Cajun country roundup in Lafayette, LA

So Needless to say, this is about a 3132 hour trip and she's holding up. I'm just going to share kind of like Casey with my first sponsor gave me, because this is what I know this morning. I'm going to say the set aside prayer for y'all, and then I'm going to let Case Kerry take over. Please God, please help me to set aside everything I think I know about myself,

the 12 steps, this book, the meetings,

disease, and you God for an open mind and a new experience with all these things. Please let me see the the truth.

That's what I note today. Thank y'all. And here is Carrie.

Hi, I'm Kerry. I'm an alcoholic. I just want to thank you all. I've had a wonderful, wonderful 24 hours.

There's nothing like Southern hospitality and Cajun food served up north is just not Cajun food. I think that's, I think they just throw some spices on it and say, oh, that's blackened. So I absolutely enjoyed myself and I've really enjoyed getting to know you guys and talking to people. And, you know, I mean, that's what I like about conferences.

Yeah. I get to come up here every once in a while and I get to give an hour pitch, you know, and that's nice. I mean, I'm an alcoholic. I have an ego and I'm not going to lie,

It's, it's, it's fun, but it's really not why I like to do this. It's not why I like to travel. It's not why I like to go to conferences. Why? I like to go to conferences to see what y'all are doing and what

similarities and differences and how we're all applying the principles of Alcoholics Anonymous.

It it heartens me to go somewhere else with a completely different culture completely. Sometimes different languages go into different countries and seeing people in the fellowship of the spirit that we all apply these principles and we all get similar results. And to me, it helps to reinforce my faith in this program and in this process because there are times, I mean, just like anybody else, where I'm sitting here going, do I have to be unselfish again?

And I can look back and I can think about all these wonderful experiences when I get to talk to somebody,

but I have never met before and we're speaking the same language. We're having the same experience, and we're in this together. So that when I go home and I go back to my life and I have dirty diapers and I have bills to pay and the roads are flooded and I'm stuck at work or whatever little inconveniences that come up,

I can remember and I can look back and I can say it's all going to be alright. It always is and it always will be. It is exactly as it's supposed to be. So coming here and sharing this experience with you helps to carry me through and helps me to

believe more. I mean, there's something, there's something about the concept of faith and, and I can understand the principles of Alcoholics Anonymous from an intellectual level, but understanding them intellectually and living them are two very different things.

Alcoholics Anonymous is not an intellectual enterprise. If it was about thinking my way through circumstances, problems, alcoholism, I think I would have gotten sober a long time ago. But the fact is, is that it's not about that at all. It's about absolutely throwing myself into this experience and giving up what it is that I think that I need for myself and an understanding that what I think that I need and what I think that I want are the very things that are usually going to kill me,

you know? And when I give a talk, I like to talk about what it means to be an alcoholic. And the reason why I do that, and I always do that is because I spent a lot of time in Alcoholics Anonymous calling myself an alcoholic. And I didn't know what it meant to be an alcoholic.

I didn't know the definition of alcoholism. What I knew was that I got in trouble in the people around me were really pissed at me. That's what I knew. I knew that I went to a lot of rehabs. I came out and I drank. And so my perception of Alcoholics Anonymous and recovery was that recovery didn't work because I could not get sober.

Excuse me, I'm recovering. I have bronchitis. And so if I cough, excuse me on that one, but and I'm still smoking because, you know, God hasn't removed that one

anyway, so I thought that it didn't work because I couldn't get it. And I would come into the rooms, I would come into AA and I would see these happy people and they seem to be all right. And I just wasn't. And I couldn't understand why I was not okay. And I couldn't understand why I felt so worthless, less than and broken.

And for me, I mean, I, I am identify myself as an alcoholic, but I am what I am is truly a hopeless alcoholic. And it doesn't mean I'm helpless. It means that I'm hopeless.

And what that means to me is that no human power could have restored me to sanity. No human power could have relieved my alcoholism. I tried everything. I mean, I tried absolutely everything that I could do in order to stop drinking, and none of those things worked. I could stop, but I couldn't stay stopped.

