Kerry C. from Tannersville, CA telling her story at the Men Among Men Groups's conference in Reykjavik, Iceland

Hi, I'm Carrie. I'm an alcoholic. I want to tell you what a pleasure it is to be here. I was here in 2004 and I had such a wonderful experience. I think

I, I took the week that I spent here in Iceland home with me and it changed me in a profound way because I got to see some wonderful people who really, really do live this program and who are very excited, enthusiastic about it. And I got to experience this week where I, I spent in fellowship here and I made some wonderful lifelong friends. And I've been able to

take that experience back to America and

bring that enthusiasm where I live. And so to be back here on short notice, but back here nonetheless, you know, it, it, it's a beautiful thing. And you see a lot of the same faces. That to me is the miracle of Alcoholics Anonymous 'cause we, you know, alcoholism is a deadly disease and our chances of actually recovering and staying sober for any extended period of time,

it's pretty, pretty rare to. So to see some of the same faces and some of the same people

that I saw seven years ago tells me that whatever it is that you guys are doing here, you're doing it and you're doing it well. That you're carrying a message that truly, truly transforms an alcoholic from being a hopeless wreck to being somebody who could be vital and useful in their society. And I see people today and I and people have, I didn't think would Remember Me or like, oh, I remember you from that and I remember your husband. And I'm, I'm like, for me to think that, you know, I spent a week here and that

for whatever reason, God was able to use me because on myself, you know, I'm kind of useless kidding. But God was able to use me in a way that, you know, that people remember and that had an effect on them. So you guys affected me and I affected you. And we got to go about our lives and meet again seven years later and say, wow, the fellowship of the Spirit is broad and it is beautiful and it is something to behold and it is magnificent.

You know, And I was thinking about it as I've been talking all day and I'm, I have to tell you that I've been up since 5:00 in the morning yesterday.

So I'm going to apologize

because I left my brain somewhere,

somewhere this afternoon. Like it's gone, it's vacated. What you're seeing right now is pure primal energy and God, because I pretty much was about to pass out a couple out, I was like nodding, you know, and I'm like, I I really need to be awake because you know what, I have a job to do and I can sleep later. So I'm here to do my job and then eat something and go to bed. So

but what I want to say first and what I always do and you've heard this many times today my sobriety date is September 6th, 1994. My sponsors name is Peggy and my Home group is the way out group in Tannersville, PA. And I like to start my talk like that because it tells you one what I'm doing. And Alcoholics Anonymous tells you that I'm an active member and good in good standing, tells you that I'm accountable and tells you that I haven't had a drink, which is what qualifies me. And you know, there's, there's an old preamble that my husband and I

to use. We have a, we have a house meeting out of our house. Well, of course we have a house meeting out of our house. See, this is where the exhaustion is coming in.

Some of this is going to get lost in translation and I hope you can fix it when you translate it. Anyway, we have a big book meeting out of our house and we have this old preamble from like 1940 something or other. And it says that, you know, when, when an alcoholic drinks a member of Alcoholics Anonymous drinks that they lose all status and Alcoholics Anonymous meaning not that you're not a member,

not that you're not, we don't like you. But it means that something happened in in this cake, the spiritual cake that we're making these directions

that we're following, and you need to redress these things because something's missing.

Because what happens is is there is that this program is intended to produce a spiritual experience that is sufficient to overcome alcoholism.

The big book, my big book says that it asked me if I have a sufficient substitute for alcohol, meaning God or a relationship with God. And so

when someone, an alcoholic, you know, is no longer sober, it means that if you come into AA and you're given the proper information, you're informed about the facts of what it means to be an alcoholic. You're told that there's a program of recovery and something happens in the translation of that, and you're not able to take that information and apply it in some way. It means that the grace of God hasn't come into our lives and has to relieve our alcoholism.

