Moving from Victim to Hero in Your Own Story – Paul P.

Good evening my name is Paul and I'm a full-blown alcoholic and I am glad to be here tonight. I see the people standing in the back, too bad. I always feel sorry for that people have to stand, and then I think, well, hell, I have to stay in. Besides, if they don't like it, they can leave. Of course, their conscience will get them, and their sponsor might see them, so they have to be careful. I never walk out on an hour. I mean, this is a real jumpy meeting. I don't know whether it's because everybody works a good program or it's just the damn floor. I always like enthusiastic meetings, and we've talked in a meeting like this, this kind of a room before. It's interesting. Hope you all are enjoying your Thanksgiving weekend and have been appropriately thankful and probably glad that the holiday is over. Oh, and I want to congratulate the new people. I think that Thanksgiving season is a really clever time to come into AA and get sober. I'm surprised at your thoughtfulness in really working that out so it came right at the Thanksgiving season. And for the rest of your life, you can be thankful that you got sober around Thanksgiving time. I also noticed that most of the new people are not just plain ordinary routine garden variety alcoholics, they're addict-alcoholics. I guess I could be an addict- alcoholic if I wanted to. I never figured out whether being an addict alcoholic is better than or less than an alcoholic. So I'm reluctant to do that. I also understand that if I'm an alcoholic, it doesn't matter what else I am. You can't keep you out as long as you're an alcoholic. And if you're anything else than that, you don't need to be that to be him. Although I do find there is a difference between addicts and alcoholics. At least I see it in my own personal opinion. because an alcoholic, as I see it, is a person that can't drink or take drugs. And an addict is the person who can't use drugs or drink. Anyway, I'm glad you're here and hope you keep coming back And congratulations to the chip person and Ellen for her birthday. And also I want to testify the fact that I am still alive, as Gene and some of the others have heard that I had died. That's definitely not true. That's not true, and there's one more reason why I'm glad to be here. I'm glad to be alive. And in fact, I'm glad that I'm glad that I'm alive. It hasn't always been that way. I used to wish I were dead. The only thing I didn't like was the idea of dying. I always thought of ways to commit suicide. Still, it's the easiest way, the most painful way, but there's always a risk that they'd find you before you were dead long enough. and I always thought the worst thing I could do with my life if it was bad enough I'd been a failure in everything else now to attempt suicide and fail would add one more failure to it the idea of shooting myself seemed so loud and so gruesome and so bloody and I don't know I always had a way So I was going to inject some mag sulfate intravenously. That would kill you right instantly. I see a bobbing head over there. The only thing, the only thing I didn't know how to get the needle out and wash the syringe and needle out and put it away before I died and how they would hide up the hole. Of course, I had holes in my arm anyway. I got little... Somebody might get the idea that I was an addict because I had needle marks on my arm, but I was very careful to use the same place most of the time. Although I used the veins down here. I used to have black and blue marks from using these things. But I wasn't an addict. I just took some. I used a few narcotics, kind of like between-nail nourishments. It wasn't that I had to have them. When addicts use dirty needles and they take anything they get, you know, they say, what's that? Give me something else. Put it in. See what happens. That's an addict, and I didn't do anything. I mean, I always, always used a fresh needle. And I never used anything but the purest of drugs that I'd stolen from my patients. In fact, a patient and woman would come in with a flu, and I'd tell Max who was keeping my narcotic records because she worked in the office, I'd say to her, this woman has cholelithiasis. That means gallstones, but it sounds better if we say choleLithiasus. I'm going to give her two cc's of Demerol. I'd give her 2cc's of vitamin D complex. I'd take one cc of Demerol and she'd owe me one ccc. And so the other day I was talking to somebody, at the time of the meeting they were wasting Demeril. Wasting Demeral. They were injecting it in the muscle. That's a ridiculous thing. And Demerol is a potent and really important narcotic drug, and it should be treated with respect. It should always be injected intravenously. It's the only way to take Demerrol. I used to love that way. I'd squirt a damn big deal out and wait and see what was going to happen. Nothing happened. Then all of a sudden it would start in your feet and just rush right up to your ears. I just float around the room with that. Just love that feeling. Put it in a muscle, that doesn't happen. It's nothing, you know? But I like Demerol better than morphine. You have to practice medicine with one hand if you use morphine, and the other hand keeps scratching your nose. Makes my nose itch just thinking about it a little bit. make my nose itch, and