The Slipper Experience – District 5 Area 74 Service Workshop – Part 2 of 3 – Pat I.

Our speaker, who is from Laguna Niguel, California. She's traveled here with her husband to be with us tonight and to share with us her story. And I understand that she's been sober a number of years and that she has in the past produced television programs. and uh but the main thing is is that she's with us as a member of this fellowship and she's one of us in sobriety and i'd like to introduce you now pat h hi my name is pat and i'm an alcoholic This floor is moving. I'm pleased to be here with you to share this week, and I'd like to thank the committee for asking me to come up here and be a part of it. It's always a privilege to take part in any AA function. I particularly like the theme of this conference, seeing is believing. It wasn't always that way. I saw a lot of things in years past that I really didn't believe in. I knew they weren't there, for starters. I was really glad they weren'T there, actually. If I believed in all the things I'd seen in those years... You may have a different speaker tonight. I'd still be put away somewhere. But I am pleased to be here. I have found over the years and during sobriety a strange thing has happened to me, and that is that I most of the time, just about always now, like to be at meetings of Alcoholics Anonymous. And that never used to be the case. And it came as a big surprise to me to find that I had turned some invisible corner in my life and in sobriete and reached a point where I was glad to be in a meeting of Alcoholic Anonymous because, you see, I am not someone who danced in here joyously. I was a little bit reluctant to become a member of Alcoholics Night. I resented being an alcoholic, actually. I didn't like it a bit. And so for a number of years, I was in and out a lot. I am what is known in California, in any event, and probably here, as a slipper. That doesn't really mean much. It's descriptive of a person who never stays sober. But it's by choice, not by accident. I've discovered that about myself, too. So I was around AA for seven or eight years before I finally had what I hope is my last drink. And that's some time ago now, some time for me. I, my sobriety date is May of 1971. So I've had a few years sober. But before that, I had a year around Alcoholics Anonymous while still drinking. And that is a very painful way to live. If you have tried that or are trying it, you know what I mean. It's painful, it's discouraging, it's full of despair. And I felt most of the time without a great deal hope i thought but i had no future i had been around alcoholics anonymous long enough to kind of speak aa i i knew the words without the music essentially uh i heard certain phrases and they didn't have a great deal of meaning for me and i heard people say that you had to do things and become part of and get involved in all of that and i knew that none of that was for me because, because I always had a reason. Because I wanted to drink more than I wanted to be sober. So essentially what has happened to me in sobriety is that I did turn that invisible corner and now I find that I want to be sober more thanI want tobe drunk and that I cherish my sobriete and so it is a privilege and a pleasure to take part in the meeting of Alcoholics Anonymous. Our leader tonight mentioned that I had been producing some television shows. And that was true. I got into that in sobriety. And I hear someone use those words in describing me, and it ranks right up there in the unbelievable as far as I'm concerned because when I did get sober, I was unemployed and unemployable. And I had little hope of doing anything I felt other than perhaps finding some subsistence level of earning a living. And yet I was able to turn my life around because of what I learned in Alcoholics Anonymous. But that is not why I came to AA, and that's not why I stayed in AA. That happened along the way. It could easily not have happened. It's just the way things worked out for me. All I came here for is finally, in the last analysis, why I kept coming back to AlcoholicsAnonymous when it looked like I would never be sober. The reason I came back was just to stop the pain just so that I could breathe in and out without thinking that I was going to swallow my tongue at any moment or just freak out and run down the street screaming, asking strangers on the street for help, whatever it might be. I just wanted to stop that particular kind of pain and I didn't anticipate anything else happening even though I had heard those words around AA meetings. That was podium talk. That was speaker talk that had no application to me or my life. So, consequently, it always comes as a surprise to me when I can look back and think, hey, my life really did change enormously. And it ultimately for me was the easiest, softer way. But I didn't know that for so many years. And we were talking tonight at dinner about friends who have become part of this fellowship without being a member of Alcoholics Anonymous or Al-Anon or Alateen or whatever. There are just people who are friends and sort of semi-involved with us in our fellowship or the meetings, and they are attracted by something that they see here in us and in the meetings and the things that we stand for and do. And to me, when I used to be sort of on the outside looking at this fellowship and these people and what went on here, I always found that a little repellent and I found it repellant because I thought if I were to become involved with that then they'd expect something of me I'd have to do something it'd be one more commitment that I couldn't live up to and my life seemed to be a series of things that I couldn'T do commitments that I couldN'T fulfill things I couldnT live up TO and I thought oh god I can't you know not one more thing they want me to raise my hand and say that I'm a newcomer I'm willing to do that, but then they'll want to see me here again next week. I was told that wasn't the case at all. You wanted to see Me here again the next night. Oh, no. And I just, you know, I wasn't willing to make those kind of commitments, and a day at a time didn't mean anything to Me. What did I know? But I guess the important thing is, is that I kept coming back. You know, we do run out of places to go. There are not a lot of socially acceptable places that your practicing alcoholic can come in and out of and say, when people say, how are you? You say, strangely inadequate. And no one thinks that that is an odd response. There aren't a lot OF places like that. so i ran out of all of those other places to run to and people and everything and i ended up back one more time in alcoholics anonymous thank god there was apparently some part of me that was alive as a survivor some small section of my my spirit that still was looking for a positive answer and that little piece of me would bring me back each time to alcoholics