One Page at a Time group's October Thing event in Moorhead, MN

And just really going to make this very brief, but it is extremely heartfelt.

Gentleman that I'm about to introduce as my sponsor, he has touched my heart in my life for many years.

And over the last, I don't know, two years we've gotten a lot closer, I guess.

I asked him be my sponsor a little about a year and a half ago, I guess.

And I am humbled that I get to learn from him.

And I feel very graced that God put us together.

I appreciate our friendship.

God bless you, Don, come on up.

Thank you.

Thank you, Michael.

Hi, everybody.

My name is Don Major, and I'm an alcoholic.

You all have been putting up with me all weekend, but this is the last time.

We've needed some divine intervention ever since I got up here at the first time,

but we're really going to need some over the next little bit here.

Probably you all are going to need it more than I do.

And the first place we're going to need it is something has got to get me out of the way,

and it's not going to get me, be me.

Okay.

My sobriety dates April 9th of 1981, and I'm not a bit more capable of getting me out of the way tonight than I was in April 1981.

It's just way too big a job for me. I've got to have what I call divine intervention.

And I'll probably mention divine intervention several times.

And if any of the newer folks or anything like I was when I got here

and are intellectually offended by some old fool up here talking about divine intervention,

not only do I understand you in my old seat,

and I've got a suggestion for you.

When I talk about divine intervention, just substitute the magic from the steps.

And it'll get you to the same place, and it won't offend your sensitive intellect so terribly.

But, anyway, we need it to get me out of the way, and then...

We also need it because I'm going to try to follow directions.

And believe me, I've got a long and sad history with the directions.

They have never applied to me. They've never meant what they say,

because with my extraordinary understanding of things, you see,

I've always understood who is in charge of the directions.

And it's always just really conservative nerds.

Just square jobs.

Anal retentives who are usually being advised by insurance lawyers who are worse than they are.

And I've always understood the target audience of the directions.

It's morons, just stone idiots.

So...

So these conservative nerds are overstating everything to manipulate idiots into doing things,

and in my special case, there's always been necessary, I guess you'd say, to extrapolate to figure out what the directions might really mean,

because they clearly don't mean what they say.

And I assure you, if I haven't done the work I need to do today on Saturday,

Because if I've learned anything in my time around here, I've learned that I don't get much divine intervention on Saturday based on what I did on Friday.

And if I haven't done what I need to do today, I'll go back to my default position.

And if, for instance, I were to see or hear some directions that say do not exceed six in 24 hours.

My brain is very apt to really register that as meaning something like do not exceed 36.

So I need the help with the directions.

And I want to follow the simple directions that we hear every time we hear how it works,

a little bit about what I was like and what happened and what I'm like now.

And there's another set of directions in the book that we don't talk about nearly as much,

but it's just absolutely critical for me.

It says words to the effect that our personal stories tell in our own language and from our own point of view.

How have we been able to form a relationship with our creator?

And I really hope my story carries that because the first 37 years of my life, I had no openness to God whatsoever.

I grew up on a tobacco farm down in southwestern Kentucky, and I remember at four years old sitting in the Baptist church, about a half mile or so down the road from the farm.

And it was Christmas time.

And I remember specifically still believing in Santa Claus

and not buying one word that preacher was saying.

It's not word.

And I have no idea where that came from.

But I spent the first 37 years of my life as an evangelical agnostic, I guess you'd call me.

And it was clear to me that believers were weak-minded and weak-willed,

and it was my mission to dispel them of their superstition.

And believe me, that's where I was coming from.

So up until I got sober at age 37, I had never asked a God for anything or even acknowledged

a God that had anything to do with my life.

I mean, I was okay with intellectual theories about a creative intelligence somewhere,

but certainly not with anything that had anything to do with my life.

In April of 1981, a loving God that I'd never acknowledged or asked for anything.

And I believe, I think it was Michael that mentioned it today.

I believe it was prayers of others that caused this miracle to happen for me.

That loving God gave me the most life-saving and life-changing gift that I've ever had.

And that same gift saves and changes my life today.

And what it was...

It wasn't a change of anything in my thoughts, feelings, or beliefs.

And I wasn't aware that there was any change in anything.

I only recognized it in the rear view mirror, and that's true of the way life is.

My sponsor, Bob B., says that life is lived forward but understood, if at all, backwards.

