An Irish-Born Storyteller Finds Her Recovery in America – Local Speaker

This feels really short. Hi, my name is Rowan and I am an alcoholic. I've been nervous all day. And there was a time in my sobriety where my ego would never allow me to be nervous. But the longer I stay sober no more, I realize how little I know. So it's been a couple of years since I've shared my story. And I don't like to plan it. I like to just kind of hand it over and just see whatever comes out. So it could be a hot mess, people. First of all, I want to say thank you for asking me to speak. It is an honor, even though I'm a nervous wreck. I know that this is what keeps me sober. And I know it's what I have to do for the rest of my life. I haveと stay doing this sort of stuff and getting uncomfortable. comfortable, and I committed to doing that very, very early in sobriety. It was actually around step six that I committed that, but I'll talk about that later. My sobriete date is June 6th, 2007, so I just celebrated 10 years of this stuff. I remember having a couple of weeks. I remember having 24 hours actually no I don't remember having 24 hours because the first 90 days were quite blurry but I remember being in early sobriety and looking at people with 10 years and just it was the most unattainable thing I'd ever seen I would just maybe for you guys but not for this alcoholic and I really believed that I really believed that there was just no way I would make it to 10 years and here I am. A little bit about me, I grew up, you might notice a little tiny bit of an accent, it's faded a lot over the years. I was born in Dublin, Ireland on Easter Sunday 1971 and I know you're doing the math some of you so that makes me 22. As they say stay at home. I'm 22 and a bit, and the bit's my own business. Yeah, so I'm 46. Grew up in Dublin, in dirty Dublin, and was really like a scruffy street kid. And I was born into... You know, I know most Americans think of leprechauns and rolling hills and the soap that you guys use, that's shit. That does not exist where I come from. The first bowl of Lucky Charms I was offered, I was like, what is this shit? What is that? But yeah, also doesn't exist in Ireland. So you guys are being conned is all I'm going to say on that. But people think of Ireland as that, but there is also a lot of sorrow And, you know, I don't end up in Alcoholics Anonymous because I came from a beautiful childhood. I ended up in Alcoholics Anonymous because I was born to a depressed mother who was addicted to Valium. And she would take Valium and then go to her room and stay there forever is what it felt like as a little girl. And my dad was an untreated or is an untreated bipolar paranoid schizophrenic pedophile, unfortunately. And so I was born into that house. And really, really young, I knew like I was in a crazy house. Like I wasn't sitting there confused. I was like, these people are nuts. And I remember looking for like adoption papers like when I was little. I was not sure what I was doing. I was just like, I cannot, seriously, I can not belong to these people. It's just not, I just couldn't comprehend it. And I would literally search through all their stuff off and look for these adoption papers because you know when you come from abuse there was forms of escapism that I used and one of my escape routes was I would bring my um my bags a school bag and all my clothes onto my bed every single night and every single day I would pretend that it was a boat I was in and I was sailing away and that was one of the things that I did. One of my escapisms and one or the other ones was to keep searching for these real parents that exist. They're like on television in Little House on the Prairie and stuff and I grew up with like the Brady Bunch and all that American television so I was convinced that I really belonged to a family like that and that I would find paperwork and I'd be able to escape but that wasn't the case. I looked like my dad My personality is actually a lot like him and And I always think to myself, for a long time, I hated that fact. I was really ashamed. Like when I was little, people would be like, you're just like your father. And the horror of being like this man that behind closed doors, you know, was hell. But now today, having worked these glorious things right here, I love the fact that I'm like him. He's super intelligent, and he's funny, and he's sick, and I am no longer, you know, sick. And so I get to be the good of what he could have been. So growing up, I, you know, you would think that being in a mentally ill, untreated mental illness household, that that would be what screwed me up. but being raised Mormon in Dublin, Ireland Man, oh man My parents were baptized in the Irish Sea because there was no church The Mormon Church is quite new I don't know how old it is but it's quite new compared to Catholicism and the Protestants that were killing each other there but my parents converted when I was one and a half um and they got baptized in the Irish sea so we grew up Mormons in in Dublin and that was just crazy like because I would have to go to these special schools and everybody would call us morons instead of Mormons because nobody in Ireland knew what it was. And we were linked with the Moonies and all the weird, weird, weird obscure religions. And it was just very peculiar. And my family was very dedicated to it. My dad especially was super dedicated. He, in his delusions, thought he was a prophet of God. So I got to grow up with the prophet of the one true church on the earth. And there's There's no trauma there from that at all. He would bless the food for like a half an hour. I