Identification and the Outsider – District 5 Area 74 Service Workshop – Part 3 of 3 – Paul J.

Yeah, good to be here. Good to be sober. And yeah, thanks everybody for sharing. And everything that Tex just said, I'll leave it there. I agree with everything she just said. And I've been pacing up and down my flat. I'm so grateful and I'm terrified. I've brought so much fear upon myself um but just looking through that chat that 98 speakers from 29 countries going marathon round and round thank you everybody for putting that together that's amazing i just need to talk and just get all settled down and i'm not sure what screen to look at gallery screen speaker screen um but it's good to be here when i share once i get over myself. I normally start by sending them a very happy, satisfied customer of Alcoholics Anonymous and a self-declared happy clappy kind of AA member, really annoying. I've heard people kind of take the sobriety date. Mine's February 10th, 1999. I had no idea I'd be doing this uh you know so one day at a time one day at a i remember back in the early days kind of being outside meetings and asking people saying how you know just how long you've been coming and because i was i was struggling they said i've been coming like a couple of weeks because i didn't want to talk to the old-timers that had even a year but people that had 20 years or 30 years i thought why are they still coming and i'd sidle up to these people and say how long have you been coming? And they say, I've been coming for a month. I said, well, nothing. I'm drinking nothing. They go, yeah. I think, well that's some of the shoot for. And I kept coming back and eventually before I do a share like this I kind of had to look at those little sobriety counters there's 7,765 days one day at a time all joined up which is just remarkable and I took a lot of words out my mouth, I've heard a lot people struggle with the whole God situation which I had great difficulty with I'd heard it mentioned not to get into the drinking story, drunk-a-log I don't like doing that either I assume that everybody here kind of knows like i did everything about drinking uh you know i know uh doctor's opinion says you must have depth and weight but got limited time um 20 i don't know 28 years of drinking i started drinking when i was about eight uh properly you know 16 i came into recovery when i was uh 36 57 now um so i'm gonna leave a lot out but um i kind of you like say usually kind to start by when i in 1999 i was signed up to take of the monk's club or cd of the month club it became and uh so kind of came up had one of these sent from america clancy you know uh wayne b uh you know just just uh chuck you know go and charlie all that kind of stuff i kind of kind of grew up on that and i could be in meetings and try and explain my drinking uh and go on for about an hour and it just wouldn't explain it then i that kind of all started off actually uh that i i ended up at uh privilege to attend the world one world conference in minneapolis in 2000 and uh there's people who've been there those type of things there's a big sober city and tape stores everywhere and one of the two cds came off there one was wayne b one was fancy and listen to it endlessly in the car, driving around after the convention, driving off to Canada or around the Great Lakes. And so the point of that is that all these CDs and stuff will get to the real juice of the fruit in terms of me trying to explain is that Wayne would kind of say, I don't fit in, I don' t belong, solitary, disunited, set apart, apart from, always a part of, outside looking in. I think how are you doing that hey let's just explain and kind of how I feel uh and then Clancy came out with one he said I would drink until I had to stop and then I would stop until I'd to drink and then it would drink and tell her to stop. And that just described like that's it that's that's just kind of what I did and then a little while ago I kind of listened to a guy Charlie why it was just a random cd and when he was forced to confess how much he drank by the doctor he said uh he said i drank as much as i could as often as i could and i thought that's it so that's that's all i need to kind of tell you about my drinking i think um and i am so so grateful apart from the last 48 hours i've been so terrified but i can learn from that i've been doing all this stuff that i know to do a prayer for is waking me up last night worrying about worrying anxiety um and my mind has a mind of its own demands i think about stuff and just dominate my thinking so i'm fear prayer god please remove my fear direct my attention to what he would have me be my default setting would be to run away from this make an excuse i don't feel very well uh i've got to be somewhere else all that kind of stuff but god direct my thinking to what you would have to be he wouldn't have me do that anymore he would have need be here to try like the 13th word of the 12th step is tried to carry the message so i'm looking up there 198 people there uh maybe you know maybe just one person