in it.

And I said OK, but I had already had like 10 diet sodas. And I'm sitting there trying to like, hold on to my seat, not drink and stay with him. And that was it. I took that first drink, that shot of tequila, and I drank like eight shots of tequila later, and I was drunk for a solid year. Now, I knew nothing about the phenomenon of craving. I knew nothing about any of that. But when I look back on that, when I took that drink, when I told myself I was not going to drink until May, it set off that phenomenon of craving

thing is for me is that once it starts, you know, how do I know how you're probably an alcoholic? Because once it started, I never knew what it was going to stop. And I had it was like, and when I tried to quit entirely, I I could not quit entirely. So things made sense when I started sitting in meetings and I started hearing things. I could take parts of my own life, my own story, and I could identify it. Now, some of the stuff I identified with was

for me, I had an inability to be committed in my marriage. I took a marriage, Catholic marriage vow. I wasn't able to keep that vow of celibacy.

Celibacy, yeah, well, that would have really helped to fight on that. But I wasn't able to keep the the commitment. And so when I got to AA and I hear people say, well, I got car accidents, I had affairs. I, you know, I thought those things, those hazardous conditions made me an alcoholic.

That wasn't true. What made me an alcoholic was that phenomenon of craving. So although I found the stories entertaining and I could identify because I think with a lot of us, we have a lot of similar things that might take place when we're out there. And we have, we come from similar backgrounds, some of us. But then you know

what I know makes me an alcoholic is what I have in common with you, even if our stories aren't don't mirror each other, is that I have that phenomenon craving that sets me apart from my you know, like friends that I that would want to go and have a glass of wine with dinner. I have a glass of wine with dinner. I want to. I want to shoot myself

like I wanted the next day. I want to die because what I've done is I've told myself I don't want to do this today. I don't want to hurt these people around me. I want to show up for this thing. I want to, I want to get an education. I want to be able to drive my car. There's lots of things that I want to be able to do. Once I ingested alcohol, it was like, OK, I'm not driving tonight. OK, I'm not sleeping with my husband tonight. I'll sleep with yours. OK, I'm going to do this.

Everything that I told myself,

all those values and morals that I had just went, they just went one by one. And what happened was the senior and the shadier the people I was hanging out with, the lower they got. It was like, okay, that was unacceptable to me, but now it's okay because they're doing it and I'm hanging out with them. So it's okay to do that. And so I started compromising. So the unacceptable became the acceptable. And it got very scary because there were times I'm thinking, how did I get to be like this? Like, this is not what I,

not what I wanted to be. This is not what my mother wanted me to be. My mother could see what I'm doing right now for a drink or a drug. She'd be horrified. I mean, I remember this guy walking down Commercial Street with this cardboard sign, you know, 'cause we see them all the time out there.

And it said, I need to, I need a drink. No joke. And I thought, oh, that would have been minimal had I just stood on the street and held that sign. It would have been minimal compared to what I did to get alcohol. My mother would have been ashamed of me, I thought. And then I thought, no, she'd really be ashamed if she really knew what I was doing, how I was really living, you know, so, and I picked up booze. I was one of those kids that,

you know, there's a lot of chaos on my house. I was, my mother had six kids by the time she was 44.

That is enough alone. I have one. I would have committed myself, I can tell you that. And I don't know how she did, but there was a lot of stuff going on and there were a lot of things going on in my house that never should have been going on. I did not know how to protect my body. I did not know how to talk about what was taking place. And So what I did was when I found alcohol, it took care of all of it. It like put a cap on everything that ran through my head, every fear I had, everything. I started to develop some real idiosyncrasies around my anxiety around a lot of that stuff.

I had, you know, a lot of things that I did to cover up and protect myself and kind of little survival skills, which worked for me for a long, long time until I got sober. And a lot of those things that I was conditioned to do and to protect myself and all that kind of stuff. I can tell you they don't work in my marriage. I can tell you they don't work in a lot of my relationships. And it's taken a lot of time with my step work to undo what I, you know, what my natural thinking is. It's just like my natural thinking around booze. Like, I know that I can't use alcohol safely in any form.

