I Took the First Three Steps Before AA Then Spent Seven Years Avoiding the Rest – Harriet R.
About This Speaker Tape
Harriet R., a member of the Coral Gables group in Miami, shares her story at Eureka Springs, Arkansas in 1992 with 36 years of sobriety. Born in Pennsylvania as an only child raised with privilege -- private schools, white gloves, dancing school -- she describes how her first taste of alcohol at age nine during a late-night lobster dinner ignited the phenomenon of craving that never left her. She insists she did not drink too much and become an alcoholic; she had to drink the way she drank because she was already alcoholic.
Her drinking progressed through college blackouts at 18, a career with the federal government where alcohol became her "new manager," and a stint in the Navy where she drunkenly drove a forklift while her seamen lost respect for her. She describes the moment she slid down an icy roof to rescue a beer and knew it was not social drinking. She cycled through the CIA, a marriage to a merchant marine captain, and ultimately a Veterans Hospital mental ward where she played King Herod in a Christmas play performed by patients -- two of the shepherds escaped on Christmas Eve.
Released on January 9, 1956, she drank that same day, watched herself change in a bathroom mirror, and said "I must be crazy -- the bottle is bigger than I am." Five days later, stepping off a train in Miami on her 39th birthday, she asked her Higher Power for help and never drank again. She speaks powerfully about settling into "a comfortable but dangerous mediocrity" for seven years before general service cracked her open. She compares her life in alcoholism to the burnous she traded for with an Arab in the Sahara -- what she imagined was glamorous white silk turned out to be brown wool full of moth holes that stunk. Today, she says, she wears a new burnous with twelve buttons -- the Steps, the Traditions, and the Concepts.
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