Almost Starting Zoom Anonymous 🤣 – June G.

About This Speaker Tape

Venice Beach, California. A thirteen-year-old girl stands on the boardwalk barefoot, putting out a cigarette with her bare feet to prove she is tough. June G. grew up in a house where violence and poverty were the only constants and life always hurt too much. She drank to feel nothing at all, drifting through a haze of gang fights and suicide attempts until she walked into a room where she didn't like the men or the women, and she certainly didn't like herself.

She arrived at the doors of recovery with a motorcycle jacket and a vocabulary consisting mostly of profanity, viewed by some as a "little kid" who didn't belong. From the wreckage of a seventh-grade education and a series of overdoses, June found a Higher Power through the sheer act of showing up. She describes the "footwork" required to move from cleaning apartments to law school, guided by a sponsor who wore pink and hated her cigar smoke. June reflects on a life rebuilt one day at a time since 1972.

Topics

Timestamps

• 0:00 June G. opens by emphasizing she is not an expert, only sharing her experience.
• 2:30 Discussion of AA history: Bill W.'s early sobriety and the strange early practice of drinking tomato juice and sauerkraut.
• 6:15 The family wreckage: June details the deaths of her grandfather and father and her mother's struggle with alcoholism.
• 10:40 Childhood trauma and the 'first obsession' with suicide starting at age five.
• 15:20 Life in Venice Beach: gangs, fighting, and the 'tough broad' persona.
• 20:10 The bottom: a near-fatal overdose and the realization that she couldn't live or die.
• 24:50 Early sobriety: the struggle with a 'rotten attitude' and the discomfort of being female.
• 31:10 The 'footwork' of recovery: moving from a seventh-grade education to a law degree.
• 38:40 The final days of her sponsor Gail W. and the revelation that Gail believed in the program, not necessarily in June.
• 44:10 Sybil's lesson on the 'magic wand' and the importance of the journey.