Every Dumb Story Starts With Well I Thought – Jennifer K.

Oh, there we go. Okay. Hi, y'all. My name is Jennifer Huddleston Kelly and I am an alcoholic. I've been kept sober since December 5th of 92 and that's my miracle. And so I am a freshly minted 29 year old. It's an honor and a privilege to get to be here. And I desperately want to make a joke about not having any character defects, but that's going to be dispelled immediately i uh i i just think it's like it's funny i i mean i don't even i don'T presume that i DON'T make mistakes or that i'M NOT wrong or that I'M not stepping in it regularly i am an oversharer i you know i i really look at at this stuff as i'M in the game i AM finally in the GAME i'M not in the cheap seats with my arms crossed judging everybody who's in the game. And if you're in the game, you're going to fumble. You know, there's going to be some stuff. And so I don't come at it defensively at all. And when I screw up, y'all, I screw out big. I screw about public. I mean, no need to just kind of stumble. I mean I face plant and I share it. I don't pretend. I tell the gals that I work with. I think we need heroes in our rooms, but I'm not going to be one of them. I'm going to keep the bar low for the newcomer and I don't do that intentionally. I do that because I just, you know, just sort of wander into stuff. And so there are things that I laugh at that other people don't get. There was a speaker who was at my home group a couple of years ago and he said, well, I was going to open up by talking about my humility, but there really aren't enough people here tonight. And I cracked up and nobody else in the room even understood the joke. I was like, oh, see, that's how I think. That's hilarious. I remember going to my meeting and people would say they'd make the joke, does he know who I am? And I had to call my sponsor after. I was like are they joking or do they really think that like I do? She just chuckled. She was like oh sister you're a special one aren't you I mean I just I think it I say it and it happens in real time and so uh and I I came into AA um pretty sure of I meanI knew there was stuff wrong with me don't get me wrong I mean like I knew there were stuff wrong with me I when I was drinking I used to comfort myself with the idea that maybe I had a brain tumor because I was doing weird stuff. I mean, I didn't have it checked out. I just thought that that would be a logical explanation for some of the stuff that I was getting into and some of the people that seemed like a good idea to go home with. And I mean, just some of that stuff. Perhaps there's you know, a big mass blocking about half my brain that would make sense. And so I kind of ran with that for a while. So I didn'T really come in thinking i'm not that that that chick that saw insanity in the second step and went oh not me like well that that would explain some of it um but i still believed i was really really smart really really smart um and so i i didn't run in something past somebody just never occurred to me and and i mean we're talking 20 years in never occurred to me i because why would you why would you run it past somebody when you're just pretty sure this is a no-brainer and uh my sponsor's husband one time pulled me aside and said have you ever noticed every dumb story you tell starts with well i thought and uh it turns out he's right um and yet i still rely on on on my defective thinking to lead the way and then after i call my sponsor go you're not going to believe what I came up with this week. Um, so as I was working in the steps, um, I, I did it by the book. Well, when I got a sponsor who worked the steps out of the book, I did It by the Book. My first sponsor didn't. And so I did a four step that was like 137 pages of resentments with only three columns. I didn't do the fourth column. I Didn't write about fear. I didn't write about sex. It was a long talk with a lot of weeping and, uh, we burned my fourth step afterwards. So I went home and, um, and I started to review my work like the book says, but then I was tired. And so I basically, I took a nap for an hour and counted it as six and seven. When I woke up, I said a prayer. We had burned my fourth step. So eventually I wrote down the names of some ex-boyfriends that I thought I might want to see again. And we called it done. And since my sponsor, I learned later, hadn't made any amends, I really didn't have to worry about that because she wasn't holding my feet to the fire on when are we going to review your eighth step, whatever that was. And, um, and so because I didn't really have very good information from five, uh, there wasn't, I had an incomplete four. I didn'T have great information from five. So six and seven and six and Seven was a nap. Uh, there Wasn'T a whole lot to roll with. and um and so what happened was because i didn't have information on fear and sex uh i put myself in a situation now i did wait until i had a year of sobriety um and