Almost Starting Anonymous? – June G.

Hi, my name's June. I'm an alcoholic. And thank you so much for letting me be a part of your weekend or I guess the month actually workshop. I love Alcoholics Anonymous. It has given me a life I never would have wanted. And it's made me a person I wouldn't have even liked before I came to AlcoholicsAnonymous. So it's really been an amazing journey for me. And, you know, I've been asked to talk a fair amount these last few weeks. I'm almost getting ready to start Zoom Anonymous, so I'm truly a little bit tired of my own story, but I do feel that out of respect for Alcox Anonymous when I'm asked, I'm going to go ahead and tell obviously some of my story, but I'm also hoping tonight to share a couple of other things that have meant a lot to me over the years. You know, I always like to share in the very beginning when I'm asked in this kind of a format to say the very most important things that I say. Oh, and I want to make sure I started my timer. Sorry. There we go. Okay. Because I know that there's a few new people who identified, I'm going to assume there might be a few other new people that didn't get a chance or decided not to identify. And actually these last few weeks we're living with one of my daughters and she's not in Alcoholics Anonymous. So far as I know, she might not need to be who knows, but you know, she's actually been listening to some of the meetings that I've been going to and that we've been going too. So for that being said in case there's someone new or visiting, I want to start out by saying the most important thing I ever say when I'm asked to share. And that would be that I am not an expert on alcoholism, on Alcoholics Anonymous, on any step, on any idea, on anything that I'm going to share about. I'm only going to show my own experience and I would strongly encourage you, especially if you are new, to please go to lots of meetings of AlcoholicsAnonymous because we are people who normally would not mix and I believe it's one of the great strengths of Alcoholic Anonymous that that happens. And, you know, I know that a lot of you, I mean, I don't know all of you but I'm sure that most, if not all of you do know a little bit or a lot about the history of Alcoholics Anonymous. But I always think it's, you know, it's pretty interesting to kind of mention a few things, particularly if there's some new people, you know, when Alcoholics Anonymous first began, there was a guy named Bill Wilson and Bill had been sober for six months before anybody else got sober before we credit the day that Alcoholics Anonymous began, which would be coming up 85 years from now this coming July. And so when Bill got sober and had six months and then Dr. Bob got sober, I mean, anyone here who's an alcoholic knows just how long six months is. That is one hell of a long time for anybody like us to not be drinking. And so they didn't know what Bill was doing at that time. I mean there was no book. There wasn't, there weren't steps. We didn't have any guidelines at all. You had one guy who was sober and talked to another guy. Now there were two guys sober. And so they're fascinated that Bill has six months. And as they work with new people, they're still all very fascinated. How is Bill doing this? Now, Bill actually suffered from a condition. It's kind of like an ulcer thing and he had a lot of nervous stomachs. That was just something that he really suffered from. So Bill drank tomato juice and sauerkraut because that kind of took the edge off of that nervous, disturbed stomach that he had. So when people were new back then, they used to give them tomato juice and saurkraut, because they didn't know if that was part of what was helping Bill stay sober. So I feel like we're very lucky today that, you know, we have a big book and none of us have to drink that. We actually have a solution. We know what it is. It's written down. And I'm grateful for that. I really don't like sauerkraut. So, you know, there were a couple of things that were like, you know, floating through my mind. I mean, there's always a lot of things floating through my mind, the idea of whether I can get them out and make any sense is an entirely different thing. And oh, and I noticed that a lot of the people that shared tonight did give their sobriety dates. So just in case that's your tradition, I will give mine. Mine is July the 13th, 1972. But when I mentioned that Alcoholics Anonymous is coming up on celebrating its 85th anniversary in July this year, we normally would be having an international convention. And it's a convention where over the ones that I've been to, there's been over 40,000. I think maybe even one of them had over 50,000 people and people from countries all over the world. And because of this situation right now, that conference has been canceled or I'm not sure if it'll be rescheduled, but it definitely is not happening this year as far as I know. And given that, I think a lot of us that have gone and you know, that we will really enjoy that experience. I mean, I Think that there was certainly a little bit of sadness about hearing that conference might not be happening. And yet, I find it really fascinating that with this zoom format, if I'm going to look for the silver lining, I've actually had the opportunity to go to meetings in a number of different countries, and in lots of states during these past few weeks. And I was in a meeting, I think a week or two weeks ago in Iran. And afterwards, a woman sent me a text on WhatsApp, you know, and she told me a little bit about getting sober and the differences culturally in Iran, not just for women, but you know the difficulties of arranging meetings with Alcoholics Anonymous. And AlcoholicsAnonymous is a lot newer in a lot of other countries than it is, you know, in the United States. Um, and it's just, it's