And what I found was that

the I'm going to talk, I'm going to tell you about what my experience in AAA was up north. And obviously it's not what you guys have going on down here. I mean, what I hear down here is strong recovery, all 36 principles, the application of the principles in one's life. I hear God, I hear steps, I hear big book, I hear service. But that's not the a A that I grew up in, the AAI grew up in, was about sitting in a meeting and making coffee. It was about talking about your problems.

It was about wine, what I call lying and crying. So I came into Alcoholics Anonymous when I was 13 years old. My parents used to drop me off at the front door with a dollar and say, go in that church

and I'll be back in an hour. Because I grew up in a household in which my parents are not Alcoholics. They're adult children of Alcoholics. I'm one of five children. Four of us have darkened the doors of Alcoholics Anonymous, and I'm the youngest and I'm the youngest by 16 years. So while I was a little little guy,

my brothers and sisters were tearing things up. So my parents went to a place called Al Anon.

Yeah, without Alan on, I would not be standing here today. So my parents went to this place called Al Anon, and they said things like, you know, don't enable them.

Make him go to meetings, make them sign contracts, don't give her money, lock her out of the house. If she shows up drunk, put her back in rehab. Don't give in. Live your life, don't let your alcoholic rule you. And eventually they'll get sober. And that's exactly what happened. So my parents went to Al Anon. They learned these things. So while my brothers and sisters were enabled and my brother was bailed out of jail 100 times, they were in and out of rehab and they got patted on the head in a cookie. I got the tough love. I was really pissed about that for a really long time.

I mean, I used to sit in rehab and Stew. I'd be like, but my brother John shot heroin for 10 years. Nobody sent him to rehab,

you know. Gee, what an ungrateful little shit I was, Excuse my language.

So my parents would drop me off at Alcoholics Anonymous, send me in the front door, and I would go in there be a bunch of old men, and I would get the Alatin is down the hall. And I'd be like, I'm not here for Alatin. And I would sit in the corner and I would judge everybody.

I would say, OK, I'm not 40 years old. I don't have a penis. I don't belong here

and I'm out the door.

And then I discovered that there are young people's meetings and not young people's meetings are great because young people's meetings are places to pick up guys and get rides to, Well, where I used to go, which was Newark. And so I would show up at a young people's meeting and I would find a victim,

preferably who had a car

and I would say, I like you, would you like to go leave this meeting and get drunk right now? Why, yes, come on, let's go. So my poor parents, they thought they were doing right by me. And they were because I was able to come in contact with the program. I was able to come in contact with a fellowship, but I really wasn't getting what was going on here. And I really used it for a long time to to get out of trouble. It would be, you know, I would get caught doing something and

I would say, OK, I'll go to rehab again and I'll go to meetings. And eventually, you know, they'd stop paying attention. They'd stop, you know, watching every move. And the second they did, I was out the door and I ran away. And I was doing what I do. So I spent a lot of time around here, a lot of time raising my hand in meeting, saying that I was an alcoholic. I didn't really understand what it meant and what it means to me today. And what was explained to me today was that I have a physical allergy, meaning that when I put alcohol in my body,

I can't control how much I drink. And that is my personal experience.

I got sober at 18. My actually my separate date is September 6th, 1994. So I drank for a total of maybe six years.

I like to say that I was a natural born alcoholic

and I think that, you know, that aptly describes me because the first time I picked up a drink, I had a spiritual experience alcohol. And it wasn't, it was just something so silly. You know, it was Thanksgiving. I was wearing, I remember, I remember what I was wearing. I was wearing a velvet jumper, green velvet jumper. And I must have been like six or seven years old. And my parents thought it would be funny if I drank a little bit of wine.

And I drank this wine and it just burned down my throat. And I felt warm inside. And I remember thinking, I must be grown up because I'm drinking. They must like me because they gave me alcohol. And I can remember the rest of the night kind of going around the table, taking little sips out of everybody's drink. Now, I've done that for I did that through my entire childhood. You know, somebody put a drink down and run away.

And I don't think they really noticed that that was going on because there was so much going on in my family.

My brother, my sister and my other brother were in and out of treatment centers and a A and struggling. So me drinking as a young child, I mean, really kind of got rushed under the rug. In fact, my brother, who is now sober, used to say that.