out there uh will benefit from one thing that i say job done you know i'll have tried um so i came to aa because i couldn't stop drinking the only reason i came i had absolutely no idea what was on offer um i heard earlier in the day somebody used that expression being comfortable in their own skin i'm going to try really hard it says on those guidelines please don't cuss sometimes this would go and try try not to do it but so somebody saying they felt comfortable in her own skin I remember seeing somebody saying that at the top table and I just thought they're lying that's my clean version of it that can't be so how would that feel and I'm here to report today that you know I was wrong I do feel comfortable in my own skin most of the time other than the last 48 hours I've been a bit troubled but still very very comfortable at my last home group meeting which is Skinner Street Sunday Night Pool you're welcome uh with our platform we'll take a thousand people we generally have about 40 50 people there um but i i shared in the meeting i said i often ask sponsors i said that you know how's your day going uh on a scale of one to ten and uh somebody came back said it's six and i kind of shared generally generally speaking i'm between seven and nine i don't like to go ten because i like to leave a little bit of wiggle room there uh but generally i can't remember the last time i sort a bit below six i've been through some tough stuff recently with my son's addiction things apple trees make apples um so yeah it came because i couldn't stop drinking i remember my first uh my first meeting um sitting in what the long time as an old time is called the denial section the relapse row the back row and a meeting of about 60 people and uh just just thinking what has happened you know i was just 36 years old i thought it can't it is sitting in this meeting i remember looking around the judging everyone really harshly and there was a lady there with uh in britain used to be a thing called a blue rinse uh where by her hair she must have been in her 70s and i was looking at the back of her head thinking well what does she know about my alcoholism or how i feel what i didn't know anything about um how did she you know what would she know that how i felt and just judged her and there were some old guys there and i thought just judge them but of course play that forward i kind of discovered that she knew everything about I felt how I felt she just had the same fears the same resentments the same judgments the same stuff and with the old boys that kind of uh that I was judging had respect for so was brought up to be uh you know respectful to to the older generation and uh again I was thinking they don't know anything about how I feel and then as I hung around and discovered I kind of did the maths when they came in because one old guy had like 30 40 years sobriety and I did the maths he came in when he was 36 exactly the same as me so he knew everything um so came to a.a sat in the back judged everything it's really difficult to squeeze stuff into like 28 minutes or so um but i i kind of got into service which is one of our uh legacies you know one of the things that we need to do and i became the literature secretary and i would recommend service to everybody um to get kind of into aa service gave me relief from alcoholism but certainly not freedom i was in the meeting i was doing the literature the old boy used to sit by the door the literature was set up next to him and uh i used to talk to him set up early so it got me to the three meetings the one before the main meeting after and uh i was kind of doing okay i was like the boy whistling in the dark you know to keep up his spirits um i was telling you i was okay i couldn't be honest i was uh again you know these speaker tapes i remember somebody saying it's so bright it's like a like a dry twig yeah it's brittle we put enough pressure on it it's just going to snap and that's how i felt and i asked uh i asked the lady in the meeting i said um i said i said it was honest with her i said I feel terrible I said I actually feel like I'm going backwards and she said have you tried praying and uh I could have punched her and I've never been violent to a woman in my life but I really would talk the big book talks about you know bristles without antagonism but hackles came up on my neck and i said i will go into that mate and stand one-legged in the corner of the room with a dunce's hat on i really seriously do not want to drink bud you you mean me like pray down on my knee it's like just never happened i was so angry and uh i'm here to report today that the first thing i've do every morning roll out of bed onto my knees do a whole bunch of prayers all through the day last thing at night on my knees uh that's just just kind of what i do so was wrong about that so uh the same lady at one point i kind of said the same kind of thing really i'm going backwards and you know i've seen people talk about sponsors and i really didn't want to ask for help um my pride but i was getting sicker and