You know, as a kid, you know, when all that's going on, all these things. And I'm one of those kids that couldn't sleep with a closet door open and I have to check under the bed before I got in bed. And,

you know, I wondered when I was going to ever be able to address. And a lot of that stuff that took place in my life. What happened to me, what scared the hell out of me was that I'm sitting in a bar and all of a sudden I'm telling complete strangers. I couldn't tell the man that I was married to, the stuff that had taken place, the man that I was actually being intimate with. I couldn't tell him anything about my life. But I could sit next to you and not know you. And I could tell you some terrifying, traumatizing things that happened to me.

And then, you know, the problem was, is that nobody could help me. I wasn't telling people that could help me. I was just telling people so they could say, oh, wow. Oh, you know what, You know, And so I started getting scared because I started telling strangers all these things about my life. And I'm like, oh, my God, I never know what's going to come out of my mouth now. What did I just tell him? I can't go there again. What if they tell so? And so it was like, you know, when I was drinking, I wanted to be one of those friends that you could tell something in confidence and not tell.

And I am today one of those people that you could tell me something confidence and I don't tell. But when I was drinking, it was like you would tell me something and I'd say I'd go tell somebody. Well, don't tell her that I told you. And then it became this whole thing and like, and it was very confusing getting sober because I was trying to be honest and I was trying to mind my own business. But Jesus Christ, I'm an AA got all these people doing all kinds of shit. I know more shit about people. I wish I did not know. I have to shit that I know about people,

but what I'm telling you is it stays right here. I know where I know where it is. I know where it needs to stay.

It's fun. It's crazy, you know, some of the stuff that goes on that that we do and we do to each other and, you know, and it takes some time to get well and, and recover and, and it took me time to recover. And what I can tell you is that when I got to a A, I was not introduced to, I mean, I was introduced to a A and the fellowship and, and, and I had a sponsor that I did step work with

the step book. And we read a little bit out of the big book.

But I didn't know then that what I was doing and how I was going through the steps really didn't mirror what was actually written in our literature when the the big book was written. So she would say, read this or go right back or write a list to your character defects or whatever. And I go do it. I do whatever instruction she gave me because I didn't want to drink anymore. And I honest to God, I had a desire to change because I knew if I didn't change that I would drink again. And so,

so I went along for a period of time and what happened was as a result of not doing thorough inventory work,

I had difficulty in areas of my life, and particularly in my, the areas of my sex relations. And that was related to a lot of the things that took place in my life as a child. And I thought, I'm never going to be able to straighten out. I mean, I got divorced in AAI. Remember when I was 18 months over, I said to my sponsor, I'm going to work all twelve of these steps and then I'm going to divorce.

I'm divorcing. I've had it. And she was like, no major changes in the first year. I got to my third step

and he was having an affair and I had no control over that. And I was,

and I was surprised and I don't know why because, you know, it wasn't like the shoe wasn't on the other foot for many years. The difference was I just didn't get caught. And so here I am in the situation where I think somehow I've got the upper hand and 12 stats, I'm going to be done with this and my whole life, like turned upside down 18 months over. And I'll tell you what, it was like the best thing that ever could happen to me.

And I didn't like it. And it was humiliating and, you know, it was scary. And I had to go out, you know, figure out what I was going to do and where it's going to live. And like everything, what, you know, like things happen, we recover. And like, things don't just, I mean, you've got to sift through a lot of stuff. And the thing was, is that my marriage was not based on any principles. We had nothing in common. I married a man that didn't want children, like I wanted kids and

and he was adamant about not having kids. And so it was like, OK, if I'm how much more can I compromise things in my life?

So that that ended and I went on to,

you know, like, OK, now divorce. Now I get to date in a A,

you know. Oh my God.

And so I didn't do very well. I had a lot of sexual mishaps, you want to call them. Nothing had changed because I had not done a thorough sex inventory. And a lot of my resentment, a lot of the things that went out. I'm going to be alone for the rest of my life because of all the stuff that took place. I can't function the relationship, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And the reality was I had not done my work. And until I did my work, I was going to be incapable of functioning in a relationship and staying in a marriage.

And so I didn't remarry for 10 years. And I'm not saying it took me 10 years to do a thorough sex inventory, but I can tell you.