So, and I, you know, my husband and I, we, we read this preamble and we talk with the women, the women and the men that we sponsor. And we explained that

there's something more to being in Alcoholics Anonymous or being an Alcoholic Anonymous then parking my butt in the chair. You know, and it's important that we, if we're to remain sober and live on a spiritual basis, recognize that there are some responsibilities that we have to the program of recovery. So what I want to talk to you about is what it was like, what happened and what I'm like now. And The thing is, is that,

and we've been talking a lot today about drinking and about what it means to be an alcoholic. And for anybody who wasn't here earlier, I'm going to quickly explain this to you just so it so that it makes sense what I'm about to talk to you about. So I have a disease called alcoholism. And what that means is that I have a physical craving. I have a mental obsession in the spiritual malady. My physical craving is when I put alcohol in my system. For whatever reason

I'm not able to control how much I drink once I start. I have a mind that says this time it'll be different,

that it's OK to drink because I'm justified by some slight or some jealousy, bitterness, whatever's going, anger, resentment, fear. So this mind justifies that

or it just doesn't care about the consequences of my drinking. And I have a spiritual malady that tells me that no matter what I do, I'm just not enough. And what I'm, what I, what I really like. And, and I, and I'm going to bore some of the men in the, in the meeting and I apologize, but there's not a whole lot of women who talk about what it's like as a woman to get sober. You know, we, we US women suffer through men laboriously. No offence to you guys laboriously detailing what it means for them to get sober.

But there's a ratio and it's a little less so in Iceland, I see. Because you guys are much more,

you guys have a, you're much more equal and an equal opportunity. I think that there's a less of a gender bias in your society. But in general, men outnumber the women in Alcoholics Anonymous. And we have to ask ourselves why. Why is it that men are able to stay here and the women aren't? And I'm going to tell you why, and you're not going to like it

unless you're doing what I'm telling what I'm talking about. And then you're going to be like, yeah, she's right. But

but the reason why the men are sticking and the women aren't is because the men are active in their 12th step, because there's a, there's a principle about the 12 step and it's a cyclical thing. See, my first step was somebody else's 12th step. My 12th step is somebody else's first step. If I'm, if I have the spiritual awakening and I follow the principles of the program

and I make this a, a cake because there's instructions and directions, right? It's a recipe for spiritual experience. And the idea here is that if I only follow some of the instructions

attractive, the ones that make me feel good, I'm not going to get a cake. I'm going to get a sloppy mess. Right. You ever like, just throw a bunch of shit in a bowl, mix it up, throw it in the oven, and it tastes like crap? Well, if I define my program of recovery, that's what my program of recovery cake is going to look like.

But when I follow the instructions of the big book, I get a pretty set patented, quantifiable experience. And there's a difference between something that's quantifiable and something that's qualifiable. And what I mean by that is that quantifiable is reliable, tested, and if you do the same thing over and over again, you get the same exact result.

I had a quantifiable experience with alcohol.

I felt empty, alone, and miserable. I put alcohol in my body and I didn't feel that way anymore. That was quantifiable. That was AI can verify that I was miserable put alcohol in my body. I'm not

that works.

And the 12 steps of Alcoholics Anonymous are also

quantifiable because if we follow the instructions that are laid out in the book, we're going to get an experience that Bill describes. And he says that the very precessor concepts and ideas that an alcoholic had, which were the guiding forces in our lives, will be cast aside. An entirely new concepts and motivations will dominate us. Meaning I was running my life. I did a bad job.

I had bad instructions and I sucked at it. I did the 12 steps.

I learned new ways to deal with things and I suck a lot less

very clearly.

And that's a measurable experience because I can look at somebody and they can look at me and the awakened spirit within me and the awakened spirit within them kind of say, hey, we're on the same page.

I feel that you know what I'm talking about because we've had the same experience. So

the program of recovery is pretty predictable. There's certain things that happen as we progress through this process. So if I'm making this spiritual cake and I'm creating this myself, I might be making a very beautiful cake and it might be awesome, but it's not. The program of recovery outlined in the big book of Alcoholics Anonymous is carries Anonymous, right? Because I designed it.

The flaw in that is that self will

is run rampant in my life and so when I design my own cake, as beautiful as it might be, it's probably going to get me drunk because I decided that it was good. And let's face it, my decision making skills when I'm an untreated alcoholic pretty much suck. My decision making skills as a recovered alcoholic can sometimes suck. That's why I have 1011 and 12 in the sponsor.