anonymous when if i listened to the committee meeting in my head i would have stayed out there doing whatever it is that we do uh but yet i did come back here and that was of course always my last choice and last resort uh i tried just about everything else but i think we all try a lot of things along the way at least everyone I've met and talked to in AA has. And it's funny, though, because all of the time and talent and energy and money that goes into all of these things that we do to not have to feel good by being a member of AA is astonishing when I look back at my life and the things I did and the path that I took, seemingly to avoid a positive or a constructive life. If I stand back and look at my life objectively, I wonder what that person was up to those first years of her life. It looked like she was on self-destruct, and I was. But I could never explain to anyone else that I didn't mean to be that way. Things aren't really what they seem. Seeing is not believing. Don't believe what you see. I'm not really like this. during all of those years. But I couldn't explain who I was or what I was or what it was like. I drank alcoholically, I guess, for about 20 years. The first time I ever remember passing out and blacking out in the same night, I was about 14. That seems to be a good age for a lot of people. I grew up in Buffalo, New York and passed out in a snowbank one night. I could have been left there until the spring thaw, but some friends hauled me out and took me to their home. And my first thought when I came to, because I had passed out, my first thoughts when I was there were, my first thing that came to was if I had something else to drink, I'd feel better. Nobody ever told me that. I knew that. That knowledge was in there. We know these things. We have secret information. A social drinker would never have had that thought. They wouldn't need it. It would never come up. And I knew that. And I had another drink and I felt better and I didn't tell anybody because that was another part of the disease. You know, I look back and I see all the patterns of an alcoholic at an early age. The cover-up was on. I never told anybody any of these things I never said them out loud I had a lot of secret information I never wondered how I acquired it it was just there and something instinctively inside of me never let me mention it I never ever talked about what I drank, when I drank how much I drank or what it did to me or what is good for me I just always covered it up and to me that is the instinctive behavior pattern of an alcoholic. We just do these things. We don't learn them, we know them. They're just there and we do it. I remember when I was about 12 my first experience with the half-empty bottle. I had a grandmother that used to come and stay with us and every night of her life before she went to bed Granny had a little dollop of Muscatel and kept a bottle at our house for her visit. And I got into Granny's Muscatal one day and there was about two inches gone from it, and when I was through with it, it was half empty. And I considered the problem. I thought, well, I can't let this be discovered, so I made some tea and poured it in the bottle, filled it back up to where it was. Good move, you'd think. Not bad for a 12-year-old, huh? But you've got to check on these things. You know, that bottle kept calling to me, so I'd go and look every day or two. Well, the tea turned moldy is what happened. There was some interesting green slime around the top of it, so I thought, well, that won't do. I mean, she's old, but she'll notice. So I collected a lot of old soda bottles and beer bottles and things and redeemed them at the local store, bought another bottle of wine, drank that one down to the level that the original bottle had been at, made the switch and thought a job well done. I spent the next 20 years doing that, even when I lived alone. But we do that. I constantly hid bottles on myself. Once I hid an empty gin bottle in the washing machine and forgot. Made the undies interesting for a while. It wasn't until I was sober for a while that I remembered all these separate episodes and thought, that kid was an alcoholic because non-alcoholics don't behave like that. When I first began having blackouts, which was almost instantly, I never mentioned them to anybody. I covered that up. The cover-up was always on. And when I went away to college, I had longer blackouts, strange episodes. And again, I never mention it. I would try to elicit through information the following morning what might have gone on the night before. Look for clues. Sometimes you wish you hadn't looked. But I never mentioned it. I left, I got out of college and I went to work for the federal government And I went back to Washington D.C. Now Washington's a great party town And I discovered party drinking after the fact I hear a lot of people in the program talk about having been party drinkers And they cross an invisible line and begin to drink alone and so on I started out drinking alone And recrossed that line several times and just occasionally drank at parties because it was a social lubricant. I didn't know what social drinking was. If there was someone else in the room with me, that was social drinking. I didn' t have to be with them. They were just there. But alcohol, I discovered in Washington, put me at ease because I was really a very naive little girl from Buffalo. I mean, I didn''t know what was going on. And I consider myself a product of the non-thinking 50s. And I didn't know anything. I just didn't Know what was going on. I was working for the federal government. I knew who the president was. I could not have told you if he were a Democrat or Republican. I had no idea, nor did I know the difference. So it didn't matter a great deal. I didn' t know what was Going on at all, politically, socially, nothing. I just was pretty much out of it all of the time. But alcohol made me feel less ill at ease. And early on when I was in Washington, I discovered long parties and I remember in particular one party that I attended. It was a costume party, apparently. It was held in my apartment. I thought, what a wonderful life I've fallen into. some man came into the party he was 7 feet tall and wore a floor length black cape and a big black hat he was not in costume he just dressed that way he was fascinating he spoke of just having returned from Bay Royce and so with the courage of alcohol I had quite a discussion with him about Bay Roy which I thought was a resort on the Jersey Shore i discovered later in the evening it was actually in germany and they hold a wagnerian music festival there and so on um but then i didn't care because alcohol made me feel at ease and i just didn't cares that i'd been making a fool of myself for the first of many times to come well it didn't bother me so alcohol became a social lubricant and i liked that. And I was young and healthy and I