But it didn't. It took me a period of time to examine the stuff and then actually go out and practice what I had learned about what, you know, what my ideals and values were after I had done a sex inventory. And but it nearly killed me. I want you to know that what I found out is that NAA,

when I'm living in an unprincipled life, and it wasn't necessarily that each relationship I got in involved someone. I can tell you that I had a period where I thought in sobriety that, you know, it was okay to date someone who was married. And if you asked me if he was married, I tell you who's getting divorced. And you'd say, well, is he married? And I'd say, yeah, but he's getting divorced. See, did not get the whole you know so I wasn't I didn't want to go out with somebody married, but you know, because I started a relationship not based

same principles and any ideals or values are going in the same direction again, I got involved someone's unavailable. So it went on and on and on so I could stay out of the relationships, do my work and then actually go out and date. And so

and when I did, when I first went out with my husband the very first time, I remember saying to my sponsor, I'm not going out with him again. Like because it was so different from anything I had ever done. It was terrifying. She's like, oh, yeah, you're going out with him again. I'm like, oh, so and then, you know,

and then I, you know, I married, but you know, I didn't just marry him with it a month. I dated for a year. We had a lot of things, you know, and I've still had a lot of because of my past and because of my life, because of my history, I've, I've had a lot of things that I've had to work out to be able to stay in my marriage and stay put. And so,

you know, I often tell myself I'm just married for today and, you know, I'm committed and just for today I can do this.

And it seems to work like everything else. Everything else that I'm afraid of doing. You know, I had a lot of fear. I was ruled and run by fear. You know, as I described the not closet door, the end of the bed, some of those were like justified fears, like real fears. I had them. The others were ones that I would cultivate over and over again. I had no idea how to like, settle down,

get back into reality, call somebody,

not act on my fear. I was always acting on fear and then I would get in trouble, like it says in the big book. I mean, where did you get the ball rolling? That ball was just a roll with all the time. I couldn't, I could not like, say, stop. I didn't have a relationship with God, so I couldn't. When fear and resentment and all those things cropped up, I couldn't pause and go to God and figure it out or call somebody or whatever. I just acted on it. When I got afraid, I get angry.

So I find myself in this huge battle, this huge argument, because now I'm scared and how I'm going to tell how I'm going to shut you down is I'm going to get angry. So you don't even approach me about that. And, and, you know, I still have, you know, I still have those kind of reactions to certain things,

but I'm able to stop myself and say, OK, this is what you know, and,

and life continues to happen. I, you know, I never imagined. I mean, I got sober at 26, I'm 44. I never in a million years imagined that I would. I don't know what I thought it was going to be like. All I can tell you is that I was terrified for a long time. I did not trust myself that I was not going to drink again until I did this work as it's outlined in the book. And then and only then did I actually take my power back.

You find a power greater than myself and trust in the fact that God doesn't want me drunk. I am capable of a lot of things. I have, I mean, I honest to God believe this today. If you had asked me early on, it was just kind of like, well, I'm going to stay sober. I'm going to, you know, I'm going to get this together here. I'm going to find the right man, the right this, the right that. And I know that a lot of people come into a A and think that like, I'm going to get my shit together. I'm going to get the right job. I'm going to get the right woman or the right man.

And everything's going to be OK. And you know what, it's just one of those things where it really I found out was an internal, it was an internal thing. I had to do an internal investigation to be able to, you know, you can't go within without. I had to find God and then be able to go in and examine all those things. And so now for me, like after years of coming day, I'm not one of those people that

relapsed. I'm it's just not my story. I think relapse is part of the disease. Relapse is not part of the recovery,

it's part of the disease. And I think that for whatever reason, my, my, my deal was, I came here and I heard what I needed to hear and I did enough to keep me coming here until I realized what was really going on here. Until I was actually introduced to the Big Book in a way that I found out that it wasn't enough just to be sober, that I had to find God, That somehow I had to get all this stuff that was blocking me from God

and I had to go out and make amends. And I had to do all kinds of stuff that I thought I will never live through. And I have completed my immense, I have forgiven the unforgivable and I have been forgiven for a lot of things that I never thought I have restored relationships that I never thought would restore be restored. And you know, I recently, I lost my parents, both of my parents six months ago within within six weeks of each other

craziest, saddest time in my life. And all I can tell you about that is that I did not go through any of that without without a lot, without fear

and without God. So what I found is that I could match calamity with serenity. There was a lot of chaos. There was a lot of sadness. There's a lot of family. There was a lot of Hospice and a lot of changing of diapers and a lot of all the things that go along with helping people die within a six week period, both of them. And I would drive over the bridge and I would think to myself, I do not want to go over there. I do not want to bathe him. I do not want to change her diaper. I hope my sister's there when she needs her diaper changed. I because they were both.