You know, we'd be clear about this. So the idea is that I have this

I have this disease that requires me to have this spiritual experience. The spiritual experience in the directions for this is out is laid out in the big book of Alcoholics Anonymous. But the question is, is why is it that this disease that I have requires

have this spiritual experience? Why is it that as a human being can't just figure out what's wrong with me, fix it and go about my merry business? And that's the thing about being an alcoholic is that it's not some it's not an external or

a something that, you know, I can meet on the street and I'm not going to say, oh, you have alcoholism just by looking at you. It's something, you know, where is, you know, if we have certain other diseases, have certain other problems, sometimes they're readily apparent from the outside. The thing about being an alcoholic is there something within us that's off different and just doesn't plain work

in the way that it should. So I have this, I have this

physical allergy, right? Meaning I put alcohol in my system. I can't control how much I drink, right? And I have this mental obsession that says that drinking is a good idea, no matter how bad it was the last time I drank, right? And I had that spiritual malady that says that whatever it is, I'm just not good enough. And those things I carry within me, they're not something that's, like I said, readily apparent on the outside. So I look all normal and nice to have people. And then I do these incredibly crazy,

horrible things and they're shocked that this person that they thought was just such a normal human being can be so incredibly dumb at times. And the thing about being an alcoholic is that it's, for me, it, it wasn't a matter of just changing one aspect of my life. If it was a matter of just deciding to think differently about myself or think differently about you or think differently about alcohol, if that was within my power,

you know, I could just change my mind about certain things and my life would get better, right? But the thing about being an alcoholic is that I could know all of the things that I need to be doing, yet be unable to, for whatever reason, manifest those things in my daily life. And I'll give you a perfect example.

I've been married for a really long time. It feels like a long time. It's, you know, been with my husband. It'll be 17 years in March. So I've been with him for a really long time. And ever get into an argument with with your significant other? And it's just a stupid, silly argument about something just so ridiculous, right? But neither one of you guys will back down, because if you back down,

why don't? You'll be wrong, right? And we can't ever be wrong.

And you're talking and you're having this argument first. It's not heated. It's just a debate because you think a debate is a lively thing. We're having an intellectual interchange, right? And this is the things I tell myself about this debate. And all of a sudden it starts kind of getting personal. And I'm kind of digging in in my perspective because I, I need to make him understand that I'm right, Right. So all of a sudden, what was it just a normal conversation about, I don't know, politics,

food, the kids

paint, you know, all of a sudden starts to become this thing where like the two of us are in our corners and we're backed in and we're we're not given right. And my brain is saying to me, if you shut up right now,

this will stop. Just go have a cigarette, man. Go call Esponsee. Why don't you just pray? There's that thing called pause that you tell everybody all your response needs to do. Why don't you just try doing that right now? And my Matthew's going, I'm like

brains going shut up, shut up, will you just shut up? And I'm and

10 minutes later we're having an argument about something. I forgot how it started. I don't even know what my point was. I lost all context of the conversation and all I know is I'm pissed off, he's pissed off and we we just and then and then I do the perfect al Anon thing that I love, which is this talk is getting heated and I got to go. So then I totally blame him for something that I did right.

And I said, and I say, I say, I say, well, you know, why don't we talk about this when you're calm? Meanwhile, like I've pushed every button he's got,

so he's yelling and I'm standing there all smug and quiet like haha, I got you to yell about paint, right? And my brain just saying shut up, just shut up. And I can't.

I just can't because I might know what the right thing is to do. Shut your mouth and go home. Be quiet and behave yourself

Well. For whatever reason, I can't make what my brain knows to be right manifest in action, right? Because there's a disconnect there. And that disconnect is my spiritual malady. It's that powerlessness that we're talking about and that we've been talking about all day. I think that was the theme of this little thing here is what it means to be powerless and what one has to do in order to gain access to that power. So

I'm powerless because on my own,

I can't make what I know to be right work.

Even if I'm doing the right thing, I usually do it wrong. You ever? Like you're talking to somebody and you're absolutely right in what your observations, but your approach just sucks. And they shut down. They don't hear you and they're pissed off and you don't know why. Because you were right.

Yeah, I did it a lot

less so now less so. But the idea here is that lack of power is my dilemma, right? And I have to find a power by which I can live, and it has to be a power greater than myself. So when I do these talks, I mean, I like to talk about and say, OK, you know, yeah, I drank alcoholically. I can give you a perfectly perfect example of what craving, mental obsession look like. And I I was an alcoholic synonymous for about a year and I hadn't had a drink. But

because I was the good alcoholic that I was, every time I went to rehab I would fake a new mental illness. So I got better pills.