just want to eat it, you know? And he would come down the stairs and he would have these visions and we always had to move. I think I lived in like... As an alcoholic, I tend to exaggerate, so give me one moment. I think i lived at about 12 houses by the time I was 12. because we just had to keep moving, because they were coming to get us. And no one can be trusted. And the whole world is out to get you. And that's really how I was raised. My whole life was just... I was programmed that no one was to be trusted and it's also... I mean, I know it's in a lot of different cultures, but it's very much in the Irish culture that you don't take your shit outside the family and you don'T trust anyone and you sweep it under the rug and it stays there and so I never spoke about what was going on I never talked about the sexual abuse or the physical abuse or the emotional abuse I just got on with life and that was kind of like what I knew but I did know that it was not how it was supposed to be and I always knew my mind always stayed strong I knew that he would never get to me and he would would never break me i used to climb into the into the closet well he used to lock us in in the cupboards um and when i was in the cupboard i would uh i remember talking to whatever was out there and i was my brother who had passed away is what i was thinking in my mind when i Was a Little Girl and i remember just thinking and saying out loud that i know i'm being watched over and I know that I won't die in any of this situation I know they'll be okay and I always knew it I was crying I was scared but deep down fundamentally I knew that I was stronger than this bigger than this and that there was more for me in life than this. And I don't know how I knew it but I knew it and it drove him crazy, it drove drove him nuts that I would just stare him right in the eyes and just have no real fear of what, you know, as the man who was supposed to be watching over me, I would look at him like, you now, shame on you kind of thing from the earliest age, and it drove him nut, tormented him. And as a result, I kind of got the brunt of the stick, but that's okay. My mother, I don't know if you guys know, but there is no divorce in Ireland until 1997. It was against the law. So I had a lot of resentments against my mother and we hashed it out in my sobriety. For a long time, we hashED it out. And God bless her, she stood there in front of me and she took it, and I had lots to say. day. As far as I was concerned, there was a way out even when there was no way out. But she was amazing in the end and I also lost her about just about a year ago. She was amazing. She tracked me down and stood in front of me. I think she stayed for about three months until I would speak to her and basically just said, I'm not leaving until until, you know, you accept my apology. And I did, thanks to these steps, and thanks to this program. So, yeah, no divorce. So they stayed miserably married for 30 years, and it was a shotgun wedding. You know, in Ireland, if you get up the pole... She told me that her dad was like, you will marry him. They didn't care if he was crazy. It just doesn't matter. you will get married and so he paid my grandfather was very rich and paid for the wedding and it was like my mother said it was like two days in to the wedding or into the marriage that she saw the crazy and you know I don't know what she felt at that point at 25 or whatever age she was but there for her there was no way out and anytime she wanted to leave any of the arguments or whatever, you know, the usual threaten of killing all of us and blah, blah, blah. And she would have had to have gone to England, so on and so forth. So needless to say, they stayed married. And at 21, I had a watershed moment. It was one of the very, I mean, I've had a few of them in my life, but my dad decided that he was going going to apply for a Morrison visa to get into America because Americans were better than the Irish people. And so he applied for the green card, for the whole family. Actually I was 20 and the son of a bitch got it and it was a lottery system. And so I remember rolling my eyes thinking you crazy lunatic, we're not gonna get the green card to go to America. But somehow or another this big brown envelope arrived at the door and he had he had done it and i remember thinking finally i get rid of him out of this country you know he's gonna go and i went uh i went on upstairs and i was doing my own thing and i Was delighted that my whole family was going to be leaving and i knew just suddenly that if i didn't take this opportunity opportunity that absolutely nothing in my life would change um i just knew without a doubt and i didn't want to come here i didn'T want to i didnT want to change anything i just wanted to stay i just wanting to stay whatever that was and i was very broken but uh i decided to to come over to the States when I was 20 and I arrived here in 1992 when I was 2. I am dyslexic you know so my own math but I arrived over here and I turned it was all children under 21 so I had 10 days to say goodbye to everybody and to get into this country and so i did i just packed up everything into a couple of suitcases and i moved to the states and turned 21 i moved i emigrated here i was looking because i'm applying for citizenship right now i em migrated on the 7th of april and i turned 21 on the 11th of april so i just slid right in there and i had 1500 to my name and what's interesting is though I know you're waiting for alcoholism here it doesn't exist until much later on in my life I was raised Mormon, we don't drink so I didn't experience alcoholism in