been just amazing. It's really been amazing to get to meet these different people and to hear how there is a solution. We have this solution and we know, you know, how to get out from under, um, you Know that way out. I am from, well, my grandfather, when he was 46 years old. My grandfather was a drunk driver and he was killed in a car accident along with other people in his car and with people in another car. And when my grandfather died at that time and he Was 46 years Old, Alcoholics Anonymous did not exist yet. That was over in Ireland. so my grandmother was then left widowed with 13 children and one of them was my father and when my father was born Alcoholics Anonymous did not exist yet and later my father was to go on to drink himself to death alone in a hotel room he was younger than 50 when that happened. When my mother was born, Alcoholics Anonymous was not even one year old yet. It was, I think, nine months old when my mother Was born. And my mom was to go on and to become an alcoholic. Tonight, she is sober and has continually been sober. I believe right now she has 14 years. But before that happened, my mother WAS going to be a person who WAS going to be in and out of AlcoholicsAnonymous with varying lengths of sobriety for over 40 years. so it does appear that it could be genetically a factor in my life certainly not in everybody's life that I would be an alcoholic but how fortunate am I to have been born in a time where Alcoholics Anonymous exists and I think each and every one of us knows somebody who's 85 or older you know and that just that recognition that we are born in the time where Alcoholic anonymous exists and where we have a way out from the disease of alcoholism. I am, I'm a person who thinks I was born an alcoholic, but that's just because I know something was really wrong with me before I ever started to drink. And the way that that first manifested itself in me was I was just life always hurt too much for me. I grew up in an alcoholic home and I grewup with a lot of violence. I growup witha lot of different kinds of abuse that happened in some alcoholic homes, not all of them, but it was happening in my home. And my mom, as I mentioned, was an alcoholic. And as I look back now, I know I didn't know it then, but there was also mental health issues and there was poverty. So there was a lot going on in my life. And by the time I was five years old, I was really done. I found my first obsession, which I did not give up the idea of it until after I got sober and Alcoholics Anonymous. And that first obsession was with suicide. Because for me, I needed out. I didn't want to be here. I don't want to go forward. I wasn't looking forward to anything. I could just see that life was going to get harder and harder, and there were going to be more bad things happening. And everything hurt. It wasn't just the physical abuse and those kind of things, but it was just when I would go out in the world, and I'd see two people talking to one another and look at me. I knew they were talking about me, and it hurt, and so I was incredibly self-centered, but I certainly didn't know that then, but I was definitely very thin-skinned, and I hated that about myself, and when I was growing up, I went to 18 grammar schools and seven junior highs and five high schools. I don't think I ever went to a school an entire semester in my life. you know alcoholism was you know running the show in in our uh in my family in my life and um that was long before my drinking started so by the time that i was eight years old i did get drunk for the first time i'd had alcohol before alcohol was always around at any occasion in my home or family but i got drunk and it was that time where so many of us talk about, I just remember for me, it was like, I could take a deep breath. I could breathe and I could just, you know, let some of that weight off of my shoulders. And but I drank beyond that. And I drank always from then on for the effect. Absolutely. But the effect that I wanted was not the effect that some people in Alcoholics Anonymous were doing, which there's a lot of party animals in Alcoholics Anonymous I know tons of people who've had wonderful funny great times with their drinking and you know doing the things that they were doing with their friends and stuff that wasn't the way that I drank I drank to get drunk and I drank to not feel anything at all and I was very good at that I don't think in my life I ever said no thank you I've had enough I don'T THINK I EVER SAID NO I'M STARTING TO FEEL IT THAT JUST WASN'T in my vocabulary. I was drinking to feel it. And I wasn't drinking to feel good, like I say that so many other people that I've known, you know, in Alcoholics Anonymous I was drink to not feel anything at all. And i'm extremely grateful that alcohol worked the way that it did for me because I really believe if alcohol and the things that I mixed with it did not work the way that they did, I would have had to have been locked up in some kind of an institution because life always hurt me too much for me. So when I was growing up, um, you know, like every other kid in the world, they'd say, what do you want to be when you grow up? And I said, a boy wasn't as easy to do back then as it might be today. Um, and I wanted to be a boy because it seems to me like men never got hurt. They never felt pain in my life. My mom was a bar drinker and she drank in some very violent bars. And, um. I saw a lot of things happen in my life. I've seen men shot, seen them stabbed, arrested, you know, beaten up, saw their kids, you know overdose. I saw their wives leave them. I Saw a lot of stuff happen. I never remember. I do not ever remember seeing a man crying under any of those circumstances. And I really believe that was because men don't feel pain because you can't hurt men. They only feel anger