And what the gift is and was, is that for the first time in my life, I began to voluntarily follow some suggestions about how to run my life,

even though I didn't understand those directions.

I didn't agree with them.

I didn't think they would work.

and I certainly did not want to do them.

And folks, that gift is the only reason on earth

that I'm here at this great, great little roundup

that's got such a neat spirit and personality to it,

and I hope it thrives and grows through the years.

The only reason I'm up here with you, sweet folks,

tonight instead of having been rotting in a paupor's grave

for something over 38 years is that gift.

So I hope my story carries that.

My early life on that farm, probably the most informative thing I'd tell you,

is that it wasn't a thing like I thought it was.

My capacity for self-delusion is astounding.

And if I haven't done the work I need to do today, to get my help, it's fully intact.

And up until I got sober, I had the most interesting and romantic saga.

It was way past a mere story about my early struggles and my subsequent rise to power.

And, of course, it was all about how by my Aaron Will and my sterling intellect,

I had pulled myself up by the bootstraps from the depths of poverty

to these staggering heights I'd reached in life.

And I believed that crap so sincerely, I'd have us both crying before I got halfway done telling it.

And I honestly don't think I was sober a week until I realized, man, what a load of baloney.

We weren't even poor.

We weren't anywhere close to poor.

We were middle-class farming people that had everything we needed and most of the things we wanted.

In fact, we were better off than anybody else in the whole farming community.

And those staggering heights I thought I'd reached were a great deal more staggering than they were high.

And what was really going on the first 12 or 13 years of my life, wasn't any of that stuff at all.

What was really going on was the selfishness and self-centeredness that the big book tells us is at the root of our alcoholism.

And the way I've described that forever is that

I've got an ego disorder, had it all my life.

And that ego disorder has been front and center, I mean right, stuck to my nose.

Every day of my life, drunk and sober for 75 years.

And on account of that ego disorder, without divine intervention,

I'm so obsessed with myself.

I'm so obsessed with how I believe I stack up against other people in the world.

I'm so obsessed with how I feel.

that for many years I boiled the bedrock of my alcoholism down to one sentence,

and I believe this is where it really starts for me.

I think the physical allergy and the mental obsession kicked in much later.

But where it starts, I believe, is here.

Without divine intervention, I will always wind up letting how I feel be the most important thing in the world.

Now, without divine intervention, I can give some lip service to something being more important than how I feel.

And I might be able to act out something for just a little while.

But when the chips get down, if I haven't done what I need to do today

to maintain my spiritual condition and get my daily reprieve,

I'll go right back to my default position.

And my default position is to let how I feel be the most important thing.

And all that obsession with myself has always had the only results that I think they can really have on a human being.

It's always created so much pain and emptiness and apartness and difference down inside me

that I've never been able to stand the way I feel inside without either just running as hard as I can

and or stuffing something in there and try to make me feel good enough that I could stand it.

Now, thank my God.

For the last 38 years and some months, it's been the 12 steps that are the only program of Alcoholics Anonymous.

And you sweet folks who are the fellowship of Alcoholics Anonymous, who fill up that home,

who ease that pain, who take away that apartness and that difference.

But I didn't know there was anything to do it until I got drunk the first time when I was 12 or 13.

And what was really going on for that first part of my life was a totally self-obsessed kid.

desperately trying to stay a half a step ahead of a screaming fit.

And by the way, I don't know whether we were born alcoholic and I,

and I haven't cared for decades,

because as long as I know what's wrong with me and I know the solution,

I'm not all that interested in figuring out where it might have came from.

But something was wrong.

I already told you about sitting in the church when I was four.

The first day of the second grade, I was six years old. I started school when I was five.

I went into the office of the principal, Miss Fanny Wallace. And I said, Miss Fannie, I have been in a car wreck over the summer and have brain damage.

And I can't be expected to do nearly as well this year as I did last year.

I knew I'd set the bar too high and I was trying to make Miss Fannie laughed about that the rest of my ever life, but looking back on it, I'm not sure it was real funny for a kid that young to be thinking that way.

But at any rate, that obsession with myself makes me an egomaniac with an inferiority complex.

And what I mean by that is that without divine intervention, I'm perfectly capable of feeling too good for something or somebody.