What he used to say about my childhood, the way I grew up, was that I was really cute till I was 5 and everybody loved me. And then I didn't exist anymore. And with that freedom, because of all this chaos going on in my household,

I really had a lot of freedom to do a lot of things.

So I got to drink, I got to sneak alcohol. I got to to get away with behaviors that were not acceptable for a young child to participate in

and my parents just pulled their, God bless their souls, just pulled their hair hair out. My mother is a Eucharistic minister and my dad is an usher in the church. They're pillars of the community, They truly are. They did not deserve the hell spawn that they gave birth to.

They really are wonderful people. But I grew up in a house that was violent. And it wasn't violent because my parents were violent people. It was violent because it was full of Alcoholics, full of addicts, fighting and brawling. And it was scary and unsafe, and the only time I ever felt safe or anytime I felt protected was when I drank.

So for me, I didn't see anything abnormal about how I related to alcohol because it was just the way that I saw that other people did it. And when I became old enough to be able to seek it on my own and sneak it on my own, I very much did. And so by the time I was 13, I was showing some serious signs of alcoholism. I had a physical allergy. I had a mental obsession.

You know, in in the big book it says that the alcoholic life seems like the only normal one.

I didn't see anything weird about the way that I was living my life. I didn't see anything strange about the way I didn't think it was strange for a nine year old to be sneaking Amoretta. I just didn't think that was weird. I mean, everybody else around me did it, You know, I didn't, I didn't get it, you know, I didn't see the way I didn't I didn't have dreams. I remember when I was real little, like eight or nine years old, think I wanted to be a doctor.

By the time I was 12, I wanted to be a drug addict.

I really did. I was going to grow up to be a junkie, a drug addict, and I was going to die in early death. And that was my plan for my life at

I didn't have any desire to be anything else. There were times there were small periods of small windows when I would say this time I'm going to be a good little girl. But deep down inside I didn't really believe it. What I aspired to be was a shiftless, useless, disgusting waste of space and to die as early as possible because I could not stand breathing.

And that's how I felt about my life and what my sponsor explained to me, that not being able to stand to breathe is called the spirituality.

Now it manifests for all of us differently, you know, but the root of it is self-centered fear that I carried around. This sense of self-centered fear, this feeling of worthlessness and uselessness, and this absolute terror that you were going to find out that everything that I was or everything I presented to you was a lie.

So what I developed was a very steady and studied sense of I don't care.

I was not going to care about you. I was not going to care about what you thought of me. What I was going to do was to do anything to make myself feel better and take away this pain. And if it hurt you too bad, I deserved it. I deserve to feel this comfort, and it was your fault

that I felt this way because nobody could ever possibly love me. Enough could give me the sense of approval and acceptance enough for me to feel all right. So I walked around the world with this sense of feeling unloved and unlovable because there was nothing enough for me. I remember my mom, I was a teenager, and she handed me this book. It was called I hate you, Please don't leave me. I read the title and I was like,

absolutely, I hate you. I don't want you,

but they absolutely need you. I need you to give me a sense of self because without you and without your approval, without you patting me on my head, I'm absolutely nothing.

And I walked around feeling like that for as long as I can remember. And I don't know, and I've worked with a lot of women in AA and, and I've, and I've talked with them and some of them crossed the line. Some of them were in pretty normal drinkers, pretty normal people, you know, had some unmanageability, maybe some fear issues, some problems. And somewhere along their life, they crossed into this line of this point of being of no control, right where they lost control of the amount they drink once they start.

I don't

remember ever feeling any of those things. What I remember feeling is terror, comfort and apathy.

That was the progression of my life. So by the time I was 14, I was absolutely apathetic. I didn't care. I didn't even bother going to school anymore. I didn't bother showing up. I didn't bother trying to be nice to my family. I didn't bother with anything that I thought society expected me to do or to be.

It didn't workout real well for me, but you know, that's later on.

So I had been in and out of these rooms. I had been in rehab, I had been in treatment, but nobody ever told me what being an alcoholic was. And it wasn't until I was 18 years old, until I got sober, until I read the big book, that it was explained to me. And actually knowing that I was hopeless gave me hope because it helped me to understand that, that that it wasn't that I was deficient and that Alcoholics Anonymous didn't work. It was that I didn't know what Alcoholics Anonymous was.