didn't mind about the blackouts. I went from there to live and work in Guatemala and the disease is progressive and I was still young and I was still healthy, but it was starting to take a toll on me because what began to happen during the time in Guatemala was that I started dropping out of life essentially. I was no longer a participant in life and for a while I was an observer and then I didn't even look up and it's a slow insidious process the way that happens and again it wasn't until much after the fact that I realized that's what had happened anything I know about myself I've learned in sobriety I knew nothing as I say I always thought I was a product of the non-thinking 50s I was never introspective or self-analytical. I knew nothing about myself and just ran on impulse and did essentially the next indicated thing, and that's how I lived my life. I wouldn't let myself stop long enough to think about the path I might be taking. But I began dropping out. I loved Guatemala. It was, you know, as I say, I was from Buffalo. It was the late 50s. Spanish was an exotic language. The culture was different. I mean, everything was new and I was just wide-eyed with it. It smelled different. I thought it was terrific. And there were things I wanted to do and places I wanted to go and I wanted to do it all. And little by little I did less and less. And friends would call me and say we're going to Antigua for the weekend. Come along. And my answer to that would be well, not this weekend but I'll go next time. And I couldn't go that weekend because I had to stay home and drink. I had pull the curtains and drink, but I was young, and I believed then that there would always be a next time because I knew I'd live forever. And that became the pattern of doing nothing, staying home and drinking. Years later, I realized that it doesn't matter a great deal if you're in Guatemala or Caracas or Los Angeles or New York or San Francisco or New Orleans or Portland or wherever it may be, when you're in a room with the curtains pulled and you're drinking, that's all there is. When you can't answer the phone and won't answer to the door, it doesn't matter where you are or how exotic the surroundings are. So that was the beginning and it got worse. I went from there to Venezuela and up until then I pretty much behaved myself. Although I drank a lot, You could take me almost anywhere and rely on the fact that I'd behave. And that all changed. I got real busy. My blackouts took on a different shape. I started leaving the house at night, just walking out into the street, taking little walks at night. Now, this was in the early 60s, late 50s in South America, and they were very fussy about how women behaved in the Latin countries in those years. They still are, but less so. There were a lot of no-nos. Women never wore slacks on the street, for instance, and I was very careful to observe their customs when I was conscious. After a few drinks, who knew? But I never did go out on the street, as far as I know, wearing slacks. I did, however, go out a few times wearing only the top half of my baby doll pajamas. I'd never heard anyone say, don't do that. Well, one thing led to another, and I was asked to leave the country. I was not asked to leave the country by the Venezuelan government, who were nothing if not affable. I was, however, removed by the United States government, who felt I was being less than the best representative of our country abroad. So they hauled me on home in semi-disgrace and gave me a job in Florida. And I spent a year and a half working in Florida, and that time is the only time in the years that I drank that my pattern changed. Before that and after that, the cover-up was always on and I was on my guard. I don't know about you because I can only speak for myself but I have no middle ground most of the time. Things are either one way or the other way. I heard someone say alcoholics have two speeds, fast and stop and I know what that means but when I'm either on my guard all the way or I'm totally relaxed when I am on my guards the walls are up and I am being careful and trying to be in total control of the entire universe or I am like hot jello dripping out my own sleep there is no middle ground and for a year and a half in Miami I drift I mean, it just, it kind of all went to pieces. For the first and only time in the years that I drank, I had a drinking buddy. Right after I got there, I met this gal that I worked with. The moment I met her, she became my best friend. I walked into this room and she was taking a drink out of a bottle of Bell's Club bourbon, right out of the bottle. And I thought, oh wow. I mean, when I was around other people, I used a glass, you know. And she didn't seem to care. She was just gurgling it out of the bottle so I could relax with her and feel, you know. It was instant friendship. And that was the only time I ever had a drinking buddy. And we never really discussed our drinking at all. We were just doing it all the time. And it was an interesting lifestyle because I opened up this office in Florida, helped open it up. There were four of us. And we worked very hard, but we were all a bit odd each in his own way. There was my girlfriend and I who were alcoholics. The rest were just sort of crazy. And a year and a half later, we had 120 people in that same office doing the work of four. It was odd how it happened. To this day, it's hard to explain, but that's how it worked out. And I had a lot of bizarre escapades in that year and a half because my guard was down and I could relax. I no longer hid my hangovers. I could call my office of a morning and say, I'm too hungover, I'm Too Sick to Come to Work, I Cannot Make It. and they would rush to my side with little six-packs of pre-mixed whiskey sours and beer and whatever, and we'd all stay home and get drunk again that day. They partied a lot, although they weren't alcoholics. They would just sort of go along with anything. And that was the way I lived, and I began to have prolonged blackouts during that period. One time I came out of a blackout and I was walking down the street with my drinking buddy. And the sun was beating down on my head. It was one of those hideously hot days. You might not know about those, but it was a bad day. Oh, I felt, you know, I looked around and I didn't know where I was, which wasn't unusual. But I did have one feeling that made me real nervous. That feeling was, I don't think I'm in the United States. And I wasn't. And it turns out that it was Saturday afternoon and I was walking down Bay Street in Nassau in the Bahamas with my friend. I came out of this in front of a place called the Straw Market where they sell those straw hats and stuff. And I pieced it all together by looking at the signs and so on in her conversation. I couldn't ask. It was Saturday afternoon. My last recollection had been Friday morning in Florida and I had apparently