Defects of Character — Don’t Have Any So I Wouldn’t Really Know What to Say 🤣 – Maren B.
About This Speaker Tape
Maren shares her story at the Blue Chip Speakers Meeting at the NAVA Club, opening with her sobriety date of September 29, 2021 and noting she got sober in that very room. At 37, she drank for 21 years and describes the emotional stunting that came with it. She traces her alcoholism back to a chaotic childhood marked by domestic violence, a mother who was both loving and physically abusive, and being placed on Ritalin at age four. She describes always reaching for affection in the wrong places, finding her only sense of belonging through sports, and carrying deep shame around her sexual identity as a gay woman in a conservative family.
Her drinking escalated after a breakup with her ex-fiancee, when she stayed in the same house for a calendar year, drinking heavily, shoplifting beer from CVS, and eventually progressing to fentanyl and methamphetamine. She dropped to around 116 pounds and was hoping to die. She wrecked a brand-new car into a median at 1 PM with fentanyl in the vehicle and crutches in the passenger seat. Her sister and brother-in-law rented a U-Haul and moved her back from Chattanooga while she was loaded on Xanax.
After being kicked out by her sister, she moved back to her mother's house, then into a shed behind her workplace. She eventually found her way to AA, got an intense old-school sponsor, and worked all twelve steps. She describes the amends process as the real turning point and shares her struggle with meditation due to her ADHD, eventually building up to 35-minute sessions. She closes by saying that after being lost for a very long time, she has found herself and the truth through AA and the fellowship.
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