Came to Believe in Stages — First in Treatment, Then in the Program, Then in a Higher Power of My Understanding – Mike W.
About This Speaker Tape
Mike tells his story for the first time at the Monday Night Blue Chip Speakers meeting at the NABBA Club. Born December 17, 1975, at Crawford Long Hospital in Atlanta, he grew up between two violent alcoholic parents — a Vietnam-vet father who drank himself to death and a mother whose rages filled his earliest memories. Born small with severe asthma and in and out of hospitals most school years, Mike felt different and less-than from the start. His first alcoholic behavior was shoplifting — he liked the rush. At about ten he was sexually abused by his grandfather, something he shoved down and never dealt with. A move to Douglasville at 13 turned him into an isolator; he fantasized about shooting up his school, and at 14 he grabbed his mother's boyfriend's service pistol during a neighborhood fight and was arrested for aggravated assault.
The drinking came in waves, first through asthma inhalers, then huffed gasoline, then a 16th-birthday drunk in a pool-hall parking lot where he discovered he loved not feeling like he was there. Acid, pot, meth, coke, Xanax, and cough-syrup robo-tripping followed, alongside massive doses of ephedrine and a string of DUIs — including driving the wrong way down I-85 at 21. There were serious suicide attempts: a garage hanging around 1998 and a hundred-pill overdose in 2004 that landed him at Cab Crisis and Georgia Regional, where staff knew him by first name. Pain pills finished him. He beat his own broken hand in ER waiting rooms to get stronger scripts, lived off the Grady ACT team's efficiency apartment, robbed his own neighbors in Campbell Park, and was high at his grandmother's funeral in 2010 — she was the one rock in his family.
On May 24, 2011, his mother put him out in full pain-pill withdrawal. He walked a mile to his aunt's, told a crisis counselor he'd jump in front of a bus, and finally got a bed. He expected St. Jude's to be Lindsay Lohan rehab and found an old building in the hood instead. Day group cracked him open — first time he'd ever talked about feelings. He joined the Renaissance home group, fired a sponsor who dragged his feet, then asked a man at Triangle who put him straight into step work. Nine months at St. Jude's, a chain of closing halfway houses, and eventually a sober apartment with two treatment friends.
Now nearly four years sober, Mike prays on his knees morning and night, reads meditations, talks to another alcoholic every day, goes to meetings, works steps, does service, and sponsors newcomers. A week before this tape his sponsor — who had relapsed — died, and Mike is working through that loss by leaning harder on what the man taught him. The miracle, he says, isn't that he doesn't use or drink anymore. The miracle is that he doesn't want to.
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