and that's how I wanted to be. I wanted nothing to be able to hurt me because everything always hurts so much but I wasn't able to do that the only thing that allowed me to survive really I think is that when I could drink I could not care and it could not hurt for a little while so when I you know when I realized I wasn'T going to be able to be a boy the way I saw the world I grew up in a little town in California Los Angeles called Venice California and uh in that town that's a beach town and so there were certain things that were very important to me and in my mind that were important. And one of those was I needed to be in a gang and I was, and I needed to do a lot of fighting and I did. However, I always like to make sure I mention, I've never fought less than five people at a time, which means that I always got beat up. But after I'd been sober for a while, my sponsor explained to me, you know, if you fight one person and you lose, people can question whether you're very good at fighting. But if you always fight a group of five or more, no one's really looking at what kind of a fighter you are because they know you're going to lose. And so I was one of those people that walked around a lot with a black eye or a swollen lip or whatever it was. And I also found for me in my life that I would much rather you punch me in the face than hurt my feelings. And, uh, you just have to take my word for it. I was very good at getting people to want to punch me and my face. And uh, and so that was a big part of, you know, of my life drinking and fighting and getting beat up. Um, and walking around barefoot, you knows, really important to me. Because if you're tough from Venice Beach, you have to have tough feet. And I would stand down there with my gang and I'd see different touristy looking people kind of scared us for a while. And I'd look them right in the eye and I take my cigarette and I throw it down on the boardwalk in Venice. And I put it out with my bare feet. I sort of see sometimes these people would whisper back and forth to one another. I knew the kind of things they must be saying to one Another. They were probably saying, wow, that is a very tough ride to be able to do something so amazing. and after I'd been sober for a while my sponsor explained to me that perhaps what some of those people were saying was did you see that that person just put flesh to fire why would anybody do anything so stupid but I did not know there was another way of looking at it now I mentioned earlier that my mom was going to be in and out of Alcoholics Anonymous and she was during those years and at a certain point for me the self-hatred that I had had always as far back as I could remember. It led me to such a dark place that I can't really describe to you what it was like by the time I came through the doors of Alcoholics Anonymous. I didn't feel like I could go on breathing in and out one or two more times, hating myself any more than I did. And the alcohol was working in the sense of getting me physically drunk, but it wasn't shutting off the pain and the feelings and the thoughts anymore. And that for me was a really horrible, horrible place to be because i couldn't die i tried that as many times and as hard as i could and i couldn'T live the way that i was living um i came to alcoholics anonymous my mother brought me i didn'T want to join alcoholics i didn't want to be an alcoholic i didn'T want anything that you had i didn''T even know what you had I knew i didn´T want to belong if my mother had belonged to it because i blamed her for everything that had ever gone wrong in my life but the miracle of alcoholics synonymous began that first night and it began because there was a guy in that meeting who my mom drank with. And he was one of the few people in the world that I admired. And I admired him for many reasons that I assume a lot of you won't identify with at all, but they were my reasons. I admired Him because He did drink in those really violent bars where my mom drink, but He won the fights. You know, my mom always lost the fights and Paul won the fights. And he was one of the most hostile and violent people I knew. And I was very impressed that somebody who could be strong, like I wanted to be, would need to come to Alcoholics Anonymous. That made an impression on me. I got drunk the next night. I came back to some meetings about Alcoholics Anonymous and in that next two weeks, every option but AlcoholicsAnonymous was removed from my life. I told you a little bit about how much I hated myself. I took that hatred out toward everyone else in the world as well. I didn't like anybody. And my mother and I had a violent relationship, especially when both of us were drinking and my mom was getting sober at that time. So she asked me to leave her apartment. She didn't think she needed to be subjected to physical attacks when she was getting over. And so I did leave the rest of my family. Didn't have anything to do with me and had not for, well, we didn't until I was about five years sober before I got invited back to Christmas or, you know, different events because of my stealing and, you know. My behavior and my attitude. I had been in a lot of foster homes but none of them would take me back. I tried to get into a couple alcohol recovery homes. There were only maybe three that I can remember back then and I contacted them. None of them will take me. Some because of my age and some just because of mine. I was like, I don't know. I'm not going to do that. My attitude. And then I thought, well, you know what? Who really cares about any of that? Really cares about programs and family, foster homes, all of that. None of that really matters. If you're a tough broad, the only thing that really is important is your gang. And then one day as I walked down an alley, all five members of my own