gone to the bank, dug out my passport, flown over there, spent the night at the British Colonial Hotel in Nassau and spent the day doing whatever and there I was one more time thinking, oh my God, just panic stricken, you know, and what do you do? You have a drink to make that panic go away. So I had a lot of things like that going on. But what began to... That was on the outside, and those things I can talk about and they're kind of wild and all of that, but they're not the things that brought me to Alcoholics Anonymous. It was the things that were going on inside me that are the cause of my standing here today because the fear had arrived. and if you're occupying a chair in this room you know what that means the fear had arrived and it never left and I was afraid all of the time and I wasn't afraid of anything and I didn't understand anything I was scared of everything I was worried of the dark and Iwas afraid of the light I lived by myself in a little alcoholic apartment I imagine most of you have seen those they're not real attractive I always meant to clean this was miami in the summer and the air conditioner had broken the bugs had come in and the place was too awful to tell the landlord to have the air conditioner fixed i couldn't have anyone else see that place so i just lived with it and it was really hideous i mean it was bad and i couldn'T bear to turn the lights on in there someone might want to come in if i did that but also i couldnT look around i used to there were roaches trapped on the floor. It was like a terrazzo floor, huge roaches. They were enormous down there. They scared me to death and I couldn't bring myself to kill one. So I'd upend a glass over them. I thought pretty soon they'll just die from lack of air. And I didn't use my glasses anyhow. They lived forever under the sun. You had to be a broken field runner to get through that living room. I couldn't turn the lights on and see them all in there, but I couldn'T be in the dark either because I was afraid of the dark. So I bought this old Silco radio that had a big dial on it, and I turned it on with no sound and I lived by the light of my radio dial. I was also afraid of water, so I saw them washed. I was afraid of the laundromat, so I never had clean clothes or clean sheets. Clean sheets had remained a rumor to me for a long time. Occasionally I would visit my drinking buddy. She had a pool. And I'd go over there and I'd have just enough to drink so that I could very carefully lower myself into her swimming pool with my clothes on. I always wore something drip-dry. That took care of the bath and the laundry. If I was feeling real brave and didn't think I'd drowned or tip over, I would put my head back because I had real long, greasy hair, rinse that out, and I'd done that too. So I took care OF all of that at once. And I'd stand there and swish around and then I'd get out and stand there until I dried. That was it. And I think about it now, and I think, my God, that's ludicrous to live that way. And yet I never thought there was anything odd about the way I lived. I never stood back and looked back at it. I couldn't let myself do it. I know that now. I mean, how do you stand back and look at that and explain it? To put a rational explanation on it is possible. The only explanation you can attach to it is connected with alcohol, and I couldn't even let that surface in my own mind. The deep inside myself I'd known by then for years and years that I was an alcoholic. I never let that information surface. I never said it aloud. I never would let it come up in my mind for consideration. I'd push it down and block it out. I just couldn't handle that I know now. So I lived in this very peculiar fashion and didn't think it was so peculiar. And I was terrified all the time. The panic was always there, my heart was pounding, and I just was living with anxiety and in anxiety and didnít know. I mean, I knew it was connected with the alcohol, but I couldnít face it. And I just got by as best I could. That was a long time before I stopped drinking. It was a long time before I tried to quit drinking. And it just got worse from there. I mean, my life did not go on a steady course uphill. And I couldn't let myself think about that either. I essentially threw away that career, which could have been a good one. I was invited to leave that job, and I did. I couldn'T have handled it any longer anyhow. I got out of that and took refuge, as so many alcoholic women do in marriage, Let somebody else take care of me for a while. I married the fellow I'd known in college, and that marriage lasted for less than five years because he hadn't seen me for awhile. Gosh, what a surprise. He didn't want to be married to an alcoholic, and he finally divorced me. But it was during that marriage that I tried a lot of the things that are talked about in Chapter 3 of our big book of Alcoholics Anonymous because I had moved to Southern California and I was on his turf now. I knew no one there, no one knew me. I had to sort of behave because I just wasn't on my own now. I couldn't justify my behavior by saying I'm not hurting anyone because I knew I was. So I had try and do something. Now, I didn't know what it was I was trying to do and I couldn' t even have described it. I guess if you'd asked me, I would have said I was trying to fix things or make things okay or get out of this one or take the heat off or whatever. But it all started. It all started that treadmill we did on. The doctors and the hospitals and the pills and all of that began. I think that before I finally got sober, I was hospitalized somewhere between 15 and 20 times. It was always for acute and chronic alcoholism and I still would never discuss my drinking. I was in all kinds of hospitals. I was locked towards overnight dry-out places. I ended up in one place I always liked a lot because at the end they would give me a mixture to drink of belladonna and chloral hydrate and it was the only thing that let me sleep for more than two hours at a time, you know. I'd get in there when I needed a full night's sleep because my life had taken a turn for the worse, I thought. And at each point in my life where I was forced to look at it or where there was some incident that got my attention, I would think, my God, it can never get any worse. One time in Miami stands out very vividly in my mind. I woke up one morning sick, just sick, and I was out of anything to drink and that panic was on me and I just thought I was going to swallow my tongue and it was awful and I could hardly function and I wanted to run and scream and I couldn't move and I had nothing to drink so I went out and found a Safeway store that was open early in the morning and the only thing I could buy there was warm beer so I bought it and it Was about $6.15 or so and I Just needed it right away and I Went out behind the Safeway and they had one of those big dumpsters