my family or around me, I had an uncle who was an alcoholic but that was about it I got here, I didnít drink I was a really good Mormon girl and good Irish Mormon girls emigrate to Salt Lake City, Utah thatís what you do so thatís what I did and I showed up in Salt Lake and boy was that a trip you know i felt like i'd come from like the gangs of ireland or you know gangs of new york type thing and here i am in salt lake and i cannot describe the culture shock i went into and i had left all my family so i came on my own and i have a lot of friends and i'm not going to lie to you about that but i'm going to tell you and i said i had 1500 dollars i remember on my 21st birthday i thought the best thing i could of by myself was a hair dryer. I mean, I am so tomboy and I remember looking at the hair dryer after I bought it and thought, I don't know why I bought you but the next thing that I bought was a 1979 Ford Thunderbird because I thought it looked cool. Yeah, right? $500 that cost me. Now I'm down to like $970 something dollars. I should have returned a hair drier. So I'm driving around Salt Lake City in this gangbanger car, and every time I pull up to the stoplight, all the other gangbangers are like... And then they see this little white Irish girl looking at them. It was... Oh, my gosh. And I taught myself how to drive, because I didn't drive in Ireland. I mean, I drove a tractor here and there, because at one point Daddy had us living out in the countryside with the cows and the rolling hills and leprechauns. so I drove tractors but I'd never driven a real car so I hopped into the Ford Thunderbird and I taught myself but I wasn't sure what or meant or the D I knew, I was very crystal clear on what or means when I took out the mailbox right behind me in the complex I knew then what the or meant, it meant reverse in case you don't know which meant that D probably meant drive and I was good to go. And I went, studied for the test and got past the test, aced the test. I was super proud of myself, never did a class. But my driving to this day is mad as a hatter. I mean, people cling to the side of the car when I'm driving. Self-made, but yeah. So it was a huge culture shock and I got, you know, I lasted about a year and I just, I taught again, I'd come from so much neglect and abuse that I just found Americans too nice and Ijust couldn't deal with it I left and went back home and after a year of being in America I found Irish too brash I was like, oh my god, you guys are rude Americans are really nice they've been tender with me for the whole year and now you guysare mocking me because I have an American accent so, you know, I went back and forth from Ireland to America, I think two or three times. At one point I went home for a three week holiday and came back three years and that was before 9-11 so you could actually do something like that. Now they know everything about everything but before then they would look at the monitor because you're not supposed to leave for more than six months on a green card. So I had left for three years. Oops, now I've got to get back in because I decided America was for me again and And they're standing there looking at the monitor. I'll never forget it, in JFK. And he's like, how long have you been out of the country? And I'm like, three weeks. And he looks at the monitor pretending he's seeing something and he's, like, well, welcome home. And I was like, oh, thank God. I had no return ticket. I told him I'd lost. I mean, it was just ridiculous, the lies I had to tell. But I got back in and what's interesting is is that I was 335 pounds. And this is where my story varies a little for people who are in Alcoholics Anonymous. So I was335 pounds and I ate instead of drank. And I decided I had gotten this swanky job in Dublin. I talked my way into every job, but my brokenness stayed with me and I would find these great jobs and I'd sit in them and I wouldn't know how to do them and I had no self-esteem. and I was 335 pounds and I was sitting there and it was the next watershed moment in my life and I thought to myself if I don't go back to America and do something about this weight, my life will never change. And I knew I was eating I was textbook abuse, you know went into the refrigerator at 10 and never left and I flew back into the States got through JFK telling them I had been there for three weeks and I had the gastric bypass surgery probably about three months later I went back to an old company and they had great insurance so I got the gastric bypass when it was super uncool for like five hundred dollars and I lost I want to say 130 pounds in nine months and we didn't and I'm back then they didn't now they make you go to a therapist and just not the other back then it was just like you know we're we're going to cut you open. You're going to eat the size of an egg. That's it. And I started drinking alcoholically two weeks after I had the surgery. I had also discovered that I wasn't a good Mormon girl and that I really was a lesbian. And so, I had come out and I had gastric bypass surgery like all in the same week. And so I was just, I had arrived. I'm going to be this skinny bitch that so I hit and I was back in Salt Lake and I don't know if you guys know but you know it's full of gay people it's like they're all trapped in Salt lake city but uh I found the bar scene and I'd never done any of this and I just shed myself of all Mormonism and took off the funny underwear and put the Salt Lake temple behind me and off I went and uh I went into the bar barcine and i was losing all this weight and i was having a grand old time and when you have the gastric you