So I would leave rehab with like, I don't know, like, you know, Valium, Thorazine. I really like Thorazine. Things like that. I really like Thorazine,

so Ativan, that's another one. So I would leave the hospital or the rehab with, you know, a script for Ativan, which I would then drink and take. That's a real recipe for an OD if you ever saw one. But my point is, is that, you know, I spent a year

without putting alcohol in my system, maybe taking some pills every now and again because my doctor said I could. Treating my spirituality through, you know, better chemistry didn't work very well, you know, dating and Alcoholics Anonymous because my my my perception of what it meant to be a member of a a was making coffee, chairing meetings and sleeping with the men

sounded like a good idea at the time.

So as I was making my way through my Home group,

I meet my husband,

he's got three days sober. I got a year that I'm lying. I'm going to AA every I'm going to AA. I'm making all these meetings and I'm lying saying that I'm sober, but I'm really not because I'm, you know, popping pills and not as prescribed.

And I and I meet him and the first thing he says to me is,

you know, I did a lot of acid. Well, first he says. I'm on parole

and I did a lot of acid and I really like you. I'm not sure if you're real. I could be in an asylum right now,

but since I really like you, I hope this is real and I'm not just locked up somewhere. And I said I'm going to take him home to mom.

I did. She actually really likes him by the way. But

so I meet this guy, he's perfect. I'm 17, he's 25. That's perfect, right? He's legal by booze. It's perfect for me. So I meet him in an AA meeting. We decide that we're going to go out for one night. We're going to go out and drink. And I'm going to come back to a A the very next day. Because they always said, well, if you drink, you don't lose the time. You don't lose the wisdom you learned in Alcoholics Anonymous. You just lose your tongue

and you could just start over.

Relapse is, you know, part of getting sober.

OK, well, you know, I hadn't relapsed in a year. I was owed 1. So I go out and I said I'm just, well, actually I went to two meetings and I and I said to myself, if this meeting sucks, I'm going to go drink. So I went to the first meeting and it really kind of didn't suck. So I had to go to another meeting

and that meeting really did suck. So I went and drank.

So we go out and I and my, we go out and we buy it. We buy this booze and my husband, who is my boyfriend at the time, says, you know, here's a meeting list and a bunch of phone numbers. Why don't you not drink? But I'm going to go drink. And I'm like, you're not drinking without me. So we drank. We drank and drank and drank and drank and drank and drank that night.

So me, I'm 85 lbs at this time because, you know, I don't eat. I just drink. I just take pills. And now I'm drinking again. So I'm 85 lbs and my husband is 6 foot four and he's drunk on the ground and I'm dragging him through this park, you know, trying to get him home, you know, because I, I met him on a did I say I moved in with him

in like 2 days?

I had already run away from home. I, I,

I was living with this like 35 year old guy who had two ex wives and a couple kids. They weren't living there at the time, but I kind of, I kind of figured, you know, sugar daddy,

I was very much like that.

So but but he kind of, he wasn't as cool as my husband. So I found a new sugar daddy. You know, I kept that one, but

Needless to say, I move in with him with my hefty bag from the the other guy. And so we're we're we're we're stumbling home. I finally get him up the stairs and he passes out. I pass out. We wake up the next morning and he goes, we got to go back to a A and I said, now I'm going to go buy some booze

and maybe some acid

craving.

I said I can drink tonight. I'm I deserve it. I'm young. I'm not really an alcoholic because you have to be old and fat and, you know, and bald and you have to have a penis to be an alcoholic. I don't have any of those things.

So I'm not an alcoholic. So I can drink, right? Well, no. I put alcohol in my system. And the problem is with me is I don't get done with alcohol. Alcohol gets done with me. So I drank every day for four months. And at one point my husband decided that he wanted to go back to Alcoholics Anonymous. So I locked myself in the bathroom with a bottle of booze and a razor and threatened to kill myself if he he went back to a, a 'cause then he was gonna have to he was gonna get sober. And I wasn't done drinking. I knew I couldn't stop, so I figured I'd

codependent manipulate him in that beautiful way that only alcoholic women can do.

So we drank for another month or two, then we went back to AA. What? I decided it was time. I'm kidding,

but

perfect, perfect, perfect example of mental obsession and physical craving and of course spirituality because I'm was absolutely spiritually bankrupt, you know, and this is my point. So I have this disease. That's a perfect example of that.