out there for the garbage and It was kind of overflowing from the weekend And I drank down a can of warm beer and couldn't keep it down, you know. And I just stood there and thought, well, I'll get this over with. Maybe I'll put the second one down. So I was throwing up behind this dumpster behind Safeway. And it was a hot early morning in Miami. And this call out of people drove by and I looked at the way they were dressed and I remembered something. I realized it was Easter Sunday morning. These people had apparently been to Easter sunrise services. It was a family in a station wagon. And as they pulled up, I saw the mother shield her children's faces from looking at me. And I thought, no, my God, don't do that. Not me. You know, this isn't me here. Seeing is not believing. I never wanted to be the kind of a person that would have to be hidden from children because I was so disgusting. And that's what I was. So I had another drink to blot that image out. And those little things occurred through the years and I just couldn't handle them and I'd push them down and not look at them because it's so awful. And that happened again during this period of my marriage when I was trying the things that we hear about in Chapter 3. There were different things that would happen and that I wouldn't want to look at. I don't want us to think about getting put in a locked ward. You know, they put the nuts in locked wards. I'd go in after a while. You get to be an old hand at anything. And I'dgo in, and I'd sidle up to one of the nurses. This is the second or third day when I could walk, and I said, Which ones are the alcoholics? And she said, Oh, you'll find each other. And we did. They were the ones that after the second or third date in, they were smoking and playing cards and, you know, acting as normal as they ever act and the rest were still walking around. But I had a lot of adventures in those years. One thing I did learn in a locked word, it wasn't a total loss, aside from learning how to knit booties. They used to take the needles away from me at night though and I kept saying, you now, it's okay for me, I'm not one of them. I learned how to play volleyball under heavy sedation. I don't know if you've done it either way, but it's interesting. What they do, they feel you should have some physical therapy. So they line up all the patients, and usually what they do is they'll put an orderly on each side of the net. These are some young guys, students usually, who like a little exercise. So they'll get out there and they'll line up the patients and start hitting the ball around. And then as part of your therapy, they encourage you to join in. Now, the only thing is that you got out there barely. I mean, they keep you pretty heavily, or they did in those days, pretty heavily medicated. So you'd get out to the court. It was the old Stelazine shuffle where you just went. Then you stood where they put you. But these orderlies wanted to get you involved in what was going on and encourage you to, you know, take part. So they'd tell you to put up your arms and when the ball came over the net to hit it back. You'd stand there for a while. Then after a few minutes you'd... notice your arm was up there then you look around to see if anyone else noticed it was up very carefully put it down so that was fun well worth the insurance money I always felt I don't know why it didn't keep me sober on a lifetime basis. So the doctors didn't work in the hospitals and pills, for some reason I never got hooked on pills, thank heavens. I believe that if I had developed that dual problem I would not be alive today if I went at it with the same vigor that I drank because I was given a lot of pills. I have left hospitals with buckets of pills and not taken them. Because as soon as I got out, it was like someone in authority told me to take a pill, therefore I would not. And as soon As I got Out of Sight, I'd throw them away and drink my booze. It used to make my pillhead friends just shudder to learn that I'd thrown away all these pills. They'd just blanch when I'd tell them. But I'd go back to the alcohol. So the hospitals didn't work. and I tried a lot of things. I tried hypnosis. I went to this hypnotist who he must have weighed close to 400 pounds and it was very distracting. I just looked at him but he had wheels going around and strobes flashing at me and it wasn't good and it didn't look bad because I was always dizzy. After a while, he said to me, you're hypnotized. By the way, I'd ask him to hypnotize me into being a social drinker not total abstinence but I'd ask him to prove to me that I was hypnotized because I couldn't I didn't see any difference and so he to prove it he would put pins through the skin on the palm of my hand and I never said anything to him because I didn' t want to hurt his feelings I knew a couple of things I knew they were pressure points and it was the top surface skin, I also knew that for several years at that point my hands and feet and nose and mouth were numb all the time anyhow. He could have nailed me to the wall with railroad spikes. I would not have felt a thing. So that didn't work. Apparently I felt, and I never examined this again because I still never thought about anything I did, But apparently I felt that working on the drinking wasn't doing any good at all. So I tried to work with the hangovers, which were now terribly debilitating. And what I did, I'd seen all those World War II movies when I was a kid. And the pilots, for instance, would have a party of a Friday evening and get drunk. And they'd have to get up very early the following morning to bomb Berlin. And they had a hangover. So they'd run out to their planes and pull down the oxygen mask and have a couple of snorts, turn into Spencer Tracy, go out and win the war. So I thought, well, it worked for them. And I went to the drugstore and bought a cylinder of oxygen, put it in my car with me. Because, you see, I was most disturbed by these attacks while driving. Not when I was drinking. Then I, you know, you close one eye and handle it. But when not drinking, I would just freeze to the wheel and just know that I was going to drive into something, a tree, a car, whatever. I was just frozen to the will. And I was usually doing about 20 miles an hour in the freeway, you know, hugging the curb. So when I had one of my attacks, I'd pull over and take a snort on this oxygen and sit there for a while, and I'd start to think, I wonder how I feel. because by then I never knew I would have to ask someone else how do I look and then be guided by their response if they said not so good but if they said you look okay I'd say okay I just didn't know so that didn't work I never tried obscure philosophies or exotic religions all of which abound in Southern California I mean, I could have gotten involved in any of those. But I didn't because, well, because I'm an alcoholic. And when I want