make me vomit unpredictably. Patients never got used to that. I never became a dope-feed addict. I didn't become pillhead either. I took a few pills. Actually, I took pills. I was sick a lot. I took bills. I was a pharmacist and a physician in internal medicine, and I took the pill. But always medically indicated. I never ever took a pill unless I had the symptom that only that pill would relieve. I either had it or I could feel it coming on. And I never got hooked on the pill In fact, you ask any doctor how patients get hooked on their pill, how their patients get hooked on pills, they'll tell you two things. The first thing they'll say is none of their patients ever get hooked on pills. And the other thing they will tell you is that patients only get hooked on pills when they abuse the pills. A patient has to abuse the pill. That's how you get hooked upon it. I don't even know how to abuse a pill. I know about verbal abuse, sexual abuse, child abuse, spouse abuse, physical abuse. But I don't know how to abuse a pill. How do you abuse a pillow? You throw it up against the wall and you step on it, you talk mean to it. You dirty, rotten little pill. Why didn't you do what I told you? I treat my pills with a lot of respect. Oh, they're very tiny little pills anyway. In fact, there's this little pocket inside the big pocket. That's a pill pocket. That's where you keep your pills. and you can take the pills so easily. You have to be careful where you carry your pills. You carry them over with your change, and somebody says, you got change for a dollar? And you say, oh yeah, and you go like that. They say, oh, you're carrying Invitol around in the daytime. So you put your pills over with their keys, and you get in your car and you pull your keys out, and a Quaalude runs down the street. It always runs faster than you can run. And you can't step on it or you'll be abusing it. I always treated my pills with great respect. And I drank some, not much, I drank socially. I was a social drinker, very social. Like somebody says, social drinkers. Somebody says, thank God I drank. The other guy says, so shall I. But I wasn't an alcoholic. In fact, I even ended up in AA and I wasn' t an alcoholic The only reason I came to AA was because getting a pass to come to AA was the only way I could get a pass to get off the nut ward of the hospital I was on the staff of And I was there by mistake and I had a brain tumor and they missed it. And then they took care of this incompetent psychiatrist, couldn't see that my problems were marital and in fact Max had driven me to drink for 28 years and he couldn't see that that had anything to do with it. He just thinks I was talking about that earlier before the meeting. Max drove me a drink for 28 years, and I ended up in AA and turned into an alcoholic. It used to be I drank a lot before I was an alcoholic, now that I'm an alcoholic I don't even drink. And a week from today, a week from today on December 2nd, Max and I will celebrate our 50th wedding anniversary. They're applauding A.A. and Eleanor, because she goes to her Eleanor meetings and I go to a lot of them with her, and I come to my A. A. meetings and she comes to a lot of with me, and so does our two Ella dogs, Lily and Sabrina, out in the car, they tell you hello, and they come to a lot of meetings. more meetings than a lot of people who are trying to stay sober. You have nicer personalities than a lots of people that are trying stay sober, you know. I suppose you've heard that story that Father Tom W tells. I've been telling it ever since I read Max. When Max and I were riding off to meetings we listened to tapes of meetings on the way to meetings and we listened to the tapes of the meetings on our way home from meetings. We'd listen to tapes I thought that Tom was a weekend retreat thing. He was telling them how he was reading biographies of Hitler and was reading about the one time that Hitler drank. And Hitler was telling the story about how he and some other young soldiers years before had gotten hold of some liquor, and they drank it, and Hitler got drunk. And in the morning he was disheveled and a mess and felt terrible. And he decided that was absolutely ridiculous and he was never going to do that again. He was never, ever going to drink again. And he never did. Hitler never drank again. And Tom says, and I give you Hitler as an example of an alcoholic who doesn't drink and doesn't go to meetings. and so that's the way that goes but I had to come to meetings because I wasn't even an alcoholic I came to the meetings to get away from that nut work because the psychiatrist really didn't pay much attention to me he talked to other people but he didn't talk much to me and they wanted me to get to these meetings and I went to one of these meetings in fact I remember when he was, one time he walked up to me and he says, would I mind talking to a man from AA? And I couldn't imagine what possible help I could be to some drunk from AA, you know. And I ended up going to their AA meetings and they, I hear a lot of dumb things in AA when you're not an alcoholic. Things that I remember guys stand up there and say, if If I don't drink today, I'm a success today. And I thought, oh my God. What kind of an organization is this where they brag about not having a couple of beers for God's sake? I remember