But the question is, is how did I get from being like that to standing here today

still with the same drunk parolee? He's not on parole anymore, though, because it's been a long time, you know, and in a completely different frame of mind, I'm still the same person, but I'm not. How did that happen?

Well, part of it is, and this is this is not, this is not what you guys have going on here, but part of what recovery looked like where I lived was, you know, a lot of hand holding, bubble bath taken

head patent. Oh, your poor baby bullshit. So I would go into the meetings and I would whine and cry and complain and tell my sob story. And I got one. I got a good one. Actually. I got a good, nice story that would have you guys tearing up real good.

And I would tell this story and everybody would say, poor Carrie, no wonder why she's so fucked up.

And I didn't get any better. And I used to hear people say, you know, a problem shared as a problem half. So I would walk in and say, well, I was molested from the ages of five to the ages of 12. And then I was date raped at 14. And then I was raped again at 16. And my brother liked to throw me down flights of stairs. Thank you for letting me share.

I didn't get any better.

None of that stuff went away. I walked around a perpetual victim, constantly afraid and always, always feeling as if

there was just something that other people had a secret that they had about how they went about their lives that I just could not access. And feeling as if, you know, I just, I missed that day in class. And I was always just trying to catch up and figure out just how do you have a conversation with somebody? How do you say no without screaming? You know, how do you say I don't like that without throwing pots and pants? How do you do that?

See, these are things that I just didn't know how to do when I got sober because my emotions own me,

My past owned me. Every little thing that ever happened to me owned me in 1000 ways that I was constantly at the mercy of the things that I believed happened and the things that did happen. So there. There's a wonderful thing about an alcoholic is that we create our own drama when we don't have any,

and we live in constant drama when we got some good stuff.

So I spent five years in Alcoholics Anonymous, in and out, in and out, working the system,

and I spent two years in Alcoholics Anonymous desperately trying not to drink and dying inside. My husband and I got sober on the same day. We drank together, We got sober together, and

we tried to kill each other for the first two years that we were sober because we were miserable, angry, resentful, frightened little kids who pretended to be adults. So I'm 18 years old.

I put down alcohol because God gave me the grace to do so. You know, so kept me in that grace, in that beautiful bubble of grace until I was able to get a message of depth and weight to relieve that spiritual malady. And I think part of the reason why that happened was because I was able to use my daughter as a higher power because I got pregnant

within 30 days of getting sober. Actually, when my daughter was born, we were really worried because we smoked a lot of dust

and I was like, you know, dust is PCP and it causes a lot of birth defects. So when my daughter was born and we're like, OK, everything's where it should be Good. We we, we conceived her when we were detoxing, not when we were using. Great.

So you know, I find out that I'm pregnant, I'm 60 days sober and I'm homeless. I'm living on a member of Alcoholics Anonymous couch which happened to be my husband's ex-girlfriend. She's a St. Because I was evil

and she let me sleep on her couch.

My parents had disowned me. My parents are Irish Catholic. And one of the things about being Irish Catholic is, you know, you're not allowed to fornicate or anything like that, right? And you're certainly not allowed to get knocked up, and you're certainly not allowed to get knocked up at 18 out of wedlock with a parolee. That doesn't happen.

So my mom, my parents were nonetheless

not excited about the developments in my life and they had. They had actually disowned me,

not disowned me. That's not even the word. They had detached with love

when I was when I had relapsed and I was really thoroughly in my addiction. I can remember I was on a street corner doing what I what what I do, which is buying some non conference approved substances with a bottle of booze in my hand. And my mother's coming home from work and I'm in the middle of East Orange. And East Orange is,

well, it's kind of like Harlem, but it's in Jersey, OK. It's not a very nice place to be. So I'm this little hit like I'm wearing. I think I was barefoot. I don't even know if I owned shoes anymore. It was the summer, though. I was walking around, you know, E Orange, you know, barefoot. And I a mess. And my mother's driving home from work and she just happened to drive past me at that very moment when I have the bottle and my money

and she walks eyes with me

and she just shook her head and kept driving. She passed her 18 year old daughter barefoot in the middle of the ghetto pine stuff with booze under her arm. And it was too painful for her to stop because she knew that I would break her heart again and she just had to drive. And I, you know, when I made amends to her, which I have, she told me that she cried her eyes out that day because she knew that I was lost.