gang beat me up. And I found myself in a meeting of Alcoholics Anonymous. And I had no money and I had No Family and I Had No Place to Live and I dropped out of school in seventh grade. And so I raised my hand in a Meeting of Alcoholic Anonymous." Now Now, I know tonight that when I raised my hand in those first couple of meetings, there were some people in that meeting that did not know about the traditions about Collex Anonymous. I certainly did not have the traditions of Collex Anonymous, and I know they didn't know about them because some of those people knew how old I was because my mother had been in and out of that group for, I think, 10 years or a number of years already at that time. So they knew who I was and how old i was, and they came over to me after the meeting And they told me they didn't want a little kid to sit in their meetings while they talked about serious things. And they tell me if I came back, they'd get together and throw me out. And I thought AA didn't like me either. And that was okay with me because I didn't love me either, and I had it for as long as I could remember. And so I fell back on my number one answer, the answer I used from the time that I was five years old. And I went over to a friend of my mother's house, andI went into her bathroom, and I found enough kind of pills that I needed to kill myself, and I took enough of them to do that one more time. And then before I got to the meeting and passed out, they called on me to share. I couldn't even stand or sit, so they knew something was wrong. I laid there, and they were able to tell that I needed to be taken to a hospital, and that's where I came to. And a doctor gave me something to make me throw up and explained that the pills I'd taken were to slow down my heart. And he explained that if I'd gotten there five or ten minutes later, I would have been in a coma that they probably could not have brought me out of. And I don't know exactly why that overdose was any different than all the others that I inflicted upon myself up to that time in my life. I just know that it was, excuse me, because since that time, I haven't taken anything that affects me from the neck up. And that's how I personally define sobriety. And I've done that one day at a time, as I said, since July 13th, 1972. too. When I came to Alcoholics Anonymous, I came in here with a bad attitude. It was the only attitude I'd ever had and I brought it right here with me. I didn't like women. I don't like me. I didn' t like my mother. I d' n't like any other women I knew and I didn''t want anything to do with the women here in AlcoholicsAnonymous. I did not want to sit next to women. I didn ''t want to talk to women . I was certainly not going to hug women And I did not like listening to women's speakers, which always makes me feel better. I know there are never as many people listening to me as it looks like when I'm in a meeting. The men that I had known in my life, when alcohol became involved with them, there was always violence and the women always lost. So the men here were identifying themselves as alcoholics and I didn't want anything to do with them either. And so it was kind of a problem because in 1972, when I came to Alcoholics Anonymous, all they had were men and women and I Didn't Like Any Of Them. But I was desperate, and then I had no place else to go. So I went to 21 meetings a week most of my first two and a half years, and I wasn't trying to get a gold star in AA. I was really trying to find a place to stay indoors, and I did not believe that Alcoholics Anonymous would work for me the way that I heard it working for so many of the people. But I did believe that my life might get better. I did get enough hope to think that maybe if I happen to be walking down a street one day and I happened to glance in one of those storefront windows that you see when you're walking, which is the closest thing to ever being looking into a mirror I ever planned on doing. I thought maybe when I walk by one of Those storefront Windows and I get a glance at myself, maybe I won't feel like throwing up anymore at who I am and where I've been and the things that I have done. And that was enough hope that maybe I wouldn't get nauseous if I caught a glimpse of who I was in Alcox Anonymous. And, you know, I'm so grateful to the members of Alcoholics Anonymous that were here when I came to Alcoholics Anonymous. And I'm så grateful for how they tolerated me with my rotten attitude and my bad behavior. There was as much love and kindness in Alcoholics Anonymous when I got here as there is, I believe, today, even through the Zoom format. but I was completely unwilling and incapable of allowing kindness anywhere near me um and yet they tolerated me the way that I was so I got to Alcoholics Anonymous I didn't wear shoes most of the time it wasn't like I took them off just to go to an AA meeting I just didn't wear shoes a lot of the times I had a motorcycle jacket and on the back it said do unto others and then split I had always smoked and I smoked back then you could smoke in meetings so when I got sober, I smoked three packs of cigarettes a day. I almost always had a cigarette and I was lighting another cigarette. And after a little while, I took up smoking cigars and then later a pipe. I had a motorcycle chain that I wore on my wrist and one on my ankle. I had very limited vocabulary when I got sober. It consisted almost solely of profanity. There were a few exceptions, the, and, mother. And I found a lot of people in alcoholics and I'm just very offended if I use that type of language. And so I sometimes used it more if they got too close to me and I was actually able, um, on a number of occasions to have an entire row all to myself, which is exactly what I wanted. I didn't want anyone to get near me or touch me. I Didn't accept rides. I