the day this big healthy, big healthy husky guy stood up there and said, For me to drink is to die. And I said, oh come on fella, you look pretty healthy to me. I'd had convulsions twice, pancreatitis once. I was on pass and a nut ward. I thought I was dying of a brain tumor and I thought you were trying to frighten me into joining this thing. And I kept coming to these meetings and they heard these dumb things. In fact, I wouldn't have come. What happened was I went back to the hospital and this psychiatrist was really interested in me then. He wanted to know what the meeting was like, what they talked about, what went on there, And when I'm going to the next one, what kind of meeting was it? And all of a sudden I thought, my God, I've got me an alcoholic psychiatrist. And he's ashamed to go, so he's sending me. And I wondered how many meetings I'd have to go to before he let me out of the hospital. And eventually he did let me on. I had no intention to go. But Max had gotten hooked on the meeting. In fact, once I found out she would like the meetings, Of course, then when she didn't act right, I'd punish her and decide if she didn' t act right I'd punished her and decided I wasn't going to AA anymore. And I don't know if you've ever tried it. She got in the car. We lived in Anaheim and went to meetings in Laguna Beach about 45 minutes away. Went to Laguna beach so we wouldn't run into anybody we knew. Now 22 years later I've run into everybody that goes to Lagoon Beach so they won't run in anybody they know. And And she got in the car, and she drove all the way. She couldn't drive that far, but she got into the car. She drove down to Laguna Beach all by herself. I don't know if you've ever tried that, staying home on a Saturday night drinking while your non-alcoholic spouse is off laughing it up at an AA meeting. And so I started going back to the meetings to see what she was doing. And I turned into an alcoholic, as a matter of fact. In fact, that's one of the most profound things I've learned, and they say alcoholism is a contagious disease. I thought you get alcoholism by drinking alcohol. That's what they told me in medical school. That's not true. You get drunk drinking alcohol, but you get alcoolism from other alcoholics. And you run into a lot of alcoholics today. I've always been impressed. I've also been impressed with the number of alcoholists that you find at AA meetings. There's a lot in there. and what happens is they start talking and you identify, that's the word they use you identify with what they're saying and you think my god I wonder if I'm an alcoholic and boom, you've got the disease and once you've got it, there's no getting rid of it I try to get rid of it by giving it to others that just made it worse the more I gave it away, the more i had it I found out it's a virus it's an virus and affects the brain goes in through the ears. So if you're here tonight and you're not really, really an alcoholic, you want to be real careful what you listen to. And when I turn into an alcoholic I turn it into a very mild alcoholic. Very mild. Very mild, hardly alcoholic at all. Just a mildly alcoholic, not a drunkard, not a skid row bum, not a wino, not a rush, not a lot of things but just mildly alphalic. Allergic to alphali. They tell you in AA, you have an allergy to the body and compulsion to the mind. Allergy to the brain and compulsive mind. I didn't have any compulsion. I didn' t have any compulsions. Compulsion makes you do things you don' t want to do. I didn''t have that. I did drink. When I went to drink, when I went for a drink, I drank it. I don' d know what would happen if you waited for a compulsion and it didn' d show up. But I did have an allergie to the belly. I react peculiarly to the drug alcohol. I do weird and peculiar things when I drink alcohol. In fact, it will affect my speech, my tongue, my lips. I will talk slowly and deliberately so nobody will notice. All right. I will reach for something and knock down, or I will trip when there's nothing to... There'll be times I find myself just lying there. Just lying there, looking very serene, actually. And my brain would say, get up, you fool. People will think you're drunk. And my body would say what do you mean get up? We're paralyzed from the ears down. I would think isn't that strange that we can't move? Isn't that strange? I must be allergic to this stuff. I must have an idiosyncrasy. I have an abnormal response to the drug alcohol. I'll have to ask somebody about that someday, some allergist or something. Never found any to ask because you can't trust just anybody. They're liable to say, well, I don't know why but if it affects you that way why don't you just stop drinking it? I didn't want to know what to do about it. I just wanted to know why it did that to me. But I knew I was allergic to alcohol. But it was an interesting scientific problem, and I remember I used to lie there and think about it, and it was kind of interesting. It also took my mind off my full bladder. It was a bad combination, a very impractical combination. I never was paralyzed from the years down that I didnít have a full bladder, bladder that absolutely refused to remain full. And it's no better today than it was then. That's one thing. A lot of AA benefits, I mean a lot of fringe benefits to AA recovery, a lotof