can drink five drinks be absolutely wasted eat seven peanuts sober up it's miraculous it is literally miraculous it's like the clouds have opened i know people will tell me they drink they take coke to go online no i didn't need this seven peanuts sober as a judge and then like a half an hour later i'd drink again and i did not realize that it is equivalent to you normal people with normal stomachs drinking that's two nights in a row of drinking in one night and so i would do that four or five times in one evening i'd drive people over to the next party and you know then i drink more and i'd eat my peanuts and then you you know, and so on and so forth. So I've drank seven days in a row in one evening, apparently, but I didn't know that. So within six months, I was a full-blown alcoholic, like unemployed. Well, I still had the job, but I remember walking along the wall to hold myself up while I got to the time clock and I knew my days were numbered in the company. I'd gone from number one kind of like nationwide wide to people just shaking their head when I would come in and I'm sure you can all relate to that right it just it's just so humiliating and I would go I mean I just couldn't stop drinking it was just instantaneous I was you know I'd gotten into my very first relationship relationship, and I barely remember any of it. Like, barely remember the person. I see her on Facebook now. I remember some good times, but I barely Remember the entire relationship. And I just kind of took people hostage. I didn't know any other way. I Didn't know how to love people, and I didn' t know how To stop drinking. And that was just who I had become, and it was just so overnight. night and i really believed i was going to be something special and to just sit there with my whiskey in hand and vodka and wine and whatever i i did all that big book stuff for you you know you try the different drinks you have to i was like i'm gonna i'm going to try vodka because it has less of an odor and then no one will know that i'm drinking all night long and then going going to work. We're crazy, we convince ourselves that that is working. It's oozing out of every single pore in my body but nobody is smelling it. My speech is slightly slurred on all of my calls but it's no big deal and my shakes are out of control and I just keep telling everybody I have terrible blood sugar problems but inside I was just so miserable and I really believed that having that surgery would make everything better and my whole childhood would be wiped away and I would be healed and I'd be okay. And my whole life I had felt like I had arrived in the wrong family at birth then we removed a family and I'm in the wrong country now and then you remove that country and i'm in the wrong country again which is my own country it just didn't matter and it took me so long to realize that you know i was i was the common denominator in all the scenarios and i wasn't long into my addiction when i wanted to no longer be on this planet. It just wasn't long, and I really, really wished that I wouldn't wake up every morning. And I know that you guys in this room know that incomprehensible demoralization that we feel, and the loneliness. I just have no words for it, and I never want to forget that. I never, ever want to forget it. I want to stand up here or wherever if I have that ability to stand up and still say my story at 50, 60 years over and I still want to remember that feeling of just having nowhere to go and no solution and no answers and nobody anymore. I went into treatment in Florida they flew me from Salt Lake to Florida to get sober and I went into treatment and I was like a rock star I'd gotten the drink out of me and the personality had come back and it was 28 day program and you know I managed to do rehab romance and we were going to get married and I guess it was going to be on the invitation met in treatment in Florida Florida. It was not pretty, and I really thought that would cure me too. I could have recovery and I could love even though I was to go get a sponsor. I just didn't take it seriously and I certainly didn't this program seriously. My father had taught me that the only reason reason people need 12 steps is because they're idiots and they need guidance because they have weak minds. And I genuinely, that was my belief system. So when they carted me in the white bus to AA meetings, I would literally sit down the back and be like, these people, wowzer, look at these people. And you know, this is how I thought. I mean, delusions of grandeur out the the yin-yang and I wasn't mean like my dad but boy did I get his ego sometimes and I was you know I'm thankful that I'm not an unkind person I have my flaws but you know the heart of me is really good I got a lot of my mother thank god but uh I sat in AA for those meetings and I would not succumb to this program at all I had you know I had taken years to get away from a cult and I wasn't entering another one so I would sit in the AA meetings and I would pretend that I was paying attention but really I was here having none of it and so I got out of the treatment center and I went on drinking of course because until you surrender to this disease it it it keeps you I was I was convinced that I was strong enough to emigrate to the States by myself. I did not need God, I didn't need any of this spiritual shenanigans you guys were talking about. And I wasn't going to have it. It took a lot. It took institutions, it took lots of ER trips and 9-1-1 calls and jail. And in fact, that's where I met Wynonna was doing service in the jail out here. But my jail stint was in Florida. But I never want