I thought Alcoholics Anonymous was just sitting around the tables talking about my problems in drinking coffee. I didn't understand that there were so much to what Alcoholics Anonymous is. I didn't understand the spiritual principles. I didn't understand the concept or the need to believe in a higher power. I didn't understand these things. I mean, I hated God as much as I hated everyone on the face of the earth, including myself.

I couldn't I I felt that it was cruel and unusual for God to have created, created me to feel that way

about myself and you. And so why the hell would I love or trust a God that made me a miserable human being?

How am I going to turn to a higher power that created a deficient being like myself?

How can I trust that? How can I believe in that? And then I'm told that I have to believe in this power in order to live. I don't even want to live.

And I felt completely and utterly desolate, alone and hopeless in a way that it is completely and utterly indescribable. Except for Bill says it perfectly in his story when he talks about the bitter moration self pity that quicksand stretched around him. He had met his match. Alcohol was his master

By the time I was 14 years old. That was my personal experience.

So this went on for a couple years and it went, you know, and I tried everything. My parents tried everything

that they could think of to interject between myself and alcohol. They sent me to live in the country with my sister, you know, And when you take alcohol away from the alcohol alcoholic, what happens while they come irritable, restless and discontent? So I got sent to live in the country when I was 15,

and

you need a car to get around there. I didn't have a license. So basically I was stuck in the woods with my alcoholic self and no access to alcohol. And during that year that I spent there one, I eventually did find people who drank like me. But during that year, I had three consecutive suicide attempts

and obviously the three times on the psych ward because of those suicide attempts, I was absolutely miserable and I just could not see any point anymore and even trying to function as a human being. So in that year, I had this, I had this aunt. This aunt was my guardian Angel during, during my, when I in my childhood because it was so violent in my household. I mean, it wasn't abnormal to be thrown down

stairs for the cops to be there. I mean, I've had more broken bones and I'd like to admit through

ruckuses that went on in my household. And again, it wasn't my parents who did it. I had older brothers and sisters who were significantly older than me and on drugs and alcohol and not necessarily in their right mind. So I, I experienced a tremendous amount of violence. And my aunt, who was my mother sister used to come in and she used to scoop me up and she's to Take Me Out of there. So I probably would have gotten a hell of a lot more beatings than I did had she not been there.

And she would be the one to get in front of me and protect me from blows and things like that, to shield me from the as much violence as she could. So while I was living with my sister at 15

and suicidal, homicidal, irritable, restless and discontent, she died suddenly without she had a stroke. And

I absolutely, I just, I cannot even describe the depression and the hatred I had towards God for taking the one person in my life who had ever shown me anything close to unconditional love.

And at that point,

I

stopped even trying in even the smallest way to be a member of my family. And I just

gave up. I can remember my mother came up to visit me. And this is something I'm not proud of. I got drunk, we got into a fight and I hit my mother. That was something we don't do. You don't hit your parents. You don't hit your mother. And I had such rage inside of me that I could not, I, I couldn't see why that was wrong.

So

what happened was my poor sister, who I've since made amends to by the way and have 12 stepped her son and sent her to Al Anon. So things are good now, but my sister sent me back to live with my parents and I had gotten into this private school because

the strangest thing is that God has made me incredibly intelligent. I'm actually my husband calls me an idiot savant. I can't parallel park my car.

I have trouble like just with keys and regular doors,

you know, any kind of normal, you know, like functioning stuff I cannot do.

But I have this crazy brain with with with basically what you would call a photographic memory. So this year that I spent suicidal, depressed, without alcohol, without enough alcohol because I couldn't drink everyday. I could only get it when I could get it

ironically, you know, the one place that you could go to get what you needed was school, because it were all in the woods. All of us as a regional school district. I actually live in the same town now

and nobody has a car, but somebody's always bringing something to school. So we'd all smuggle it to school. One of us would break into their parents liquor cabinet and bring it into school. So I actually went to school and by virtue of just actually sitting in the classroom and breathing there, some of it kind of us through osmosis sunk into my head and I ended up getting really, really good grades. I don't even know how

so I ended up passing, you know, the, the 9th grade

because I stayed back the year before because I didn't go. And I got into this really good private school and I came home and I remember thinking, and I remember talking to my parents saying, you know, and dot died and, and I'm absolutely depressed and devastated. But I don't think she would want me to live like this. And I'm really going to try this time. I'm going to do it. I'm going to try to stay sober. I'm going to go to

a A, I'm going to behave myself. I'm going to take this opportunity and I'm going to live my life

and I'm going to try and be try to do this so that I can make her proud.