them. But an increased bladder capacity has not been one of them for me. My bladder capacity is no better than it once was for beer. but I'm not complaining on the other hand I don't complain at all because even though my capacity is no better my aim has improved tremendously and that's nice I like that I like it I like to Max likes that too so that part's better and I don' t have any it's interesting to me I don't have any trouble with not drinking today. I mean, I remember that I first didn't drink. I decided not to drink that day and see what happened. And nothing happened. So I decided to do it another day. And nothing happening that day. And that's kind of the way I do it. Today's the day I don'T drink. Today's an important day for me. Today's today I DON'T drink, like somebody said at a meeting the other day. He said it was, on that day, it was Wednesday. He said, never drink on Wednesdays. Today's Saturday. I never drink on Saturdays. Just don't drink today. Go and drink tomorrow. But I don't drank today. I drank many yesterday. If I don''t drink today, I'm going to drink tomorrow In fact, I don' think I can keep from drinking today if I didn't know I was going to drink tomorrow And when tomorrow gets here, I'll check the time and if it's today, I won't drink today going to a lot of meetings, and once they get through the steps, starting over and doing them again, helping other people. Doing a lot more things in AA, I find it easy to stay sober. In fact, when I say doing a lot less things than AA, I try to do all the things I can do in AA. I want all I can get out of this program. In fact it seems to me that the program people are divided into two groups. The group that want everything they can get at AA, and they're very active and doing all the things and starting meetings and leading meetings and officers in meetings and all that stuff. And the other people are trying to see how much is the least they can do and still stay reasonably sober. And they make it except on the days when they don't. And I would rather be in the group that wants to be active. In fact, when I decided when I was going to be when I started when I said I was a little bit alcoholic it seemed to me that I looked around and it seemed to me that there were people who were making it and happy, and people who weren't making it or even if they were making it that day they weren't very happy and somebody was saying stick with the winners stick with what the winners were saying and it seems to me the winners were the ones that were happy sober and happy because I spent a lot of time for a number of years I would go around and everybody I could see that I thought was the winner or seemed like a winner or might be a winner, I would ask them, how do you work this program? How do you stay sober? And I would tend to do the things that they were doing and not do the thing they weren't doing. And I talked to people who are in and out, in and up, in and now, in now. I'd say, how do YOU work this book? I would intend to not do things they WERE doing but to do things THEY WEREN'T DOING. and that's been working real well for me. Act like a winner was the phrase I used for myself. Act like the winner in order to become a winner. In fact, I would recommend it to anybody. Act like you want to be in order for you to become that person. Take it till you make it. Which is quite different than pretending to be something you're not. I used to pretend to be something I wasn't in order fool you. I act as if I were the person I want to become in order to change me. I don't care whether it fools you or not. To act as if, to act as a fool. In fact, I find that particularly with depression. I love to be depressed. It's always been one of my favorite moves to get depressed. When I get depressed, I get depressed all over. I go to bed, pull the clothes over my head, put my thumb under my mouth and just stay there. I can't even realize that it's very depressing to act like that. In fact, in order to be loving, the way to be loving is to act as if you were. Do loving things. Being spiritual. The way to be spiritual is to be act as you were spiritual. Just act as if you weren't. Somebody was saying this at a morning meeting the other day. It's the idea of being bored. That's very important for me. It is very important, to avoid boredom in AA because it seems to me that I don't see very many people resign from AA. They don't quit AA. We seem to drift away from AA we find we can get along without this one meeting then we find there's another meeting we can good long with that and another and we just we don't quit. We just drift away. And I think if you look around, most times it's because we get bored. But what I started to say was the gal reminded me that people who are bored are boring. You ever seen somebody who was bored? It wasn't a boring person to be around. And I find that's what I do. If I'm bored, it's cause I'm boring and I need to get active and get out of thinking about myself and find things to do. Go start some meetings like Gene here is doing. I love to start meetings. If I couldn't find a meeting that I liked or something I needed, I'd go start one. Either go or wouldn't. What's the difference? Either way. It's fun to have it go and years later it's still going. You knew you started it. Started a dozen or so meetings. Anyhow, the