didn't ask for rides. Um, I mostly walked to the meetings or I took a bus if I had enough money where I hitchhiked. And it's kind of funny because there's a number of people in Alcoholics Anonymous who used to pick me up hitchhiking. One of them actually is my sponsor today. He was not always my sponsor, but he used to take me up and give me a ride all the way back to Venice, even though I was at a meeting in the Valley, which was really the equivalent of at least 20 to 30 miles for him round trip out of his way. But I think it's kind of funny when I look back that I could get in a car with someone if I was hitchhicking, but not if they offered me a drive. But that's just the way my brain worked at the time. But it's also, for me, one of the reasons that I show up when I'm asked to share in a meeting about Alcoholics Anonymous, it would be great to think that I could say something that could help someone. And I do think that on occasion, I have had the privilege of sharing something that has helped somebody in a reading. But the fact is, is that I owe a debt to AlcoholicsAnonymous and to thousands and thousands of people who showed up at all of those meetings and have continued to show up through all these years they left their family dinner or they didn't stay for all of their kids birthday party or they drove in the rain or they did not watch Monday night football I mean whatever it was because they wanted to pay back to Alcoholics Anonymous what had been given to them and I do not remember a lot of their names and I don't remember a lot of things that they said but by being there just by them showing up I stayed in that meeting for an hour most of our meetings back then actually were an hour and a half. I stayed in that meeting an hour and a hal, and I stayed sober for that hour and half. And I do believe for me as I look back on it that the language of the heart was cast onto me primarily by the speakers in Alcoholics Anonymous who were able to tell me where alcohol had taken them to a point of pitiful and incomprehensible demoralization, and that through practicing these principles in their life, things were different and they began to have a different life. And I really didn't believe that all of that could work for me. I didn't Believe you know so much of it. What's great about Alcoholics Anonymous is that you don't have to believe it for it to work. I mean, I'm total proof of that. I just did these things. I think a lot of times I was thinking about it this week. I'm quite sure a number of times. I did things just to try and prove to people that they were wouldn't work for me or to prove to my sponsor that I was different and that I was worse, you know, than everybody else, which is kind of how I felt. And I love how we give out commitments in Alcoholics Anonymous. You know, we don't interview people for the position and pick the right candidate. We just give out the commitments. And so here I was when I was new, they gave me the greeting commitment and I would stay at the two plus two meeting. There used to be about 125, 150 people at that meeting. And I would be the greeter and I Would stand there barefoot with my motorcycle jacket and chain. I still had a black eye because I'd just been beaten up. I had a swollen lip. Thanks for choosing Dicob tapes. If you enjoy this tape, you can order other titles from us by calling 1-800-999-3381 or visit our website at www.dicob.com. And I had my cigar and I would welcome the new people as they came to Alcoholics Anonymous. Sometimes as they walk by and hear their sponsor kind of whisper to them, if you keep drinking, you can end up like that. And back then when I would stand at the door, people who didn't know who I was, they were guessing my age at 37 years old. And as I stood at that door that night, I was actually 13 years old. I've been continually sobering out Cogs Anonymous since I was 13 years old, that means 47 and a half years later, I'm still sober. And that also means that even if you're as bad at math as I still am today, oftentimes. You can tell that if I was 13 then and I've been sober 47 years, then I'm even older than the 37 that they were guessing when I got to Alcoholics Anonymous. And that's absolutely true. But what amazes me and has amazed me for a very, very long time is that when I go to Alcoholic Anonymous, I felt about 2000 years old. And here I am 47 years later, and I just, I feel younger than I ever did before I came to Alcoholics Anonymous or in those early years of being sober. And I don't know exactly how that has happened for me, but there has been a tremendous freedom here in Alcoholics Anonymous and I have been given a life that, like I said, I really, I wouldn't have picked it back then in my early months of sobriety and I wouldn'T have believed that it could be the life that I could have. When I got sober, I guess I'm going to talk a little bit about my first sponsor. So when I got sober, I got a woman for a sponsor, which still surprises me. You know, anytime I think about it, because I've already told you how I felt about women and that woman was a woman named Gail Wilson and Gail spoke. It seemed to me as though Gail spoken about 18 of those 21 meetings every week that I went to. And so I thought to myself, maybe if I ask this woman to be my sponsor, I'll be able to find out ahead of time where she speaks and then I won't have to go hear her all the time. And that was sort of my motivation for picking a sponsor, partly. And whenever I think of that line in the book, that we are people who normally would not mix, I definitely think about Gail Wilson. Gail was about three times my age at the time that she became my sponsor. Gail had come from a warm and loving family in the South. I hated people like that. Gale had a car. I hated people who had a car. We never had a car. I didn't like people