And you know what? By the time I got over the bridge and the time I played, I had never been more in love with my father and more in love with my mother.

By the time I got there, my heart would soften. I didn't have to want to do it, I just had to do it. It's like a lot of things. I don't have to want to get out of bed every morning for my daughter, but I get out every morning. I love her, I want to see her, but sometimes I'm just tired and so it's OK. I don't have to torture myself or I know I'm a bad mother 'cause I can't get my ass out of bed and sometimes she has to lay there, punch me a few times, you know, all the stuff that goes on. Come on, Mom, you know,

put your cold feet between my legs to touch me. You know, all those things that kids do. And then I say, OK, I'm going to get out and I don't need to feel bad about any of that.

I can think whatever I want. It just depends on what I do. I can think whatever I want about a person. I can think about whatever I want about the guy in front of me at the grocery store. I can do all that stuff. But what matters is what comes out of my mouth and what I do with my body language and what I do. I mean, I think words are like the most important thing. I mean, a word you can you could just you can wreck somebody, you know? And I did a lot of that. Like I was one of those people that the sarcasm, I wouldn't tell you like,

Gee, you really, you know, I don't really like what you said to me or boy, that really, you know, or why would you say something to me like that that's kind of hurtful. I could never say that. What I would do is I come in the back door and I'd either tell something about you that nobody was supposed to know

get you, or I would just slice you in half with my sarcasm. Like, I remember my first marriage, my husband didn't come home one night. He was out sailing or something. He didn't call. So I took those sticky notes when they first came out. We had this long countertop and I wrote THANK, thanks for fucking calling. And I taped it all. So when he came home, he understood that I was pissed that he didn't fall, which meant sleep downstairs, don't touch me, whatever, but don't come near me because I'm really pissed off.

You didn't call me. Now, I could have called him and said, Gee, son, you know, but I was drunk. So I wasn't thinking about him or is anything wrong. I was thinking only about how whatever. So that's kind of how I communicated. That's how I functioned. That's how I dealt with things. You know, showing up for work. If you miss work one day, you can't, you know, because you're hungover. You can't just miss one because they won't really think you have the flu. You got to miss 2/3

drunk into this three day thing and then you're still trying to regroup and you still got to go in sick on the 4th day. It was like, you know, when I was introduced to the big book and they would read the part and more about alcoholism, about reading inspirational books

and, you know, physical fitness. I mean, I never identified more in my life. Like my sisters were giving me books like Dream your own dream, what color is your balloon, all this kind of stuff. And what it said. We take a physical exercise system. Jenny Craig I with the infomercials at the end of my drink and I'd be up at 1:00 watching these infomercials in the first week. I got some freeze dried. I don't even know what kind of food. My sponsor was like, why don't you just put that away?

I was going to go back to church because that was going to fix me in the first week. And my sponsor said, look, I'll never discourage you can go to church. But being part of a, a, it's not a requirement that you go to Catholic Mass every Sunday. That's not, that's not what this is about, you know, And so we talk about spirituality and we talk about my organized religion and those kind of things. And I didn't go to church for a very long time. I just set up. This is all I can handle. All I can handle right now

is focusing on the spiritual thing and trying to work these steps and not drink. And my life has gotten easier and easier. And I'm not talking about

the things that have gone on that have caused me turmoil, loss of pregnancies, loss of children. You know, the things that have happened to me in my years and sobriety have happened to me and what I found in all those things that I can share that experience. I don't know who's going to come to me in the next 10 years and tell me they lost both their parents in six weeks. But I can tell you that I'll be prepared to help them.