idea of staying sober I find as long as I stay real active, it's real easy. It's easy for me to not drink a day at a time. My problem, my more immediate problem is to not think. Indeed, I don't even have a problem today. I don' t have any problem today unless I think I do. And if I think that I do, I always do unless I think I do. And if I think I do, I always do. I've never ever thought I had a problem and been wrong. In fact, I determine the size of my problems. If I think it's a big problem, it's no matter what you think. In practice, if I say it's just a little problem, it's just a LITTLE problem, no matter WHAT you think! But I don't have very many little problems. All I have to do is think about it and watch it get bigger. I don't have to work on a problem to make it get big, all I have do is just think about it. I can take any little old problem and just make it grow. In fact, I mean, you have to start with the best problem. I could start with a non-problem. But that's not a problem for God's sake. I suppose if you thought about it. It might be, and I think, you know, it is, you know, pretty soon I'm thinking, you know, by God, it's a good thing I'm looking at this. Everybody else is missing it, you know? It really is quite a problem, and then the more I get to thinking how important it is that I look at it, the more bigger it gets, and the easier it is to look at. Pretty soon it's all I can see, and people can't even help you much with a problem like that. They tell you stupid things. They say, well, don't think about it. I don't know how to not think about a problem. A problem isn't worth having unless it's worth thinking about. I don't bother with any problem unless there's a kind that's worth getting obsessed over. It's like resentment. I don't bother with any but justifiable ones. And I tried to find sponsors of wonderful guy, but he's got this dumb expression. He's a great guy, easy going, relaxed, but he's got this dumb expression and almost no matter what it is, he says, well whatever. You've got a big problem, you're looking for a solution, what are you gonna do with? Well, whatever. In fact I've always thought that I was going to do a lot more with my life, and I would have if it hadn't been for bad circumstances. If it hadn' t been for my parents, he was a pharmacist instead of a doctor, it was a small town, it's back in Ohio, I use the expression, instead of in California, and with Max, if you had to live with Max you'd understand why I wasn't doing more with my life than I am. And I used to call him up to tell him, somebody needed to know, somebody ought to know what it was like living with Max and realize why I wasn't doing more with my life than I was. And I would call him up to tell him about the things that she had done. And one day I called him up and told him about something really horrendous that she had done, that I can't recall at the moment. And that already even got started with the story, and he interrupted me. He interrupted me and said, well, why don't you Put it out of your mind a couple of days and see what happens. I said, Jessica, a couple of days, I'll forget all about it. You can't ignore problems, Jimmy. You've got to deal with them right away. Problems have a very high instant mortality. As soon as you see one, you've got to latch right onto it and give it a lot of attention because if you don't, they'll die. I mean, they disappear. That happens a lot times to me. I'll be working on one and somebody will call me up with some really stupid little thing they're fussing about, you know, when I've got a real problem and they'll keep me on the phone a long time and you can't just tell people right off. in fact I mean you can't tell people right off what to do like he did you have to do active listening that's the hot thing today if you want to be a counselor you have learn how to be an active listener what that means is you participate in the story oh and then how did you feel oh oh and then what happened Oh, and tell me more. And how did you feel then? And just keep asking them questions and asking them question and keeping them talking until neither one of you can stand it anymore. In fact, I often paraphrase this business about sponsorship. It annoys me when people say that somebody asked them to be their sponsor today And I said, what did you say? And they said, I said no. And I say, why did you say that? And they always say, they always do the same thing. They always say I didn't think I knew the program well enough. And I always say what the hell do you want to do? Go to sponsor school first? That's how you learn to be a sponsor to somebody is by being a sponsor. It's the same way you learn how to lead a meeting or read at a meeting or participate in a meeting or talk in a meeting or anything. Or do a 12-step call. You learn how it's to do it by doing it. You don't have any schools in AA, you do it wrong and everybody watches you and tells you what's wrong with what you're doing and you learn how to do it. And that's how you learn to sponsor people. And I make fun of the thing a bit by telling people that you can be a sponsor, a really good sponsor, and only know five words. You only have to know five words in the English language to be a good sponsor. Somebody will ask you a question and you'll answer it. You say yes or you'll