sicker like i said service was just giving me a bit of relief but no freedom and it's freedom i need and i'm a free man today thank god and And I asked her, and she said, don't worry. When the student is ready, the teacher will appear. And again, I could have just, you know, bang. But she was right, and I believe my sponsors are here somewhere today and sponsees and people from my home group, and thank you for their support. And I was sharing my fear. So we got on doing the steps and was working through the steps, and I'm going to maybe just sort of try and help maybe somebody that seems to be this recurrent problem. I had gone through the motion of step one, two, three, so then my will and my life was to give up God, but I still got this problem with God and I am still not really in with both feet and then one day I was walking over the Jurassic Coast, as most people have heard that's one of the heritage sites around the world now where the dinosaurs roamed and I was walking with this young guy in AA and if you see that it's a little part of an ammonite which is a fossil from a creature that used to live on this planet it and uh he actually found that i cleaned it off and put it on the mantelpiece was fascinated by and i looked to see how old it was and uh best estimates were somewhere between 160 million years and 210 million years and like i said i was like 37 i guess then still struggling with the concept of entertaining the idea there was a power great for myself so i started thinking well 37 years old had a zero this 370 had two zeros 3700 had three uh three zeros 37 000 had some other zero 370 000 3 700 000 i'm not getting anywhere near this here and i first a big number and i started entertaining the idea so well how arrogant would it be of me to claim or any human be in my opinion uh to claim whether they would know whether there is a god isn't a god what is god it just seemed ludicrous to me and it just opened the door my mind opened a bit more and then further along i kind of bumped into the fact that um i don't know for people you know most maybe people have heard of the um voyage approach that was sent off in the 70s from cape canaveral florida 1977 and been flying at 80 38 000 miles an hour for 43 years and it was only five years ago that they reached interstellar space the edge of our uh the edge of our solar system and that just blew my mind again i said how arrogant um um how arrogant it just kind of it just it just started opening up some stuff and then further along as a result of the uh the convention and that cd and and uh wayne wayne b went to a workshop there and was taken through a god in the tree and uh and and that kind of changed things me again was uh and um text was talking about ideas imagery old ideas this was old ideas about god and did i have any did i even have any ideas about god and it turns out i thought was god was kind of one of those childhood things god is a man for its stutters upon a cloud with his stuff god is judgmental god is punishing my mum told me and my brother to do our Lord's Prayer on our knees when we were small children. I'd say, what would happen if we didn't? You'll go down there. Where's down there? So I had this idea that God is vengeful, punishing, scorekeeper, all this kind of stuff. And then I saw films like The Exorcist, all kinds of sort of a load of ideas of God and not one of them was mine. And then it was at that point I was encouraged to, you know, God as we understand him, to choose my AA God. And today I choose a God that's omnipresent, forgiving, loving, all-powerful, infinite. And so from being powerless over alcohol, I kind of find I've got an infinite power in my life today. And stuff changed. But obviously I was taking through the steps to do, well, Trust God, clean house, help others. You know, that's kind of it in a nutshell. So I'm through the house cleaning process then, the inventory of getting rid of those resentments, getting rid OF those fears, getting rid Of the harms of my conduct, putting things right, getting on with the business of helping others. Like I said, what am I going to share about? What am I not going to show about? the only reason I needed to drink was a day with a Y in it, literally feeling good feeling bad just feeling anything feeling nothing a drink was my solution and my earliest memory of when I thought so I don't fit in, I don' t belong that sort of thing my earliest memory is sort of out of infant school into junior school so sort of six seven and i kind of share that i had me stuck on me me stuck with me i just hated being me absolutely detested being me i knew that i was adopted i knew i was adoptive whether that had any bearing just my kind of algorithm i think but me stuck for me the very first time discover booze and took it it just took me off of me and it was like a big big sigh of relief and then the minute i stopped drinking i just woke up with me again and i would change places with any one of you i promise there's a hundred and two hundred and six people on here now i promise like from the