to forget that, you know, when I was drunk there, I did not know what was going to happen. I would look out the window some mornings and just hope that my car was there. I drove drunk. In fact, I was convinced that I could drive better when I Was drunk. And people would try to hide the keys from me. And I literally was convinced that I was fine and I could drive just fine and thank god i didn't kill anyone but uh that's just one of the many many blessings i had the rehab romance lasted seven months and we i i drained her bank account i'm not gonna lie i drained their bank account i drained her child's college fund i think that's what we spent i think And she left. The bank account became empty, and she left, and I was sitting in this apartment. I was about two weeks away from being homeless. I rang my mother in Ireland every time I would get drunk or every other time, I don't really remember. But I would ring her, andI would berate her in my drunkenness about her being the reason I'm like this. and I had no solution and I was just utterly shattered and so I was sitting on the bed one of the days I tried to stop drinking do you ever do this you pour the vodka down the sink and then you literally want to go down the sink and suck it back up like what have I done when I used to eat it was the muffins I'd throw them in the trash ten minutes later I'm like in the crash muffins out Well, it was the same with the vodka, you know. I would be like down the garbage disposal if I could, sucking that vodka back out. But when I would get drunk, tomorrow I'm going to quit. My body was full of alcohol and I knew that tomorrow was the day I was going to quit. And the next morning, that thought would never even cross my mind. I would go to the liquor store before they're even open. and so that one night i was there and i uh i finally just the tears came down my cheeks and i cried out whatever's out there please help me and i never drank again and that is my story and i i got up the next morning i started the detox process and i went to aa meetings I sat there and I listened And in Florida they tell They're kind of old school I've never heard the saying here But they tell you to take the cotton Out of your mouth Or out of your ears And put it in your mouth And I did And literally up until you have like nine months You just shut up and listen And I listened And I got a sponsor And the thought of Working the 12 steps Was just murderous But I was out of options. I was out of options. I had nowhere to turn. My mother stopped answering the calls in Ireland. She told me that I'm just waiting for the call. I'm just waiting for the call that you're gone. And she was broken hearted. So I had no options. It just had to come to that for me. And to trust another human being with all all of the stuff you have to do and the 12 steps. I wasn't sure I'd be able to do it, but I figured I'd just start with that first one. And I knew I had admitted I was an alcoholic pretty quickly because I'm clever. And I thought if I admit I'm an alcoholic, then people will leave me the hell alone. They're like, you know, I know I have a drinking problem. Bugger off. And it worked for a long time. So step one was easy for me. Um, you know, and I sat down with the sponsor. I was like, yes, I have a problem. Duh. And so I wasn't one that was haggling about, you know, well maybe no, it was messy. Um, but step two and the whole spiritual part was going to be a big pill for me to swallow. So I just kind of faked it a little bit, um, until I discovered that I could be an agnostic in recovery and that I could have my own recovery as long as I had something greater than myself but uh it's funny when I worked with a sponsor I was so full of ego that I warned her that she may fall in love with me and uh and that she should you know just keep herself together I mean it was terrible that she was gay but still oh my god i i cringe to this day when i think about it and it's funny i've had sponsees say the same thing to me and i'm just like just do your step work you know wow and uh yeah so i was convinced that if i had her fall in love with me by warning her she was going to i wouldn't have to work steps and we would just eat dinner and drive around and have a grand old time but no she was having none of it thank goodness and so she you know had me on step two and made me write my conception of a higher power and boy i took ages doing that i mean lots of people spend a long time on the fourth step but i was convinced i was going to rewrite how you know how a higher tower was defined in the world and i was gonna blow her away and i showed up at my piece of paper in fact i read it just a couple of months ago or a month ago and it was i'm like what is this i mean but when you have three weeks sober it's profound so i showed up at her house and she's like you know let's hop in the car i'm gonna go to the grocery store and bring it with you and i'm not going to do that i'm going to go to my this is not what i wanted a microphone podium you know this is this is where she falls on the floor just cannot compose herself and so we went to Publix which is Smith's or whatever and she was in the bread aisle picking out what bread she wanted and she's like go ahead and read it, it's fine just read it right here I swear she knew and I was like I'm not reading it here and she said no really read it it's fun I'm like am I she's Like should I get whole wheat I was like I'm going to get drunk tonight and it's going to be your fault that's what's going to happen on this one and I you know I left there I was disgusted she I drove home like a maniac and and I couldn't drink