At the same instant, knowing I'm not nearly good enough for that same person or that same thing.

All my life I've known that I could do anything.

At the same time, I've known I couldn't really do anything.

And that's been bouncing around my head for all these years.

You see, without divine intervention are the things that I've tried to use.

I've never had any peers.

I can't be on anybody's level without the divine intervention.

I can be above you, I can be below you, and insanely I can be both at the same time.

But I cannot be a fellow among fellows unless I've done what the work I need to do to get my help.

And that's the mess I brought to my first drunk.

And that first drunk I got an awful lot of trouble.

I puked.

I blacked out and I passed out.

And I woke up next morning, I had a terrible hangover,

and I swall those Baptist around there were right about that one single thing,

booze, and that I would never touch that crap again.

And not only was I'm sincere, it was actually fairly effective

because it was nearly a week until I got drunk the second time.

And that was a near miracle over the next 25 years for me to go a week without getting drunk.

And after that pain and misery, I woke up that first morning with that horrible, horrible

hangover and the terrible four horsemen already gathered around me, every one of them.

And I didn't wake up and think, wow, that was great.

I can't wait to do that again.

That was magic.

All I knew was that for a few minutes on my way to all that puking and trouble, I had

passed through a right pleasant neighborhood.

But since I've been sober, I've known that what really happened was the magic happened for me.

Because for the first time in my life when I got enough of that booze in me,

I was okay inside myself.

I felt good enough inside myself that I could stand the way I felt inside without running,

without trying to stuff anything in there.

I was a fellow among fellows.

I had loads of peers.

I had people that I was okay with, and I was okay with me.

So what it did for the first time in my life,

I found something that made me feel good enough inside that I could stand it.

So as far as I'm concerned, there's no mystery about why I got drunk that second time,

and there's no mystery about why I got drunk the other thousands of times

over the next quarter of a century after that.

but was because of the magic that I didn't recognize as magic.

Because for the next 25 years, I didn't know there was anything other than the booze,

and in the latter years of my drinking the things like it, that could do that trick for me.

So there's no mystery to me about my powerlessness over alcohol and the things like it,

because since I didn't know there was anything else that could make me feel the way I wanted to feel,

and the way I feel is the most important thing in the world.

The bottom line was really simple.

When I wanted to change the way I felt, it didn't matter what it cost,

and it didn't matter who it cost.

You know, I said this at the core of my alcoholism,

and I may have mentioned this ancient question, I don't know,

but I'm absolutely convinced that after we know we are an alcoholic or an addict,

We know what we are, and we put that first one in us.

I'm absolutely convinced that that is the most self-centered act on the face of this earth short of suicide.

Because what I'm doing when I do that, I'm making a decision that the way I feel in this instant and my desire to change it is more important than my child.

It's more important than my profession.

It's more important than all of my responsibilities.

It's more important than in a relationship I might have with God

that I'm making how I feel the most important thing in this universe.

But I didn't know any of that.

And I had a drinking career 25 years that I'm not going to...

dwell on, but I'll let you know enough to know that I didn't come in here because it gave me the

hiccups, and I woke up one day and decided, gee, I'd like to get some spiritual enlightenment.

I literally stumbled uphill for 20 years. I was born with a lot of academic gifts,

And a kid that drank and acted the way I did from the first time I got drunk in today's world

would find his young butt in an asylum before his 14th birthday.

But in the 1950s in Trigg County, Kentucky, if you were cute enough and smart enough

and had the right last name, you could practically get away with murder.

And I practically did.

I left there as an early because it was time for me to get out on account of my drinking.

I left and went 200 miles up to Louisville by myself on a gray-and-bus.

And I wound up taking a bunch of tests later in the University of Louisville as an early admission student.

I never graduated in my school with an academic scholarship.

And my reaction to that was I stayed so drunk the first semester that I'd literally lost all concept of day and night.

It was just a matter of passing out and coming, too.

And, of course, I blew the scholarship.

And then for the next seven and a half years, I worked full-time, drank full-time, went school full-time, and somehow got through undergraduate and law school with good grades.

And I have no idea how that happened.

When I look back on that whole eight years, I don't have a handful of clear memories.

that I could sit down with you and say, let me tell you some details about what happened during that eight years.

It's just a swirling gray mass of alcoholic insanity.