who had cars. Gail had been very well educated. I had dropped out after seventh grade. Gail was a had traveled all over the world because she was a stewardess and she'd had, you know, college education and her family had sent her to Europe and she'd been everywhere. I had run away once from Venice hitchhiking and had made it seven miles east and that was as far as I had ever gone. And so, you know, there were all these different things Gail not only did not use the kind of language that I used regularly, she honestly did not know what a lot of the words I was using meant. And not only that, Gail had been seen in public on numerous occasions wearing pink. And I did not even sit in a row in Alcoholics Anonymous where someone wore pink until I was 10 years sober in case anybody thought I was feminine. You know, I was that uncomfortable with being female or feminine or anything to do because I thought it meant that I was weak and I still struggled with that desire. Even after I got sober, it'd be tough and to not get hurt all the time. So anyway, so when I met Gail, I'm just, I'm setting my timer here to make sure that I'm doing okay. So one second here. Okay. So um, so Gail became my sponsor and, um, I stayed very, very active in Alcoholics Anonymous. And I had been very, Very active throughout all the years that I've been sober in various ways. I've Been very active In general service. I've done some commitments, you know, with our central office. Um, and I've kept a lot of commitments at meetings and I'd had a sponsor and been sponsored. Um, so I've Been very active and that's been really, really important. Um The only thing I've done 100% perfectly in 47 and a half years is I haven't drank. And everything else, I've made a lot of mistakes. And I've screwed things up and had to ask and start over. And the wonderful thing about Alcoholics Anonymous is that you can start over and you don't have to drink to start over, you can always find someone who can be a guide for you and kind of help you along the way if you're struggling with a step or situation in your life. And there is nothing that I have ever been through and nothing that I have seen or could imagine. And I have a pretty good imagination where I have not known someone in Alcoholics Anonymous to walk through that experience and usually with dignity and a sense of humor far beyond what I might be able to do. And so I know that this thing works. This is a design for living. It's not just when everything's perfect, you know, it works through fair weather or foul. And i think for some, you know, of us we would agree that there's some foul weather out there, you right now with this whole situation. So I had this, I dropped out in seventh grade. My sponsor Gail wanted me to go back to high school. I did briefly try and go back to high school but if I felt 2,000 in AA I felt about 3,000 in high school I mean it was just not going to work for me and so I didn't stay in high school instead my sponsor said fine if you're not going to get a high school education then you'll get the kind of jobs people who have a seventh grade education can get and that's what I did I got a lot of kind of crappy jobs and I usually they were all part-time a little of this and a little that and I was a terrible employee by the way in those early years of Spritey so I got fired a lot um but you know I'd get a different job and I clean apartments on the weekends and I just do whatever jobs I could find and uh and I just not drink and show up for my AA commitments and eventually I wanted to get a driver's license and you can't get that in California unless you have a driver's education. So I went over to the local city college. And back then, if you went to a city college, when you signed up, you could take one class or five classes. I don't know, lots of classes, but it would cost you just $7, I think. It wasn't very expensive back then. So when I was signing up for my driving class, I heard some people talking in the lobby at the school and they were talking about something called a dummy English class. and the thing was was that I was sober I guess about three or three and a half years at that point and if you had asked me to read something in a meeting maybe to read chapter five I could have read it I could have read and pronounced every single one of the words and you would have heard them and thought oh she can read and I could read but I could not hold all the information from an entire sentence in my head even at three and A half years sober and so I really thought I had done permanent damage and I didn't think I was going to be able to to recover and i was scared and i first didn't want to tell anybody um these things but i thought maybe this dummy english class could help me a little bit so i signed up and i took that dummy english class and i did the uh driver's education class and uh the next semester after i passed those two classes i took a couple more classes then i got some jobs on campus i got a job in the cafeteria so i could get some food sometimes and i got job uh you know at a discount i got a job in the library so I could study sometimes. And then I kept doing the apartment cleaning and the different things that I was doing. And I kept my AA commitments and I was very active at that point in general service and, uh, um, things. And so anyway, I kind of kept showing up and, um. I had a lot of struggles in those early years. You know, I was over 10 years sober now, call it synonymous before I could afford financially to put a dollar in the basket on anything like a regular basis. And a lot of times I felt like a big loser because I couldn't put that dollar in the basket. But, you know, I was trying. I was try to put myself through school and I was showing up for my AA commitments. Sometimes I'd come home and someone would have left a