something, I want it right now. And I don't have time to enroll in a class and sit still for any length of time. So that let all of that out. I couldn't get involved in many of those, and I never tried not drinking because I knew I couldn'T live without alcohol. It never occurred to me to try not to drink. I just could not exist without it. And that was my life, and it went downhill. I was, after my husband divorced me, I was alone and I tried to work. And I would have periods of what I considered not drinking. And that would be maybe a six-pack of the tall cans of beer and a half pint a day. That was not drinking, that was maintenance. That was so I didn't go crazy or fall apart. And I'd hang on as long as I could like that and then I'd binge drink. And that was however long I could last. But you see, I made my first visit to Alcoholics Anonymous during that five-year period. And somewhere in 1963, I went to my first AA meeting. And it was just like everything else I did, like the hypnotist and all the rest of it. It was to get the heat off. And it Was the beginning of my seven and eight years in and out of Alcoholics Anonymous. And I acquired more information than I wanted to about myself because in spite of trying to turn off my head, some things came in. And it was painful, but again, that survivor that I spoke of before, that little piece of me that wanted to live, apparently listened and that's what kept bringing me back to Alcoholics Anonymous. At the end of my drinking, I occasionally called this one woman. And each time I called her, I would just be desperate for help because when I knew I was going crazy, I'd say or do anything so that you wouldn't leave me alone and i used to come back to aa as a newcomer all the time there would be months or years between my returns but i was always a newcomor and i always felt i had to assume a posture i'd see if i could find someone who looked like they might need a sincere newcomer and i or if i felt you might like a hostile newcomer i'd be hostile i'd Be Anything a chameleon just so that you wouldn't leave me along until over the years i had fallen into a pattern of calling this one woman and she this last time said to me why do you think this has happened again why are you one more time you know living on the floor of your living room because you can't move and i couldn't think of why or i couldn'T think of what reason to tell her i thought i've told her every story in the world there is to lay on her what can i tell her now so that she will help me one more time. What can I think up? What lie can I tell her? And I told her that I thought this had happened to me one more time because I had never been willing to do the things that everybody else did in Alcoholics Anonymous, that when people gave me their phone numbers, I threw them away, that I went to the meetings late and left early if I went at all, that I made absolutely no attempt to get to know any of the people And then I never tried to not drink. And I told her all of these things and she said, yes, that's right. That's why it happened again. And I thought, well, she bought that one. I was telling her the truth and I didn't even know it. At that point in my life I did not know the difference between the truth and a lie. I truly did not. I was so accustomed to lying that I thought everything I said was a lie I really believed everything I did and everything I heard was a lot. And she arranged to take me back to Alcoholics Anonymous one more time, and that was the time of, that was my sobriety date. And I've never really figured out what made that particular re-entry all different from all the rest. It didn't feel much different. I looked about the same, smelled about the sam, felt about the sim. And I was full of hopelessness, despair. And yet I came back this time and stayed. And I think that surrender that we hear about in AA took place with me. And I believe that it was not an act of thing. I don't believe that I said, I surrender. I thinkthat in my case it was a very passive act. I was surrendered. I was just at that point where it was all over for that moment. That's not to say I didn't try and take it all back when I felt better physically. But for thatmoment I was surrendered. that night I did something that I had never done before in Alcoholics Anonymous and that was that I got a sponsor I'd never had a sponsor before and I just that night said yes alright this can be my sponsor this person can be my sponsor I have that same sponsor today 12 years later and I think that that is the second most important thing I've done in my adult life other than coming back to AlcoholicsAnonymous when I didn't really want to because my ability to let someone else tell me what to do and then do it has saved my life, I believe, many times because my judgment is what got me into locked wards playing volleyball under heavy sedation. And the cumulative judgment of my sponsor and the wisdom of Alcoholics Anonymous is what permits me to lead a full and comfortable life today. so I have not taken back from my sponsor the permission I gave my sponsor to tell me what to do a long time ago I didn't know my sponsor we met that night for the first time but in the middle of that night I was shaking it out one more time and I was hallucinating one more times seeing was not believing I knew I was hallucinating I knewI wasn't having DTs because I was aware I was hallucinating but I could not stop it. I was watching some weird things happening on television and I unplugged the set and they continued and I knew the set was unplugged and I couldn't turn it off and I thought how interesting I'm having hallucinations. Now I'd never had visual hallucinations before. I'd had music and voices with me for a long time and I was used to those but this was something new. Those conversations that take place just out of your hearing. This was new and I called my new sponsor at 3.30 in the morning to say I was dying and that I wasn't going to make it through the night and I think about it now and I think how sad that I really did think I was going to die that night and yet someone I had met that very evening was the only person left in my life that I could call. There was nobody else that I would talk to that I couldn't call to say I might die. Just someone I'd met that night, almost like a stranger in a bar. But I lived through the night. I was told to call my sponsor the next morning at 9.05 and report the fact of my survival. And I did. That call, I realized later in the day, was a big mistake because I got my first direction in AA at 9.05 that morning. My sponsor told me to take a bath. Well, food and water were never high on my list of things to do when I was busy drinking. My response to that direction was, I can't, I'm afraid. I was 34 years old supposedly an adult woman and I was saying out loud to another human being that I was afraid to take a bath about two