bottom of my heart i would just take a gamble and change places with any one because i hated being me and uh and you've turned through this process you've turned me into someone all i ever thought about was changing how i felt because i just hated how i felt about myself and you've worked on me you know done great work because you turn me into a person the last thing i want to do is change how i feel uh it's kind of good that um the thought of drinking hasn't entered my head for you know decades uh you know the obsession was was lifted and kind of, I think, worthy of mention is, you know, it's not rocket science-ist kind of stuff. You know, it's action. I mean, my old book is, yes, I love all this. It's my original book. You know? I've got a big, big book because proper LK, you know, some it's good, more is better than the big one. I can't see it anyway. The eyes aren't that good. But it's well used. um you know take an action there's usually a promise on the end of it and we go through the actions and it's just freaked me out um so i at the risk of getting emotional and crying um which is okay uh you know good news is you get feelings back bad news is to get your feelings back but it's juste kind of genuine head-to-heart thing um when i was four years uh you know about four years sober and my brother who i'd kind of grown up with uh all my life worked with we you know we spent most of the time together um hung himself which was tragic and absolutely life-changing and yeah massive and in amongst that I kind of went to where he was hanging I could see he was blue and and I called the ambulance and never occurred to me cut down when they turned that he was actually still had a heartbeat um I had to kind of process all that kind of stuff journey through that with this program with the support of the fellowship uh loving God And the reason I kind of say that is just to chuck it out there. It's from somebody that all they ever used to do, think about obsessing about a drink. You know, the obsession with a drink was not once did I want a drink, think of a drink need a drink? Was it necessary to take a drink that is a miracle? That's what I came here for. But I didn't know that I could be comfortable with that. I am comfortable with that and I can share that and i can see graphically what what uh you know what was on that on that day and uh and i'm i'm cool with it because i have learned to quit playing god there's a bit in there's when we sincerely took such a position all sorts of remarkable things happen and you get to the bottom of that kind of passage and it says we begin to lose our fear today tomorrow and the hereafter something we kind of don't talk about And so very much in AA. And so the idea that my brother should be here and not there would be such a selfish, God-like kind of thing for me. So I kind of let go of it. And this is exactly where God wants him, I guess. So eight months after that, and this is where I kindof get a bit emotional sometimes, as a gift of sobriety, two beautiful children in AA never seen me take a drink and so my daughter had just been born she was 8 months old developed pneumococcal meningitis and took her to the doctor the doctor had a look at her because she had a rash and had been crying all night and said I don't like the look of her I think you need to take her to the paediatric ward at Poole Hospital and I took her there and she started having febrile convulsions in the car getting there already i nearly took the doors off the casualty department and shouted out help within about you know minutes there were about 15 people around and they had all the on the bed there and uh they said we're gonna have to give all these injections and these fluids and kind of stuff she said and said uh she was up on the little beeper you know that thing i said try not to worry we're going to give this injection and her heart's probably going to stop. And it did, and it seemed like forever. She ended up in intensive care, tubes, full blood transfusion. She needed to be taken to a paediatric intensive care which was like 60 miles away. So they sent a paediatric retrieval team that put my little baby, kind of eight months old, she's only about that long, and they shut her down by the water machine, switched her off, taped her eyelids down, put her in the back of an ambulance and said we couldn't travel with her. We had to go to the hospital. She didn't arrive. It turns out that the ambulance got lost. It was traumatic. anyway she ended up on the paediatric intensive care ward and we had nowhere to stay I've been a vegetarian for 50 years the only place related to the hospital was Ronald McDonald House it's to do with McDonald's which is a charitable kind of house they had behind and there was a wall covered big long steep hill and I remember we were doing a vigil just taking it in turns going back to the rooms being by a bedside and uh i remember looking there was a late dark saturday night i think it was there was pub on this hill uh bar and it was absolutely full of people and uh and i just stopped