I lasted two months.

By the time I was two months into this private school, I was in my set and my 5th rehab

and how that happened was very simple.

I behaved for a couple weeks.

I obsessed about alcohol constantly. I just held on and I went to meetings and I obsessed and I held on and I held on to one day I was walking down the street and somebody said, hey, care, you want to go get a fifth? Why? Sure sounds like a great idea.

And by that point, I absolutely knew it was coming. I knew that there was number controlling it. I knew that everything that I had built up, the dreams, the hopes that I had, the wanting to give it one last shot to just try to be a normal person was gone. So what I did was I ate the entire medicine cabinet and died for two minutes. My poor mother found me on the floor

and I woke up about a week later in the ICU

and I was pissed because I can't live, I can't drink, I can't die. God doesn't want me, I hate him, and there's nobody on the face of the earth that I can tolerate, including myself.

So naturally, I did with any good alcoholic does. I came out of rehab and I started drinking right away and I drank

until my mother had me arrested.

So I had this thing as I would run away a real lot. I was one of those. I was one of those ones. I was one of those kids, you know, where I just disappear for two weeks. My parents wouldn't know where I was. My shrink, my parents, all their friends would be combing the town and I'd be, you know, staying at some 37 year old guy's house

because that's what I did. When you're under 18 and you're not legal to buy alcohol and you're not employable, you do what you can. So I would find some dirty old man to hide out with who had a car and was, if he was unscrupulous enough to take me in, so to speak,

he was unscrupulous enough to provide provide me with alcohol as well. So I would find some dirty old man to hide out at his house and while my poor parents would scour the earth looking for me, thinking I was dead.

And one day I came home to break into my parents house because that's also what I do. I steal, I lie, I steal, and I hurt those around me. So I went to go break into my parents house. It was about 9:30 in the morning. My mother's car wasn't there. I hadn't been home in days. And I'm climbing in the the living room window and I have one foot over the window sill and there's my mother.

Apparently her car was in the shop and she had the day off from work.

So as I'm stuck in the window, she says to me, you can't come in this house and you can never come home again unless you're willing to go to rehab. Now this one, maybe the 6th rehab seven, I don't know. I don't know how many psych wards, I don't know how many four point point restraints. At this point it was just piling up man.

And I said what any good alcoholic does F you,

I'm going home. I'm getting out here, you know, So I took my rucksack, you know, which was filled with the clothes that I was that were dirty and smelly in a bottle. And I went to go find whatever dirty old man that I was staying with. And I waited a little while and I thought, you know, I'm sure she's gone now because I'm not bright. I'm not a good alcoholic. You know, you, you don't get sober at 18 because you're good at being an alcoholic. He gets over at 18 because you're really bad at being an alcoholic. I'm not sneaky,

I'm predictable,

I'm just completely and utterly tunnel vision. Must get money to buy booze now and if that means breaking into my parents house the second time thinking that this time she was not going to be home.

So that's what I did.

So she comes out up out of the basement and this time I'm through the window standing in the living room.

It's it's funny. So she calls the cops because this is what she was taught to do. So she caused the police and the police come and they say you're going to rehab. And I say no, I'm not. So they begin to, they try to grab me and what I decide to do is I'm going to fight 6 Bloomfield police officers in my mother's living room.

It didn't go over all that well.

I did end up in the back of that police car and I,

I got a police escort to my second to last rehab.

They waited till I was on the ward before they left. You know, they were intake, they're standing right in the corner. I did eventually go back and make amends to these officers and thank them for their efforts because they could have pressed charges and they didn't. And the part of the reason why I've been successful in my life today is because people saw that there was something in me that I could not see in myself

willing to give me the chance. And so these police officers didn't press charges. And I don't have a police record because of that. And they didn't go to juvenile detention. I went to rehab again. And I was in that rehab and I was able to stay sober for almost a year. I came to meetings. I did 90 dances in 90 days. I made a lot of coffee. I had a couple boyfriends.