So

I get sober and I think my family hates me because you know, I'm a self-centered alcoholic and I just think how dare you hate me. You made me an alcoholic, you screwed me up and now you don't like what you did and you're mad at me about it. Give me money,

you know, take care of me and make up for all your mistakes.

Entitlement was a problem for me

and, you know, so my parents were not, not too thrilled. So my husband and I, we, you know, we said we really have to do this a, a thing originally we kind of came in to dry out. I mean, one of the things that people like me do and Alcoholics Anonymous is I come in for a couple months and I, I use people in a, a, they take care of you, they give you rides, they give you a place to stay. They patch on your head and they listen to your drama. So you could feel a little better

and you get a little dried out, and then you go back to drinking, right? Because I don't want to get sober. I just want the pain to stop. I don't want to stop drinking. I just wanted the consequences to end. And the one place I knew where people would tolerate me, no matter how demented and sad I was, was Alcoholics Anonymous. So I came in with that intention, and God gave me my daughter day. He knew better than I what I needed in order to stay sober. Because I hated God when I came here.

I hated the idea of God. I resented God in the same way I resented my poor wonderful parents because he failed me, because he let bad things happen to me. And I couldn't understand how a loving God who was supposed to be protecting me could allow those bad things that I named. I wasn't making those things up happened to me. So I, you know, when people said, well, you know, you got to get a higher power. I'm like, I got a higher power. He sucks. I don't like him. He doesn't like me and

not playing.

They're like, we'll use AA as your higher power. And I'm like, it's full of perverts and old men.

You got to remember I was, I came in, came into Alcohol Anonymous, you know, really young. And men sometimes forget themselves around, you know, progressing girls. So every once in a while, a dirty old man would pinch my butt and I'd be like, see, that's why Alcoholics Anonymous sucks, you know, Because I wasn't talking to the women.

I was getting rides from dirty old men,

you know?

And then I wondered why I thought I suck, right? So anyway, so AA sucked. It was full of dirty old men. The women didn't like me because I didn't talk to the women. I talked to The Dirty old men's

God sucked because he punished me for something I didn't know what I did because I felt that when I was when I was in second grade, some bad stuff was going on in my life. I had some pretty horrific stuff, stuff that I eventually did bring to a counselor and we did some work on it after I got sober. Cause counseling is a beautiful thing to treat things other than alcoholism.

So I had outside issues, PTSD, things like that. And

and when I was in second grade, I went to church, my parents very Catholic. I got down on my knees and I begged God to make something stop. I said, you know, if you can make this stop, if you can make this person stop hurting me, I'll do anything you want. I'll become a nun, I'll do anything you want. And he didn't make it stop. So I said, fuck you, God,

you don't like me, I don't like you and we're not playing. I'm gonna take, I'm gonna take my ball and go home. And that's exactly what I did. And at that point, God and I parted ways and I wasn't having none of it. So I come into a a, they say get a God, but they don't tell me how to get a God. They don't tell me how to get a relationship with God. They don't tell me how to relieve, get relieved of all these resentments and fears and all these false beliefs and concepts and ideas that were driving me and causing me to think about God in terms of it. Santa Claus. And ATM, I mean, that's really how I looked at God. He was Santa Claus. He was

what I wanted whenever I asked for it. An ATM is supposed to give me money just like my parents.

So, you know, I'm looking at God in these terms. And nobody in Aqua Anonymous is saying, Gee, Kerry might want to write some inventory on that because you know what? You're delusional. They're saying just like, oh, I'm like God, I'm like, I don't want him to have it. I don't like him. He's going to screw it up. He screwed me up. I'm not giving him anymore. So what happened was, is I had a daughter and my daughter was my higher power for the first two years in recovery because I didn't want my daughter to experience some of the things I experienced in my life.

I wanted her to have a life that was better than my own. And because I believe that it came from a truly unselfish place and a true love for my child, God graced me with two years of sobriety.