bag of groceries on my porch. And, you now, I have to say honestly I was more embarrassed, I think, than grateful. I just felt terrible that I was sober and people were still having to help me. I didn't like that. And I talked to my sponsor about it and she'd say, we don't give it back to the people who gave it to us. We pay it to other people. We give it forward and backwards, but we don'T give it right back. And anyway, so I kind of kept on with school. And after about three years, they called me in the counselor's office and they told me I completed all the requirements for what they called an AA college degree. I didn'T even know there was a college degree called that, but I liked that name. And my sponsor came to that graduation and so did some members of my family by then because I was starting to heal a little bit within my family relationship and I had come up with a dream and I don't know when I had it but I'd come up this dream and my sponsor told me that I had to do the footwork for that dream whether I was in AA or not people have to do footwork and so I went ahead and I was doing that footwork and while I was during that she told me I had go get a GED so I'd have that equivalent to a high school diploma and so, I did that and then I filled out these applications and did the footwork to move forward on that dream. And I got accepted at a university and I went on to that school and I completed that a few years later and continued working all these different jobs. And after a while, I finished the university and then there's more footwork that needed to happen if I wanted to make that dream come true. So I went ahead and I filled out more applications and did more work and I got excepted. Let's see, it's been 40 years this year. 40 years ago, I got a telegram saying that I was chosen as one of 300 out of 3000 applicants to go to law school. And I had always planned on spending a lot of time in court, never on that side of the table. And, and I have a job today where I truly believe I'm able to be of service. I not have not had one day ever, or I've gone to work where I'm not reminded of where alcoholism takes people like me it doesn't take everybody to the same places and I know that but I know the places it takes people like me you know and I have a job where I truly believe I'm able to be of service um and there isn't a single doubt in my mind um but that that's all it become possible because of Alcoholics Anonymous um because of what I've learned here about showing up and uh and doing the footwork whether I want to or not or whether I have good attitude or not um so when I was getting ready to graduate law school, it became very clear that my sponsor, Gail Wilson, was dying of cancer. And Gail is 48 years old. And she spent a lot of the last few months, almost all of it in the hospital at Cedars. And so different ones of us took turns visiting her and spending time with her. And I'd go and talk with her. When I go in there, Gale would introduce me to these nurses and doctors when they'd come in who, by the way, didn't really want to meet me. I mean, they had no reason to, but she'd say, I want you to meet Junie. She said, Junie's like a daughter to me and Junie is going to be an attorney. And, um, you know, I would sit and I would remember how in the early months of my sobriety, when I would see Gail at the Thursday night Brentwood meeting, she would say to me, don't tell anyone that I am your sponsor. And please don't sit next to me at the meeting because I cannot take your language and cigar smoke, you know? And here it is a number of years later, she's introducing me to absolute strangers, you don't even want to meet me. And while we were sitting in that hospital room, you had plenty of time for conversation. And so I talked to her and I asked her, I go, Hey Gail, how come you agreed to be my sponsor? And she goes, Oh, that's really easy. She goes, one reason only. She says, I agreed to be your sponsor because I was taught to never say no to an AA request. She said, when you asked me to be your sponsors, she said, I did not just, I knew you'd probably never make it. So with your background and your attitude, she goes, I was pretty sure this was not going to be possible for you, but I was told to never Say No to an A request. And so I agreed to sponsor you. And she said and I have to say that during the years I've sponsored a lot of people. She says, I'm not sure if I've ever sponsored anyone who was bigger flake than you. You did all kinds of things that I told you I didn't think you should do. You didn't listen to the things I did. You didn'T tell me when you were doing some of the things that you were doing because you knew I wouldn't want you to do them, you know, with the one exception, well, I guess two exceptions really, so you didn't drink no matter what and you always kept your AA commitments. You always showed up and those are the two things that have done served me very very well this past 47 and a half years and she said, you know, and I remember when you called me up and you said, Hey Gail, I'm going to try and take a class over at the city college. She goes, I knew you'd never finish. She was, you'd ever finished anything. You hadn't even kept a job yet for six months. I knew he wouldn't be able to make a whole semester of the school, but I didn't say anything. And she said, and then I remember you taking a few classes, not really all that many. And you called me up one day and you says, Gail I think I want to be an attorney. She said, I had to force myself not to laugh out loud. She said, you know, I knew that with, you know, the way that you were, you wouldn't be able to do that. That was eight years of school, you know, and we talked about how come she didn't tell me? How come she didn't say, hey, June, let's be realistic. Let me sit you down