I hung out and I thought, you know, this is it. I can do this. You know, I, I'll just, all I'll do is go to high school,

go to meetings and go to dances and maybe I'll go bowling and it'll all be OK.

And you know, the big book talks about the boy whistling in the dark, says that, you know, we whistle to keep up our spirits. But deep down aside, we would give anything to have a couple drinks without impunity. And honestly, the truth is, is what I wanted more than anything else was to drink. And what I just what I found was that non conference approved substances help me not drink. Now I'm an A A so as long as I don't drink alcohol, I'm sober, right?

So I found

that as long as I stayed really high, I didn't have to drink. And I would come in here and lie and say I was sober. I would, you know, talk about the steps that I thought about and I read about in the step book and that maybe I might do one day. And the other thing I discovered was the person with the biggest problem was usually the person who seemed to be like

the most popular in the meetings. And The thing is, is that I wasn't going to come in and tell you about what was really going on in my life. That I was suicidal every day that I had to take substances to keep from drinking. Every day that I lied to my family every day that I stole every day that I felt like a complete and utter failure and outcast in society. I would go to school and it would have panic attacks in the bathroom because I could not interact with people without

in my body because it kept me from killing myself and others. I couldn't say that because then you would actually know me. So I made stuff up.

I would like watch all my children and stuff. And then I would like come in and I would have a plot line. I would make stuff up and I'd be like, you know, you know, I mean, I, they all knew. And this is a beautiful thing about the, about the fellowship of Alcoholics Anonymous. No matter how screwed up you are, they just smile at you with that stupid smile and they pat you on the head and they give you that cup of coffee, absolutely knowing that you're completely and utterly insane.

And they go, isn't she sweet?

Maybe one day she'll get it. Let's just be nice to her.

And they did. And so like, here I am, I'm going to these meetings and these poor, poor people are tolerating my BS and my lying and conniving and manipulating and, and they're just smiling and I'm just hating them.

So what I did is I met my husband,

he was 25 and he when I met him, I met him at a meeting and he said to me, he said I just got off parole. And I thought,

my mom is really going to hate him. I'm 17, he's 25. Sounds like a good idea. So what I did was I, I was already by that point, I was already ready to relapse because I had already picked up a new sugar daddy and I was staying at his house. Part of how I pick up a sugar daddy you guys love this one is again, God forbid I tell the truth, I have to. I'm a complete and utter pathological liar. So what I do is I usually create a circumstance in which this person has

take care of me because I'm not taking care of myself. I'm not going to be a partner in this relationship. I'm not showing up in any way, shape or form. But I have to make you care about me enough to tolerate the fact that I'm completely and utterly insane.

So what I usually do is blackened my eye and punch myself in the eye,

you know, must my hair up and say my dad beat me up again, can you take me in? And they go,

this poor sweet girl,

she, she's in such an abusive household. And you know, I can't let her go home.

Let me take care of her. And then I move in and I kick you out of your bed. I'm in your bed, I'm eating your food. And then I'm dating other people while I'm living at your house, letting you think that maybe, just maybe, I might sleep with you one day.

And eventually they get, they catch on and they throw me out. But it works for a little bit. So I had one of those going on when I met my husband. And of course, what do I do? I trade up.

The guy I was staying with was a 37 year old biker with two ex wives and a bunch of kids. So you know, you know, 25 year old handsome man off parole. Perfect.

So what my husband and I do is we go out and we drink because that's what I was looking for. I was looking for somebody to drink with me and take care of me and buy me my alcohol and hold my hair when I vomit and keep me out of trouble. And he was great for that. He was perfect for that. Now my husband is is what you would call just like myself, a complete and utter hopeless alcoholic. Both of us have been around Alcoholics Anonymous for years and could not get it.

So you know we were match made in hell. We drank together, we tortured each other, we fought, we threw things, we vomited everywhere. We were evicted from our apartment. It was awesome.

In three months I had a year abstinent from alcohol, controlling my desire for it with non conference approved substances.

I picked up alcohol and when I was three weeks after my 18th birthday. And here was my brilliant plan.