or three years after that I realized that that was the very moment that my recovery in Alcoholics Anonymous began that was the very first time I told on myself and what happened was that my sponsor said, Oh, I understand. That's okay. Run the water while we talk on the phone and then go do it. And that's what I did. No big deal. Except it was a big deal because I told on myself and I followed a direction and I've realized since that time that my recovery in Alcoholics Anonymous is in direct proportion to my willingness to tell on myself. I can hang on to something as long as I want and make it my very own. As soon as I'm ready to get rid of it, my life is a lot easier. But I thought how astonishing all those years that I fought, I guess, AA and everything to do with it when all I had to do was do it and everything got easier. It wasn't long before I was trying to explain that to other newcomer slippers saying, would you just do what I say and everything will be alright and they'd look at me like I was crazy and I'd think, oh, why aren't they sincere like I would? I've realized since then no matter what I say they really believe I don't understand. But that's just the way it is. That's the way I felt. I had essentially been a hermit when I got sober because everyone had dropped out of my life. I lived alone and was content that way mostly except when the panic was with me and I thought I hated people any room that had more than two people in it was too crowded and yet for a hermit it was astonishing how much I needed people and how I survived that first year especially on the fellowship of Alcoholics Anonymous I was put down in the middle of an active group of AAs and it saved me because they didn't leave me alone. I didn't much like it at the time. I felt that if I received one more item of unsolicited advice, I'd have to kill somebody. I spent my life planning ways to get away from them. My sponsor finally told me I could go away for the weekend. I was delighted. I was six months sober and I thought, finally, I'll get to a motel, I won't tell anybody. They'll never know. I wasn't that honest yet. and then I'll come back and you know just go along with their nonsense but my sponsor hadn't told me though that my weekend away was going to be at the Southern California AA convention with 2,500 or 3,000 other alcoholics in most of my home group and that I would have to pour coffee for something like 72 hours straight or whatever it was and wear a funny hat So that was the end of that particular plan. I was about nine months sober when I had my first positive feeling. And I remember it because it was a stranger, it stood out. A gal I got sober with had her first birthday and I remember just feeling joy on her behalf. Not how it related to me or what impact it might have on me but just pleasure that she was a year sober and doing well and feeling good. And I hung on to that feeling because, my God, I wanted more like it. And so I stayed around here to get some of my own by doing the things that you do. I had to take the steps for a number of reasons, pain mostly. I guess that motivates a lot of us, peer pressure, and because my sponsor told me to, the biggest reason of all. for whatever reason it doesn't matter the steps worked in my life and continue to work in my life I was going on two years sober when I realized that I still was obsessed with alcohol I thought about drinking all the time I had an ongoing desire to drink I still would go to meetings and have a cup of coffee and look around to see if anyone else noticed it had bourbon in it I'd go out for hot fudge Sundays after meetings and then it tastes like scotch and enough is enough you know um my sponsor had told me that i could use that desire for alcohol as a positive force in my life in the beginning use it as a motivation to get a little more involved and a little bit more active in aa than than i might if i didn't have those feelings but that was like a red flag waving it was a clear in present danger and while i felt that way i'd better get active instead of getting to the meetings half an hour early maybe i should get there an hour earlier help put out ashtrays or just hang out do whatever um and use it as a reason to get involved and so i did that and worked for me that way and it did help me a lot it got me more involved faster but then after a couple of years i realized i didn't want that feeling anymore i was tired of always having that demon surface in my mind and i was told that the time was come to treat that desire for alcohol as a character defect and work step six and seven on it and i knew it wouldn't work because the steps those steps are so abstract they don't have any application in real life but i did it like i did so many other things because it was easier to do it than trying to explain to my sponsor why i had not. So I took steps six and seven to the best of my ability, and one day I was driving home from work and I drove by a liquor store that I always used to look at longingly as I passed. I drove by that liquor store, glanced over, and realized it had been some time since I looked at it, and I thought, my God, I hadn't thought about drinking. The desire for alcohol had left me and I hadn't even noticed. It just went away. But our minds are cunning, baffling, and powerful. My next thought is, if I don't want a drink, why am I in AA? There is no escape from my mind. I've left it a few times, but it's always caught up. I'm here so I don'T have the next drink. That's why I'M here. anyhow that's how I learned my lessons I learned them by going through them just as you told me I had over the years a number of things happened to me some good, some bad some unexpected some plans that didn't work out but I found that on a number of occasions I walked a parallel path in sobriety that I had drinking at the end of my drinking I'd been working in management and production and theater, and I drank my way out of that. Then after I was sober for a year, I got back into it and managed to stay with it, and I liked it. And it was good to be able to do that again. But I always found a conflict between that life and AA. There was no conflict, but I found one. I felt that they were sort of mutually exclusive and that my presence would be required elsewhere when I was supposed to be in an AA meeting. And that just never happened. I was told to put AA first and everything else would fall into place and that really is what happened until I reached the point where I no longer had to put AAA first because AA is the core of my life. Everything I do centers around Alcoholics Anonymous so I don't have to put it first. But in those days, I had to make a conscious effort to do it. And I used to get a little bit annoyed that I had to go to so many meetings and do all of the stuff that didn't seem to have anything to do with the steps, help other members of AA move and be on committees and do