say no, yes or no. Sometimes they'll just tell you something and they sound rather excited about what they're saying and you say really. Yes, no, really. Or it sounds a little sad if you don't want to say really and you You don't want to keep saying really all the time. So you use my sponsor word. You say, whatever. So you got yes, no, really, and whatever. Sometimes they'll call from cloud nine and they're really happy. And I don't try to bring people down from cloud 9. I say, oh, it won't last. You watch out. You owe me down here. I tell them to stay up there as long as they can. If they come down, get back up as soon as they can, stay as much time as they care on cloud 9 And they're calling me real happy about things. And then you give them the fifth word, you see. Wow. So you've got yes, no, really, wow, and whatever. Now sometimes, you know, they're talking and you're not listening so you don't know which word to use. That's no problem at all. You don't want to use the same words all the time. That's a problem. Then you use a non-word. No matter what it is, no matter what they've said, you say, hmm. And with practice, you can get that into a question and say, Hmm? Or if you get into an exclamation, Hmm! You can get a lot of things out of that. But they have five words and then onward. And it's really easy. That all takes to be an excellent sponsor. In fact, I've heard it said that I've had some adolescents tell me that it's a good thing for adolescents to use on their parents. In fact I've read parents say it's good thing to use on their adolescents and in fact it may be a good thing to take home and use on your family. But the other thing is sometimes they will ask the question. I mean they'll want an answer on how to solve a problem. Not very often. It doesn't happen very often that they want to know what to do about it. Most of the time, they just want to whine about the problem. But if they really want to do something about the program, that's not a difficult one. You just let them outline the problem and no matter what the problem is, this is the thing that fascinates me about our program. It doesn' t matter what your problem is. It doesn''t matter if it''s a financial problem, a relationship problem, an in-laws problem, It doesn't matter what the problem is. No matter what your problem is, the answer is you pick a number from 1 to 12 and say work that step. And they disappear. One of two things happen. They either come back later and they say, oh, I have the most wonderful sponsor or else they never come back. Especially if you pick number 4. but they don't want to work the steps you don't wanna sponsor them anyhow because that's what you're sponsoring them to it's how to live this program and in all our affairs it impresses me that the steps that I had to work in order to keep from drinking are the answer to every problem I have today and in fact I was sitting in a meeting the other morning and there was a real boring meeting I shouldn't say that after talking about being boring it was a very boring meeting and people either weren't talking or the ones that were talking weren't saying anything and they had the 12 steps on the wall and what's the first word of this first step? We. Good answer. It's a we program. I can't do it, you can't do it but we can do it. It's an we program, it's a we program but the thing that impressed me was the last few words of the 12 steps. Commonly, I've been in discussions with people and I've heard them often discussed, you know, what are these principles? What are these principles that we practice in all our affairs? And when I read the steps on the wall, it seems obvious to me, Bill W., who wrote the steps, did not, back in that day, it was very important not to use the same word twice if you could find a word substitute for it. And an example was that in the sixth step, he says, became entirely willing to have God remove our defects of character. In the seventh step, he changed it and said, humbly ask God to remove our defect, our shortcomings. So he went to shortcomings from defects of character rather than say the same thing twice. And it seemed to me he did the same thing in the 12th step. He said, having had a spiritual awakening as a result of these steps, we tried to carry this message to alcoholics and to practice these steps in all our affairs. Then changed it and said, practice these principles in all their affairs. So it's interesting. The point I was making was that in all my affairs, the steps can be the answer whether it's in my relationship with Max my relationship with anybody else or whatever the answer is in the steps I can take a step that will set the problem set the need and if I'm focusing on that I don't have to it takes care of the problem rather than working on the problem I should be working on the answer in fact it seems to me going back again to the fact 22 years ago When I accepted the fact that I was a very mild alcoholic of sorts, I went to one meeting too many and that happened. And the odd thing about it is that I haven't drunk since then, but my alcoholism has gotten progressively worse since then. I'm far more alcoholic today than I was then. It's a progressive disease, whether you drink or not, except it's more comfortable if you don't drink the nice part about that is it's also a progressive recovery