Dodged the Fourth Step for Months Claiming I Couldn’t Make Columns in Microsoft Word 🤦 — Julie M.

About This Speaker Tape

Julie M. shares 22 years of sobriety from the Monday Night Blue Chip Speaker Meeting at the Naval Club. Born in Memphis, the baby of six children in a family riddled with alcoholism, she watched her mother die ugly from the disease and spent her adolescence as a self-appointed Carrie Nation — leaving P.E. pamphlets on the kitchen floor for her drinking mother. Morally opposed to alcohol until her freshman year at the University of Florida, she took a screwdriver from a friend named Andy Murray Verity and felt her skin finally fit. She drank alcoholically from the first sip.

A corporate fast-tracker stalled by blackout drinking, she pounded wine glasses at the top of the apartment stairs before running to the car, fell backward down wooden stairs after picking up a man in a bar, and let alcohol rule her seven o'clock wedding. One morning she rolled over, whispered "Higher Power help me," then told her psychiatrist she was an alcoholic. She checked herself into Ridgeview on February 25, 1995 — packed her perfume and razor, thought she was going to a spa, and had them all confiscated at the door.

Reading the Third Step Prayer in her soft-cover Big Book, she had a white-light experience — "relieve me from the bondage of myself" gave her the same skin-fitting sensation as her first drink. Her first sponsor, found after she burst into tears in the Chili's foyer at Tocco Hill, walked her through a Fourth Step that was mostly about everyone else. At her Fifth Step in a solid white living room, the sponsor looked up and said, "My, what a sad, angry, lonely little girl you are."

Julie's teaching lives in Steps Six and Seven. She recounts Paul McGee telling her to change her toothpaste to prove she could change, sweating through the Serenity Prayer in the laundry room over salad dressing on her husband's face, and mailing her "sister from hell" a Ninth Step amends letter before consulting her sponsor — earning a reply that began "I no longer associate with evil people." She closes on humility: a clear recognition of what and who we really are, followed by a sincere attempt to become what we could be.

Topics

Timestamps

• 0:00 Monday Night Blue Chip Speaker Meeting opens; Amy introduces her sponsor Julie
• 2:30 Julie reads the 'shivering denizens of king alcohol' passage as her great equalizer
• 6:00 Kroger 11:30 a.m. beer run — clerk tells her alcohol sales start at 12:30, proof she no longer tracks it
• 10:00 Memphis childhood, glass-half-empty 12-year-old under flock of birds — 'great, we're going to get shit on'
• 16:00 First drink freshman year at Florida with Andy Murray Verity — skin finally fits, drinks alcoholically from the start
• 24:00 Rock-bottom morning, whispers 'Higher Power help me,' tells psychiatrist she's an alcoholic
• 28:00 Ridgeview intake — packed perfume, razor, shampoo; given a $40 soft-cover Big Book
• 32:00 White-light experience reading Third Step Prayer — 'relieve me from the bondage of myself'
• 40:00 Fifth Step in solid white living room — 'my, what a sad, angry, lonely little girl you are'
• 50:00 Sister amends letter sent without sponsor review; reply: 'I no longer associate with evil people'