I've had women come to me after I lost pregnancies and say I need help. I don't, you know, And then every pregnant woman in the world came to me after they, you know, I lost my baby and all of a sudden I got all these pregnant women, you know, that are like, I need help. I don't know how to stay sober, go to meetings, do this, whatever. And I help them because that was what God wanted me to do. And I was happy for them. See, I don't genuinely take away from anybody's happiness because I've had sadness anymore. And when I was sad, believe me, if my day was going to ship, yours was too.

And I would take you down with me. I mean, immediately Sundays, I would get up on the weekends and I would immediately pick a fight with my husband because I wanted to go out and drink. I wanted to look like we had this relationship. And on the weekends, we did things together, read paper, played tennis. And there I couldn't get the paper delivered to my house.

My experience of playing tennis was I'd start a few lines of cocaine and I go out and I play tennis with my sister like I did nothing. It was all everything recreational involved drugs and alcohol. I wanted to look a certain way. So like my underwear would match my nail Polish and match my lipstick match my shirt and I would be puke and whole tomatoes out my nose by no time as I drank so much and drunk so much that I thought if I ate something everything would be OK. I was one of those drunks that would like throw up in her dresser drawer, shut it, find it three days later.

I had not had a solid bowel movement in a year. I could my whole system was completely shut down from drugs and alcohol and I was 26 years old and I could have used A at 20. Like I remember dropping out of college, driving home, saying to my my mother, I I can't stop drinking. I don't know what to do. And you know what? They did not know what to do with me. I had a grandfather live with us for a period of time. He would urinate in the corner of the bedroom. My mother would bring a maintenance fears and every once in a while he'd get loose and he'd run down a tyranny's bar and my brother, my older brother would drag him back.

That is what I knew about alcoholism. I was not peeing in the corner and I was not, you know, those things weren't going on for me.

But I had a brother that peed every time he drank and I swore he was going to, you know, it was like he peed in the closets. We'd all be like, you know, afraid. It was awful. And then I, of course, you know, then you go on to sleep with people that pee on you and,

and I came to a a thinking, well, I wasn't a bed wetter, but if you're sleeping with people that went to bed, you get wet.

I really don't think there's much difference.

And so I had to identify with what I heard, and I identified with a lot of men and I identify with a lot of women. And those are the two types, Alcoholics that I know, male and female. And the beauty for me is that I no longer suffer,

you know, from that hopeless state of mind and body that I really, honest to God, have recovered from that seemingly hopeless state of mind, body. And all I have to do is ingest 1 drink and I'm done. And you know what, What I mean about like is that I will die that spiritual death that it describes in the big book. I might not die right away. I'll want to die. But I doesn't mean I'm going to go out and get hit by a car. It doesn't mean I'm going to overdose. It doesn't mean any of that. What it means is that I'm going to walk around knowing what I know about

this disease in the true nature of you know, I am now armed with the truth about myself

and I wanted to blow my brains out when I got here. Imagine the progression of that, that period of time of what I will feel like if I take 1 drink. And as much as I'd like to thank live and come in here, maybe people would miss me. You know, what I know is that I will do until another one comes along because I'll tell you what, I've been here a long time. There are people that I have loved in a A and all of a sudden they're gone. And then a period goes by where you call them and you wonder where they are.

And then

five years ago by and they show back up and you realize you haven't thought about them for four or five years because you know what? There's so many of them. There's so many relationships and there's so many people to help and there are so many people that need help. That's the thing about doing this work in a A is that I really feel a very strong responsibility to continue on this path because there are people that need help. And so people that are doing the work. I would encourage you to continue to do your work because there are people that need you,

like desperately need you could be the guy sitting next to you. They haven't talked to you yet. Maybe he needs you could be somebody you're going to meet tomorrow if you go to a detox meeting. But I couldn't get out of myself or get anywhere until I did this work because I couldn't sit next to somebody and say, how are you? Have you been to this meeting before? Do you need help? Have you tried to come to a a before? You know, and you know the part in the big book where it says, oh, go out, drink.

You know, people will pull things out of the big book randomly like our hats are off to you, go try some control drinking. Go drink for a year.