this and do that. Where does it say in the big book I have to help somebody move every other Sunday and shove a refrigerator up three flights of stairs? My sponsor said that's called going to any length. But when I got back into the theater we did a musical and it was during the rehearsal and the production of that show that I got some insight about A.A. and myself it was just sort of a nice parallel when a music is in rehearsal it looks real messy because it's sort of all over the place and disconnected there's no cohesiveness to it and I walked one day through the rehearsal halls and there were actors working in one room on lines and dancers in another and the singer someplace else and the costume designer was in the back doing something odd with feathers and the lighting designer was doing his thing and it was all just disconnected and it looked like a wreck and you knew it would never pull together in time. And a few days after that, we moved into the theater and the director said, okay everybody, on stage, it's magic time. And the actors were there and the dancers and the singers, the music, the costumes, the feathers were intact. The lights went on. There was music under and a pink follow spot and it was all a whole piece. And I thought, okay, I understand now. That's a lot what my life in AA is about. I do a lot of seemingly unrelated things whether it's setting out ashtrays or shoving somebody's refrigerator around or whatever it is. a lot of unrelated things but they do come together just as the show did and they don't come together with uh music under and a pink follow spot but they come together in a quiet feeling inside of me just where everything's okay and i am on that middle ground that i can never find uh because i need to live there i can't live on a high and i can' t live on low I need to find that middle ground and this is it all that stuff contributes I'll tell you about one other incident and then I'll sit down and I'll talk to you I'll not tell you about it because it had a big impact on me at the time it made me realize that my commitment to Alcoholics Anonymous is more than just going to meetings it's a love of a way of life and because I get so much out of AA that surprises me it endlessly surprises me because I believe that I give so little you know, I just I think that no matter what I do I can never repay what AA has given to me when I was about five years sober I was still working in theater and we took a show on tour and we were taking it on we took it on a national tour and then to Washington or then to New York but we opened it in Washington and I was real nervous about leaving I was five years sober I'd never been away from my home group and my AA in those five years except to other AA events with people that I knew now I was going out on my own and I had to work and I was very ambivalent because part of me wanted to go the other part of my remembered how I had left Washington D.C. it was under something of a cloud and I thought oh dear you know bad times back there I don't want all those bad feelings back but I went and I arrived at the theater there that we were working in and I met the production staff it turned out later that of the production stuff there were 8 of them, of the 8 3 were members of AA which is a lot, that's a high percentage but Washington is that kind of a town laughter laughter but that night That first night there, there was a party for the cast and everyone had to attend. And so I went and it was a big cocktail party and I had my Styrofoam cup of coffee and I was walking around and I saw three people standing in a corner with Styro Foam cups of coffee. So I walked over and stood with them and we were chatting. Someone else walked by and asked me if I'd received a phone call from a man at the State Department. They said, did Hale call you today? Yes, he did. These three people looked at me and said, Do you know Hal? I said, Yeah. They said, Are you by any chance a friend of Bill Wilson's? And the knot went out of my stomach, and I relaxed, and I was safe. And I just, you know, it was incredible how protected I felt. And I told these people about a time 15 years before when I lived in Washington. I came to one morning when I was living in Georgetown. And Georgetown in Washington is a charming little area. they have cobblestone streets and used brick sidewalks and the houses are all restored and it's just lovely and I came to one morning in Washington and I was under the front windows inside and I got my other eye open and I wondered what time of day or night it might be and I turned around and I lifted up the Venetian blinds and peered out and it was one of those beautiful fall days in Washington where the sun was bright and you could just tell the air was clear and crisp and the trees were doing their number and they were all different colors it was absolutely beautiful and there was a woman walking down the street and she had a little dog on a leash and I remember peering through those blinds looking at that woman thinking I wonder what it feels like to be out there just walking down the street like that. I mean, she wasn't hanging on to anything. She was just walking down the streets. And I let the blind drop and crawled around looking for the corner of the bottle for breakfast. And that incident stuck in my mind because it was another one of those tacky little times that was like that morning in Florida behind the dumpster. You know, no big deal but just that sick feeling inside of you. Oh my God, is this the way it's going to be? and I told these people that I met at that party about living in that apartment in Georgetown and they said, funny thing we know that corner because right around that corner on the next street is a meeting of AA that was there then and we'll take you there tomorrow night so they did and we stopped on the way and we stood in front of this apartment house that I used to live in looked just the same and it was that time of day it was like dusk and if you're drinking, you don't know if it's 6 a.m. or 6 p.m., I used to turn on the television to see if it was Walter Cronkite or Sunrise Semester so that I'd know. But I stood in front of that apartment house and the blinds were drawn and the distance of where I was standing to that room was maybe half the distance from here to the back of the room and I thought, wouldn't it be funny if there was somebody in there peeking out of those blinds looking at me thinking I wonder what it feels like to just be standing out there like a person there's no way I could have gotten from the floor inside that room to 15 years later standing outside looking in there's now way to make that journey except through and with Alcoholics Anonymous so if you're new tonight or coming back tonight or whatever your reason for being here I hope that you can stay here long enough so that you could make a journey like that someday thank you