Spring in 1968, I graduated from law school, past the bar that summer,

and my daughter, Dana, was born that spring.

And Dana, if you're doing the math, that makes Dana 51.

And when your child is middle-aged, you're just old.

Forget it.

You know, you don't have any excuses left.

But Dana was my only child for over 20 years.

I have a wonderful 30-year-old son now.

But Dana, she was 21 when Keaton and my son was born.

I practiced law for about 10 years in Louisville, Kentucky,

which is the city of our metropolitan area, is about a million.

With a good deal of material success, I've always been a criminal defense lawyer.

From the time that I began practicing law, I quit my job as soon as I passed the bar,

and I've never had a boss.

I've always been self-imposed private criminal defense lawyer.

And things got worse over the next 10 years.

than there were the time preceding that, and I just told you how crazy that was.

And I was pretty darn materially successful, not nearly as much as I used to think I had been.

That's a peculiarity about staying sober a while is we get a better focus on the past.

You know, they tell us out here in the world, you can't change the past.

Don't you believe that crap? We do it in here every day in several different ways, and some of them positive.

But...

At any rate, I always had a knack for getting involved in some cases that had some money in publicity in them.

And that's what I'd stick in your phrase when you suggested that the way I was living was not just exactly right.

During that 10 years, the whole 25 years that I drank, I know that sometime in at least 80% of the 24-hour periods, I was drunk.

I had no idea that I was drunk that often because the only standard I ever had for drunk was whether or not I blacked out.

If I remembered it, that discussion was over. I was not drunk.

And during that ten years of practicing, the first ten years of practicing law,

My honest best estimate is at least a third of the nights, I did not take off my clothes like a normal human being and go to bed.

I either passed out in some other situation or I just changed the combination of what I was putting in my body and tried to fly on through the day.

And when you stuck that in my face, I would...

stick my material success back in yours.

Things got worse because I no longer had a boss looking over my shoulder.

I had some money to escalate things with.

And alcoholism simply progresses in everybody that's ever had it.

Alcoholism is like being pregnant. It does not stand still.

There's nothing you can do to make it standsville.

You know, you...

Again, with the pregnancy analogy,

You don't look or feel the same way when you're 20 minutes pregnant, you do it eight and a half months, but just hang on and see what happens.

It'll progress.

And during the latter part of that 10 years, by the way, another analogy, man, which is even worse than that one, but it helped me so much.

to finally get sober when somebody told me that,

you know, Don, intelligence and willpower are really, really good things.

And there are a lot of things in this world that intelligence and willpower do a really good job on.

But two things that they don't have any impact on,

or alcoholism and diarrhea.

And for some reason, that caused a penny to drop in my head

to realize that truly that my brain and willpower

was just as useless against alcoholism as it was then.

But at any rate, during the latter part of that 10 years,

I used a world of things other than the booze, and I used the world of them.

But now before you get your singleness of purpose, knickers, all in a knot, let me explain that to you.

I'm going to take it out in my story as soon as they take it out of Bill and Bob's.

Just as soon as they do, I'm going to do that.

My story is just like Bill and Bob's.

I use different things than they did, and certainly more of it, I'm sure.

But it's still the same story.

Everything else that I used was a sideshow and the booze was the big tent.

Everything else was something to somehow change the effect of the booze.

Maybe increase it, maybe decrease it, maybe help me try to function on the hangovers.

But it always went back to the booze of the big tent.

February 10th of 1978, I had been practicing law right at 10 years.

And I got full of scotch, vodka, and four separate outside issues.

And I drove a Corvette off the road at over 120 miles an hour, and it did really horrible things to my body.

It crushed both knees, it tore out a good deal of the artery in the lower leg, and they had to do a bypass in the upper leg, take out a vein and grabbed it in to replace that artery and just informationally.

I'm supposed to be in the hospital right tonight.

having a vein pulled somewhere else out of my body to replace that 41-year-old graft.

But I talked my surgeon in to let me put that off until the first week in December.

And it separated my pelvis and it pulled my internal plumbing into so that I didn't have a urinary function for over a year.

I had what they call a suprapevic catheter, which is simply a plastic tube with a flange on it where they boil a hole in your abdomen,

pop it into your bladder to carry your urine out to a bag.

I was in hospitals for more than six months of the year following that wreck, and I had a half dozen major surgeries.