and let's, you know, let us really talk about a practical job for someone who comes from where you came from with your education and, you know your background how come she didn't do that and the thing was was that you know I just want to be really clear to anybody here who's listening just in case I haven't you know conveyed this enough Gail never believed in June Gail ever thought oh here's a winner June's going to be somebody this program is going to really be easy for somebody like June Gale never believed that but Gail had had things happen in her life that she couldn't believe had happened and she'd been sober long enough to see incredible things happen in other people's lives when they did footwork and they didn't drink. And that's why she didn't tell me that I couldn't or that it could never happen because she didn'T know what might be able to happen, you know? But it wasn'T that she believed in June. It was just very simply that she believed In Alcoholics Anonymous. Okay, let me see here. I've got a couple minutes later. So I'm going to go ahead and a couple of minutes to go. Thank you. Yeah. All right. So, you KNOW, there'S a woman on the panel around the meeting tonight named Joan from San Diego. And she and I got to do a panel this past Monday night where we talked about a woman named Sybil, who was the first woman to get sober west of the Mississippi. And it turns out that I hadn't known this. I've known Joan for a long time, but we've gotten to know each other even better because of this whole Zoom thing. And we've been chatting and going to meetings together. And so I found out that Sybil had been Joan's sponsor at a certain point. And so we really had fun doing this panel and I wanted to tell a couple of other, or at least one of my own Sybil stories, which I'm not sure because Joan's heard me a lot. And there's several people on this talk, I mean, on this meeting tonight that could probably give my talk, but still it was really important for me. You know, Sybil when I met her, I was less than 30 days sober. And I happened to remember that very clearly, because I was the greeter at that two plus two meeting that I mentioned with my cigar and my bad attitude and all of that. And I had less than 30 days as I sat in that meeting when Sybil came to talk. And Sybil had almost 32 years when she came to talked that night. And she was talking and I didn't listen to everything that she said. I mean, even today, I don't always listen to everything the speaker is saying, because i often have to get back to thinking about me. but that particular night I was you know thinking about me and all these different things that were going on and then near the end of her talk Sybil said and newcomers oh well now I'm gonna listen because I'm a newcomer and I think this is my part so I kind of tuned into what she was saying she said in newcomers she said Alcoholics Anonymous has given me an incredible life she said it is unbelievable how amazing and wonderful the life is that Alcoholics Anonymous has given me. And she said, and do you know, newcomers, if I had a magic wand and I could wave it and give you an amazing life, I wouldn't do it. I thought, wait a minute. I mean, did I just hear that right? I mean isn't it supposed to be, you know in this AA thing, aren't they supposed to say, oh newcomers I wish I had magic wand and I wish I could waive it and get you an Amazing Life too. But she said I wouldn t do it, I mean, she didn't even want to. I thought, wow, this is amazing. It's mean, really. And the thing was, was as I sat there that night with less than 30 days, I was 13 years old. I had a seventh grade education. I had no place to live. I had No relationship of any kind with my family. And as I mentioned, none of the foster homes that had ever had me before wanted me back. I was facing deportation for being in the country illegally. And I had some court cases that were going on that didn't look like they were going to be turning out very well and I just want to tell you you know as I sat there things were not going really well and Sybil said I wouldn't do it I wouldn'T give you an amazing life she said because I wouldnT want to rob you of your journey and I didn'T want a journey when I sat here I just wanted someone to wave a magic wand I wanted all these problems to go away I couldn'T even understand how having me sweep the floor was had anything at all to do with all of these real problems that I had. Go to a meeting, don't drink. It's like, you know, they're not listening to how deep my problems are. They have these simple little answers, you know. But as I think back then and now, I've thought about it a lot. You know, I'm so grateful that Sybil didn't rob me of my journey. Of course, the truth is, is that nobody can rob you of your journey because it's your journey. The thing is here in Alcoholics synonymous if you stay sober and if you don't drink and you keep coming back you can always find a sponsor or a guide or someone who can lead you and help you on your journey when i got sober there's a number of people i know on here um especially i'm sure you know the the tapers here you know they're going to have a lot of information if you ever want to hear these talks but back when i Got Sober we had a guy named Norm Alfie and every time i ever heard Norm Alpey talk right afterwards, I'd think, I want to join AA. And then I'd remember I already belonged or I wouldn't have been there hearing Norm Altey. But he was just so enthusiastic about life and the life that Alcoholics Anonymous had given him. And one of the things that he would often say at the end of his talk, he would say, you know, but for a moment of grace, rooms like this, Zoom rooms for now, people like you, I could have missed it all. Thank you for not letting me. Thank you for letting me be a part of your workshop.