If you read on, it says we can be of most help to Alcoholics when we help them understand the thinking that precedes the first drink. So if you're thinking about drinking, you have an obsession to drink right now and you need some help, talk to somebody about the thinking that precedes that drink. What is it? Is it you don't have the right woman? I mean, is it you don't have the right man? Is it you want the right job, whatever it is that's got this obsession that's driving you to think,

OK, I've got to have all these things to be OK.

That's not true. It's the lie. Like, for me, there were a lot of lies that I would tell myself. I'm not going to drink tonight. I'm going to go home. I'm going to cook dinner for this man because that's what people do when they're married. I'm going to do my laundry. And what would happen is I would ingest the drink, and then that was it. So the lie I told myself is I'm not going to end up drunk on Peaks Island. I'm going to stay right here in town. And somebody would say, hey, I'm going, there's a booze cruise. We're going down, you know, Casco Bay. Why don't you come with us? We'll be back by 11,

I tell myself, I can get back my leather. I can get up tomorrow. I got to work the early shift, but if I take the 11:00 boat, I'll have six hours to sleep it off, and I can do that. And you know what happened? I wouldn't make it back. I'd be calling out from work, whatever I drank on the lie and I ran into the tree, you know? So now the thing for me is how am I going to cultivate this relationship with God under all circumstances when my parents are dying, when I'm selling my house, when I got a lot of stuff going on in my life

and I just keep saying, please, God, remove my fear and direct my attention to what you'd have me be. Help me to not direct this to my husband because when I'm in fear and he's in fear and we got stress and you know, it was a lot going on the other day. We had this little thing and I'm like, you know what, my parents just died six months ago. I'm selling my house. I got a four year old. We're in the dead away. Like, you know, I got to consider these things. It's stressful, but I also don't want to inflict myself on the people around me. So how am I going to do that? I have to go to God. I have to go to my

I have to work with other people. I have to do this stuff to get out of myself. So what am I not willing to give up to have a better relationship with God? Am I going to stop? Like every time we go to see a house, I lay in bed. My husband will say, I'm sorry I woke up. Like if he whatever snores and I, I'll say, that's OK. I'm just redecorating that house. We just looked at like this is the stuff I'm doing in the middle of the night. I'm like, please, God, help me sleep, like get everybody and everything out of my bed because I got to go to sleep. I got I got responsibilities tomorrow. Like it seems minimal to you.

Stuff that we store in our heads is just ludicrous. I mean, it's unbelievable to me what we can keep going around there. And the only way I know out of that is is really to go to God, you know, And

so, you know, if you're new, welcome. And you know, what I can tell you about my experience here is there really is a solution. It really does work. I'm not kidding you when I say that my life has gotten better and better and better. And I'm not saying it's been without. You know, I've had I've had scrape your chin on the sidewalk kind of sorrow and I've had joy where you got to peel me off the ceiling. I mean, it's that it's that there have been that extremes. And I don't think that's any different than anybody else who's out there trying to function in this world.

I just don't use alcohol to sedate myself, to comfort myself. I have to go to God for that kind of

Peace of Mind. And the last thing I'll say is that, you know, when I came here to a a, it was really my relationship with God. Pretty much this is it, God damn it, or God help me. So the idea that I would come here and come to know God and come to and be willing to take a regular look at myself,

you know, make restitution as needed, know that I'm not I'm human, that there is no way I'm going to get perfect, that I am going to get angry, that I'm going to, you know, I'm going to retaliate. I can still be manipulative, all those kind of things. What happens is this internal barometer says to me, that's not the right thing. That was not the right thing that you said to that woman. That was not the right thing. You shouldn't have repeated this. You shouldn't have done whatever, whatever it is

that I can say to myself that's not OK, and then I can go back and take care of it. So then I get to go out and be free

because I don't have all this stuff in my head that tells me I'm not good enough. I shouldn't have done this. I mean, I remember teaching 6th grade math at your level when somebody says the last thing you were saying when they go on.

I was teaching 6th grade math and I taught it for a whole year and I was going every day before I had done this work. And I would say they're going to find out. I don't know how to add I was teaching 6th grade math, but I'm telling myself every day they're going to find like they're going to find the, I don't know what the hell it is. Are you guys going to find out about me? Stuff I don't even know yet. But I had this thing that was like, if somebody was looking at me, they must know,