The night of the wreck, I was closer to Nashville, Tennessee than I was to my home in Louisville.

So they took me to Vanderbilt.

Probably took me an hour and a half to get me from the scene of that wreck to Vanderbilt Hospital in Nashville.

When I got there, I still had a blood alcohol of 0.40 with all the other things I had in my system.

And I woke up two or three times during the emergency surgery because they were terrified to give me enough anesthesia to keep my...

to keep me under. I stayed there in Vanderbilt seven or eight weeks, but they didn't know who I was there

and didn't treat me with nearly the appropriate deference. And as soon as I got out of the operating room,

the recovery room, and intensive care long enough to get moved by ambulance because I wasn't stood upright for the first time until almost three months after that wreck.

I got moved against medical advice back to Louisville where folks knew who I was.

And the prognosis, by the way, was that I would never walk without at least a brace on one of my legs,

and that we had never found a surgeon who would even attempt to try to put my plumbing back together

so that I would ever have a urinary function.

The doctors were wrong, and it had nothing to do, as we know, with me following directions.

It was purely the grace of God.

I've been sober 38 years, and I haven't owned a brace for over 39.

And about a year after that wreck, the head of urology at Duke University, did put my plumbing back together and restore my urinary function.

But I didn't know that was going to happen.

After I got moved back to Louisville, I laid in the hospitals in Louisville for months.

And after I got back there, to the best of my recollection and the best recollection of the couple of friends who survived from that era, there are not many of them.

And those two, of course, are in recovery.

I'm one of their sponsors.

Every day that I was laying in that hospital with that prognosis, flat on my back,

They would come in and bring me booze and more dope than the doctors were giving me.

And I would lie in that hospital bed and say really intelligent things.

I would say things like, you know, fellas, anybody can stop drinking when the going gets a little tough.

But it takes a man to lay in there with it when the bills start coming in.

And then I would explain to him that a man ought not be out there doing the crime if he's not prepared to do the time.

So just because we'd hit a bump in the road, they weren't going to hear me whining.

Give me another drink and let's go on with it.

Of course, that's insanity.

That's powerlessness.

And when you really think about it, it's letting the way I felt in that instant be more important than my child, more important than my profession, more important than whether ever walked, more important than whether ever peed, more important than whether I lived or died.

and the way I felt and my desire to change it be the most important thing in this universe.

I wound up not practicing law for a total of five years after that wreck.

I lost literally everything. I'd had a young lady with me when I had that wreck

who was not my daughter's mother, and at the time of the wreck, I was remarried to my daughter's mother.

And I'm not proud of any of the pain that I caused people in that area of my life.

I've had to do a lot of amends, and I live a lot of amends on it today.

But I'm not going to fail to laugh at myself where I've been ridiculous.

And I'll share one sociological observation.

Please feel free to ignore it. It's not in the big book.

But over the last 38 years, I've just kind of looked around and observed,

and I've come to the conclusion.

that the fact that I was remarried to the same woman

probably establishes my alcoholism without further authentication.

I just don't believe a normie would do it.

I think it's even crossed their mind to jump right back in a frying pan they just got out of.

They'd tear the door off in asylum getting in and try to protect themselves.

But we do it just willy-nilly drunk and sober, you know, old Joe and Sue divorced,

but they're dating, and they'll probably get back together.

And it works for us sometimes. It's not necessarily bad. It's just really different from ordinary folks.

But obviously I got a brand new divorce right after that wreck, and I wound up pretty quickly married to the young lady who had been with me.

She had on the seatbelt of all things, so she was hurt terribly, but not nearly as badly as I was.

And during the...

ensuing period of time.

She had to leave me on account of my insanity,

and she was staying with some girlfriends and died in an accident.

I was in what I call asylums.

About half of them were psychiatric hospitals, about half of them were jitter joints or treatment centers of some kind, the kind they had back then.

But Bill used the word asylum, and my mama used that word.

When I was a kid, people didn't have substance abuse and alcohol problems and go to treatment, nor did they have emotional problems and go to the hospital.

They went crazy and were put in asylums.

And that's a whole lot more descriptive of what kept happening to me, I'll assure you.

So I was in them 18 times in two and a half years.

I laid eyes on my only child, Dana, in January of 1980.