I was going to go out and drink because I deserved a drink. Because

I'm 18 and all the 18 year olds go to frat parties now. I wanted to go to frat parties too, and I had gone to them when I was in high school. But you know, now that I'm 18I, I'm of age to start doing these things, right?

It didn't matter that I had dropped out of high school. Like, you know, a couple months ago, there was number way that there was number plans to go to college. There's no plans to graduate high school, get a GED or do anything like that.

But I deserve to go to frat parties, right? So I was going to go out and I was going to drink this one night and I was going to come right back to alcohol. It's anonymous. I went out and drank and I couldn't stop drinking for four months. I drank every day. I would leave for an A, a meeting and I would get drunk before I got there. I would pray every day. God, please just help me to stop. Please help me to stop, please. And I couldn't,

I could not stop. And I couldn't blame it on the House. I couldn't blame it on my parents. I couldn't blame it on my brothers and sisters. I couldn't blame it on any of those things,

you know, because they weren't there. By that point. They had utterly disowned me. My mother at one point had seen me. I was in East Orange, which is a pretty nasty city where I live, doing what I do on the street corner. My mother happened to be driving through town. Her eyes locked with mine. She stopped at a stoplight and I'm barefoot and a tie dye T-shirt, hippie skirt with pink hair in the middle of the ghetto.

She looks at me, I look at her. She turns her face and drives on.

She didn't even stop because she could not because she knew I was going to break her heart one more time. At that point, my family would not even say hello to me on the street because they couldn't take the pain that I caused them anymore.

So I'm 18 years old and all I got is my bottle and my alcoholic future husband. So we're evicted from our house and from the apartment because, you know, you have to pay rent. I thought first, last and security was fine. Like, that's three months. Why should I have to pay you rent every month? I'm paid ahead,

so we're evicted. We're homeless. I'm living out of a Hefty bag, sleeping in other people's basements and couches and things like that. And that's not abnormal for me. But the data that I got sober, and I don't know why I did. I don't know how it did, how it happened. I don't understand in any way, shape or form why that day God seemed fit to restore me to sanity. I don't know why I had been begging for it and fighting it

for so many years.

I could not believe it was possible for it to happen. And at that point, I had just accepted that I was going to die. And I did not expect to live to 21. I just figured I was going to be raped and murdered in, you know, in some alleyway. That was my plan, and those were my expectations. And

I crawled out of my husband's ex girlfriend's basement

and

after a bad run, you know, the bright sunlight would hit your eyes and you just,

you just feel like you just died a little bit more inside. And there's all these useful people walking around. They're doing things, they have lives. And you're just standing there with absolutely no purpose, no use, no anything. And you're just, the sun is burning your retinas and you feel like you just can't breathe. I had one of those moments and I was standing there

and the night before it was my husband's birthday

and we met a bunch of friends to go into New York City and have we happen to meet them at this little park. It's like the town square that happened to be next to this church where there is this 7:00 Monday night meeting. And we was completely, it was absolutely God. I wasn't thinking about going to meetings. I wasn't thinking about alcohol, Alcoholics Anonymous. I had no plans to ever return to this hellhole.

I was just planning to drink until I died and I was really hoping that was going to be soon.

Um, so I showed up at this park to meet my ride to go into, go into Harlem

and.

All these people are standing outside smoking. And there's this one guy, his name is Billy. And he walked up to me and he said, are you know, are you going downstairs? And I got, I said no, I got $400.00 in my pocket, a bottle of rum and I'm not going anywhere. I'm going downstairs. You can take your AA and shove it. And he smiled at me. He goes, you know, you can come downstairs anytime you want. And I laughed in his face. I was like,

I don't think so. And I got in the car. I went to Harlem. I did what I do

and I woke up the next day with the sun burning my retinas and the absolute shame of the person that I was and the person that I felt that I was always going to be. And I thought

maybe I just need to go back to AAA for a couple months. Like, you know, I can get some money together, I can get better. I'm, you know, sick at this point, you know, I'm yellow. I'm £95 because I'm not eating because food costs money and I need money to drink. You know, I'm unemployable. I just got fired from my job working at a clothing store because I can't seem to manage to hang clothing on hanger appropriately.