and so that part's been nice but I I forgot what I was saying and it's your loss because I'll remember it on the way home It intrigues me that I, you know, what happened that day or hour or minute or whatever when I accepted my alcoholism that changed my life so completely? Because I haven't had a drink since that day and I haven�t had any minor mood affecting a drug since that day. And I like who I am since that date. Not all instantly, but with time. And AA gives me a way to live such that I like Who I Am. Everything is going in an opposite direction. The things that come to mind are, I think, when I accepted my alcoholism and I was willing to say, now what am I going to do about it? and I started trying to act like a winner, I moved from living in the problem to living in The Answer. I think predominantly I moved from being a victim of life. If you had my wife, if you had me, if you heard my life, if you read my problems, if you have my patients, if you did this, and I was a victim of life, I moved from being a victim to being a hero in my own life story. And I think life asks that of every one of us at every moment of every day. The story of your life is going to continue today. What role do you want to play? Do you want the role of victim or do you want to be a hero, a heroine, in your own life story? And I moved into, as a matter of fact, it reminds me, somebody sent me a badge the other day from Phoenix, a little batch. It says no whining. I have the vaguest notion of why they thought I needed that. I went from being a whiner to being a winner when I made that change. And I've become real good friends with my higher power and such good friends that AA has allowed me to completely change who my higher power is. I had the God of my childhood, and I have the higher power of my choosing today. In fact, if you're having problems with a higher power or you don't have one, it might be worth your time to either write out or think out exactly what you would like the ideal higher power to be. Just what would you like a higher power to be if you had one? And you might come to realize that is your higher power, the one that comes to your mind. Because that's how God speaks to me. He speaks to my mind by these voices in my head. He speaks through me by the voices in AA. I used to drown out the voices in my head so I could sleep at night and a lot of times I'd want to lie down go to sleep my body would want to sleep my brain would say no let's lay here and talk about it for a while or even in the middle of the night they'd say hey wake up we need to talk to you there's an emergency you know that thing that you thought you handled so well today and they were so happy with you wasn't like that at all you wait till morning you'll find out And I say, boy, God, I don't want to listen to that crap. And I roll over and go back to sleep. Just as I'm about to lose consciousness, I think, boy I'm glad I'm not thinking of that anymore. You know, that's not the first time you did that either. You've done dumb things before. In fact, you've done a lot of dumb... Let's spend the rest of the night laying here making lists of dumb things you have done. and I used to drown those people out and today I find that that's how God speaks to me he's one of the voices in my head he comes to me with loving thoughts not just loving thoughts but actions to take that are loving making the other person feel important like we do with newcomers in AA like we deal with each other in AA like we did when we applaud And we make the other person feel important. Being courteous. Just being courteouse to another person, either at a meeting or at home. It's an act of love. God comes to me in ideas like that, of being loving, being spiritual, being kind, things to do for somebody else. And I get that at AA meetings and I get it from the people in my head. And that's why I can never drown them out with drugs, and I can't not come to AA because they need to hear this. So God speaks to me there, either whether it's at the speaker or somebody reading chapter 5 or chapter 3 or the leader or the birthday, so a chip person or a person before the meeting, a person after the meeting. It's interesting to go and say, when's it God speaking? And I have a good relationship with my higher power today. That's how I'm outpedaling, you steer. And for God's watch where you're going. And I'm sick of some of the places we've been, you know. But I enjoy this stuff. I enjoy it. I was convinced for many, many years that the worst possible thing that could happen to a nice guy like me would be I'd turn out to be an alcoholic. And it happened to me. Came to one meeting too many, turned into a mild alcoholic. and it's the best thing that's ever happened to me. Best thing that has ever happened to me I've never had it so good I'm not only grateful people say I'm grateful for being an alcoholic but I'm also grateful for this way of recovery if I wasn't an alcoholic I wouldn't need this recovery and I certainly wouldn't do this stuff if it wasn't because I was forced to because of being an alcoholic I really enjoy being an alcoholic in fact I like the line in the middle of page 132 on our big book where it says we absolutely insist on enjoying life and I recommend it to you enjoy life besides they don't charge any extra if you do thank you very much