But at the end of those two years, I'm an Alcoholics Anonymous and I'm sicker than I ever was. Not in the external thing. You know, I look good. You know, you know, I, I have a nice apt I, you know, I, I have all the things that one would say she's a functional member of society. But I would come to a a meetings and I would sit in the back of the room and I would get up to get a cup of coffee and I'd sit in the last row,

my brother coffee maker. And I was sure that all of you knew that I was getting up and you were secretly thinking about me

as I walked to the coffee maker. And you were facing forward, man. So everybody's facing forward. Nobody sees me. But I'm absolutely sure that I'm the most important person in the room. And you're all thinking about me and judging me because my butt's fat, because I'm not smart enough, because there's something wrong with me. And you know it.

So I'm in Alcohols Anonymous having panic attacks

over and over again. I can't even sit still. My hand shook, my knees shook. I was going completely insane and all I wanted to do was die. The problem was is I had already tried to die. My heart stopped for two minutes and I came back and I had a major suicide attempt when I was 16 and I woke up three late three days later in the ICU, intubated, pissed off because again, God failed me because dude, he doesn't even want me.

I tried to go home to him

and he said no.

So I can't die because I know suicides not working for me, drinking ain't working for me, living ain't working for me. And I knew, I absolutely knew that if I didn't do something, something didn't happen. I was going to be a horrible mother.

So out of justice, sheer God's will, kids MIT the beautiful way that this,

the beautiful way that that everything seems to come together at that perfect moment, at that perfect time when

it couldn't be any, it couldn't be any more perfect. I walk into a room and a a meeting full of big book thumpers that everybody told me not to go to that meeting because they were crazy. And in that meeting was sitting this guy who was going to study with the Dalai Lama. And it was the last.

He was actually doing a workshop and he had just happened to be at that meeting that night because one of his sponsors was chairing it. And

I'm in this meeting and they're talking about the amends. Now. I had worked the steps in my mind up until that point because I had a step book and I thought a lot about the four step. I thought a lot about the 5th step. And every once in a while I was sitting in a a meeting say something incredibly personal that would make everybody uncomfortable thinking that was a fifth step because I would hear things like I fist step all the time. I share in meetings dude.

There are certain things that just really don't belong in a a meetings.

I didn't get that.

And there's certain things that belong in a a meaning to let other people know that you can survive them depends on why you're doing it. So I was thinking about the four step a whole lot. I thought a lot about the A step and I decided that most of the people who were on my list didn't deserve an immense because they sucked.

So I made amends to the few people I felt were deserving of an amends

and I called it a day. So I'm sitting in this meeting and there's this guy talking about amends. And what he was saying was that my one's failure to make to finish their amends has something to do with whether or not they're going to drink again, because one's failure to make amends or when when someone says I'm not making an amends and we dug her, dig her heels in and we balk on something means that we really don't understand the desperateness of the situation of the alcoholic. You know when Bill uses the word doomed and hopeless?

Hopeless and doomed over and over again. He's not mincing words. He really means that the alcohol condition is hopeless without divine intervention. 1 gets that divine intervention through the process of the 12 steps.

He's explaining this in this meeting and I'm getting pissed because I think those people don't deserve my amend and I'm going to tell him that. So I raise my hand and I say this crazy stuff. I mean like I I exorcist on the meeting. My head spins around, pee soup flies out. I'm toxic,

like seriously toxic. And he just smiles like a smug little bastard.

I do that now too, which is really funny. So he smiles and he pulls me aside after the meeting and asks me some questions about, you know, my drinking, whether I have craving, whether I have mental obsession and spiritual malady. And I don't realize this because no one's ever brought me through the steps. So I really don't understand what he's doing. He's just asking me questions about stuff and I'm answering them. But I'm going, but you don't know. And he's just cutting me off. And they call somebody over, says you need to work with her. And I start working the steps out of the big book of Alcoholics Anonymous. I didn't even know

that I did. I just said this guy who looked like Captain if David Crosby and Captain Kangaroo had sex, that's what this guy looked like.

OK, so this Captain Kangaroo dude,

you know, basically threw me at this other person who said they're gonna save your life, you're dying, Just do what they say, please. And I said, OK, Captain Kangaroo,

I sit down and I start working out of the big book of Alcohol Anonymous, and I'm informed about the hopelessness of our condition. I'm informed about what it means to be an alcoholic. I realized that I had spent at that .7 years in Alcoholics Anonymous claiming to be an alcoholic, not knowing what it meant to be an alcoholic. For the first time in my life, I was truly able to diagnose myself because I knew