I didn't see or have any contact with her until February of 1983 over three years.

My partners and I had built an office building in downtown Louisville, a little law firm

of nine or ten lawyers had built up around this other guy and myself.

And the internal revenue took my portion of that and a couple of other things, and the

mortgage companies took the homes.

The ex-wives were in.

The guys had to kick me out of the law firm.

I'd found it on account of the social and legal pressure that my behavior was bringing on them.

And I'm really grateful for that because I don't know that I would ever have hit bottom had it not been for that.

And for anybody that's new or struggling in any way, if I had my choice of only one thing out of my talk that you could remember,

I believe I would ask that it be this.

Please don't wait for Bottom to happen to you.

I've seen hundreds of people die waiting for Bottom to happen to them.

I don't believe Bottom happens to us.

I believe Bottom's a decision over which we have a great deal of control.

And I wasn't going to make that decision as long as I had a Time X watch.

I certainly wasn't going to do it as long as I had a law firm.

Right after the guys kicked me out of the firm, the state of Kentucky jerked my law license.

For almost a year, I lived without an address on what I called the street

and an expired blue-crossed blue shield card.

I did not sleep under the bridge, but the only reason on earth I didn't was I could always get somebody to take me in.

And it was frequently strangers.

I had no home, I had no car, I had no clothes, my teeth were rotting out of my head.

Fall of 1980, I wound up back in Nashville, Tennessee, at asylum number 17, the next to last one so far.

And...

They kept me in there a little over a month and it was time to boot me out and I had no place to go, no way to get there.

I wouldn't have gone back to Louisville.

If you'd give them the choice between chopping off my right arm or not going back to Louisville,

I would let you chop off my right arm because of the terror of going back there.

I wouldn't have opened a box of mail from Louisville and I'd been destitute for a couple years

and I wouldn't have opened a box of mail from Louisville for $50,000.

It's because of the terror.

And I'll tell you that from this stage of sobriety, I still don't believe there was any paranoia in that.

I believe the crap I had done in human terms, I had no business ever showing my face back there.

I believe a loving God poured all on the troubled waters of my past to keep the worst of my chickens from coming home to roost on me.

But at any rate, I had a roommate in that asylum number 17, and he was a young guy,

of course, I was ancient.

I would have been 36 at that time.

But Matt was 21, and his sweet family lived there in Nashville, and they felt sorry for

me and said, Don, why don't you come stay with us a few days and let's try to figure

out what to do with you?

Well, I wouldn't live with him a year.

And the first six months I didn't stay straight, but I got better.

And I had to get better before I could grasp recovery or anything else.

Just as an example, and I was ashamed to tell this for the first 30 years I was giving talks.

When I was 60 days sober, I had still not regained the ability to use a knife and fork on food,

not just properly, effectively.

And I was just embarrassed to ask anybody, would you give me a few hints on how to use these things?

I seemed to have lost it somewhere.

So we'd go to meetings at a clubhouse in Nashville that we called the 202 club.

And after the meeting, we'd go down to a Shoney's restaurant down the street.

And I would sit there with my knife and fork under the table trying to mimic what my friends were doing

so I could regain the skill of using a knife and fork.

So I had to get better, and I did get better during that six months

from getting out of that asylum in the fall of 80

and getting sober in April of 81.

I went to a world of AA meetings,

almost all of them at that 202 club during that six months.

I got to where sometimes I could go up to two,

and I think one time, even three weeks, without getting ripped.

And that was a world record for me.

since the first time I ever got drunk.

And how I really know I got better is they only put me back in an asylum one single time in that entire six-month period.

And the rate I'd been going twice a year in the asylum looked like the picture of mental health.

Well, late March of 81, I got on my most recent drunk, and it was another one of my pop-off vodka slash listerine drunks.

And I have honestly drunk buckets of both those things, and this is not a joke.

I have better memories of the Listerine.

I can stand to smell Listerine today,

but I can't stand to smell that old hot, cheap vodka.

But on this most recent drunk, I was drinking and taking everything I could get my hands on.

By the time April, the 8th of 81, rolled around, most recent day that I drank.

I'd been drunk 10 days of two weeks, and I was sitting on the edge of bed in a motel in Nashville,

and I know now.

that my loving God started giving me that beautiful gift that I talked about.

I certainly didn't know I had any gift then.