Mental Obsession Lifted at Ninety Days — I Was Scared to Breathe in Case It Came Back — Maria H.
About This Speaker Tape
Maria shares from the Monday Night Blue Chip Speakers meeting at the Nava Club with a little over two years sober (sobriety date February 21, 2015). She grew up in Gwinnett County, Georgia, in a stable, loving, teetotal home — her dad had watched his own father drink and refused to touch it, and her mother hated the out-of-control feeling. From an early age, Maria felt safe at home and socially inadequate everywhere else. She traded competitive gymnastics for cheerleading because she wanted a social life, then took her first drink at 13 — a six-pack of Zima split with a friend at an elementary school playground — and blacked out, threw up, and peed herself. At 16 her teacher-librarian mother caught on and she was sent to inpatient at Charter, then Inner Harbor, then Outward Bound in Utah, and finally a young people's treatment program that got her sober for ten years.
After a decade in a young people's program — working as a teen-treatment counselor in Arizona and North Carolina — Maria moved back to Atlanta, quit that job, and found AA on its own for the first time. A Big Book study cracked open a first-step doubt she had always carried. She left AA at ten years planning to join a church group, stayed white-knuckle sober on fear for about four months, then drank a glass of wine at 10 a.m. at the airport. She started nursing school, passed her boards, became an ER nurse at DeKalb Medical, and moved into an apartment in the Highlands specifically so she could walk to the bar and not catch a DUI — that, she says, was her version of Bill's 'I had arrived.'
It unraveled fast. Three glasses of wine was cheaper than one, so a bottle made financial sense. She called out sick constantly, drank alone, spent four-day weekends in bed, wrote suicide notes, and eyed the ER's pharmacy. A Miami vacation in 2014 ended in a blackout on South Beach, a totaled car, a busted face, 48 hours in Dade County jail, a lost phone, and a mugshot her sister found online. Her straight-laced parents bailed her out. She came home, read the Doctor's Opinion, decided she wasn't an alcoholic, and drank another full year.
She finally came back to AA ashamed and expecting a lecture and was hugged instead. She got a sponsor, a home group, and stayed on Step One for a year. At three months the obsession to drink was lifted — the first time in her life she experienced her Higher Power doing for her what she could not do for herself. She finished grad school, started a new career, travels with her parents now without resentment, and is about to move to the West Coast for a new job. She closes with the page 63 passage about the new Employer and being reborn.
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