and i i remember thinking maybe i could make a deal with god and i remember at one of my first meetings you know somebody's sharing about you know not making deals with gods and praying only for the knowledge of God's will and the power to carry it out. And naturally I wanted to swap places if you're going to take someone, take me, see, but I kind of got into prayer and I thought, well, if just literally that, if just give me the knowledge of the power of the carrot out and I'm looking at this bar and I've just stood there in awe, in shock, in miracle mode, kind of thinking, I don't want to go in there. why do i not want to go in there this is all i ever wanted to do you know it was my excuse for everything and all i could see were these people that were just like me stood in a crowd that seemed alone but in a crowded room that separation you know solitary disunited set apart uh and that was one of those you know sort of epiphany kind of things um i got six minutes i mean you do good work here yeah it's just miraculous it's it's mind-blowing um and then the level of selfishness as i said i was adopted my mum uh adopted me she never treated me any different than her blood son my brother that took his life and she did everything for me she was a single mum, she sacrificed her entire life for her boys yet selfishness and self-centredness being the root of our troubles I couldn't give her the time of day I was so resentful that there was Mother's Day which meant I would have to do something I'd go and see my mum in spite of all she's done uh and then it was Christmas I would have to go and See her at Christmas and it's like two days out of 365 was just a bit too much I resented that fact uh my brother used to uh used to live with her or be with her every day ring her every Day I never kind of did that um and through AA I kind of made my amends to her And I realized I never even told her I loved her. I wasn't capable of that stuff, wasn't capable of feelings. And give her a hug and just be grateful. And so I developed the habit of phoning her every day. And she was 94 when she died a couple of years ago of bowel cancer. And with her age, she was becoming more and more reliant on me and fixing her stuff. and she broke her hip and she'd fall over and I'd get her up off the floor just stuff that's just spiritual it's just normal but spiritual in nature and I've just got a few more minutes but I'm going to try and suck this in she was getting close to the end and she said what would I do without you my son she said you're like an angel what would I do and I said well and she said I'm just happy that I've lived this long to see you turn the corner and be who you are and I saw well you know I'm not just trying to be the best I can be one day at a time try me out and she says you don't need to try anymore you're perfect now stop thinking of others and think of yourself which obviously goes against everything that's priceless you guys done that and just to be a part of just to be a decent human being I always say best me I've ever been but not the finished product and yeah like I was about to say because I've got three minutes was it's not rocket science I truly am free truly unhappy one of the things I've heard would you have rather be happy would you rather be useful of course being selfish self-centeredness I would choose happy, but actually I'd rather be useful because when I'm useful, I'm happy. And I go about trying to be a tool in God's hands, trying to help trust God, clean house, help others. But in AA, I've been in AA. I kind of do service. I realise now in 21 years I've never been without commitment. I've ever said no to a legitimate AA request. I've not had a sponsor once I was long enough in the programme to get sponsors or to work for someone uh i've done like so much prison service school talks um yeah there's so much on offer in as so much don't short yourself short change yourself would be my advice um just just get stuck in um again another weird analogy for i mean the program will give me a freedom from alcoholism but a weird analogy from vegetarian you can have like just cheap burgers or you can have steak you know uh you know take steak you know go take take the best stuff um and i've whenever i was drinking uh if i was in ireland i had to go and find pochi you know when i was in greece i had to find ouzo when i was in mexico i had to go to tequila and find a tequila i always find the strongest stuff of everything when i smoked i smoked french cigarettes that type thing And when I came to AA, I discovered that there was kind of some weak AA. You know, it's still good stuff. But then there's the good, nearly said the swear word. And it's like, where would you find it? It's kind of in here, the last place most alcoholics would think of looking. You know this old book that I had such contempt for. I'm just blown away by the whole kind of thing. And that we're doing this now. And we're all in with a chance, just one more day. god bless everybody all around those 98 countries i'll leave it there thank you