My Professor Asked If I’d Had a Head Injury — It Was Just Early Sobriety 🤦 – Hashi M.

About This Speaker Tape

Hashi M. shares from the Monday Night Blue Chip Speakers meeting at the NABBA Club, sober since February 9, 1993. Born in Puerto Rico to very young hippie parents with alcoholism on both sides of the family, she describes a childhood of constant moving, violence at family gatherings, and a bone-deep sense of not belonging — covering her ears upstairs while her family partied, making up fake names, and telling her mother at age five that she was her problem since she'd been born. She took a bottle of baby pills at five or six. Her younger sister Crystal was her opposite — sweet, outgoing, the one who watched over her — and her closest companion through the chaos.

She found alcohol in Georgia at 12 after her parents' divorce, in what she calls a perfect trifecta of puberty, depression, and alcoholism. She was a blackout drinker from the first drink and loved it that way — cocaine, exercise, anything that kept her awake was useless to her. Multiple DUIs, four months in jail, sleeping in cars, and the same judge over and over followed. Her sister got sober first through an Al-Anon-adjacent path that enraged Hashi, then came back utterly changed. When Hashi finally called her mother from rock bottom, her mom said, 'I can't help you, but I know somebody that can,' and gave her the number of her sister's first sponsor.

She walks through early sobriety as harder than drinking — walking Walmart aisles at night filling carts and abandoning them at the door, driving recklessly, picking fights at her sister's house, a professor asking if she'd had a head injury. Two years in, her sister was diagnosed with cancer in May and died in December. That first spiritual crisis — rage at a Higher Power who would take the healthy sister instead of the alcoholic one — took a long time to work through. Later she had a daughter born in May and another born in December, which she receives as the Higher Power restoring what was taken.

At 46, married 20 years to another AA member, raising two daughters (one just 18), same house for 15 years, same program that taught her that alcoholism can kill you drinking or not — and did almost take her husband at double-digit sobriety. She closes on the 12 and 12 passage about the Steps expelling the obsession to drink and making the sufferer happily and usefully whole, saying that is now her experience and that the longer she stays, the more she needs the rooms.

Topics

Timestamps

• 0:00 Leslie opens Monday Night Blue Chip Speakers meeting at NABBA Club, reads from page 29 and introduces Hashi
• 2:30 Hashi opens — sober February 9, 1993, home group A Vision for You in Beaufort, Georgia, sponsor is named
• 4:30 Puerto Rican childhood, grandfather bumming quarters on la esquina caliente, alcoholism on both sides, shame from a very early age
• 8:00 Took a bottle of baby pills at five or six, told mother she was her problem since she'd been born, made up fake names in every new city
• 12:00 Moved to Georgia at 12 during parents' divorce — 'perfect trifecta of puberty, depression, and alcoholism' — blackout drinker from the first drink
• 17:00 Jail and DUIs stack up — same judge repeatedly — working two jobs to pay attorneys and keep drinking, degrading things done to keep the supply coming
• 22:00 Sister goes to rehab, comes home transformed — Al-Anon enrages Hashi as an untreated alcoholic, sister briefly leaves AA saying she only needs to smoke pot
• 26:00 Last jail stretch, utter inability to stay away from alcohol, calls mother who refuses to help but gives her sister's first sponsor's phone number
• 30:00 Early sobriety — Walmart buggy ritual, reckless driving, professor asking if she'd had a head injury, sponsor telling her 'you can stay sober no matter what'
• 34:00 Sister diagnosed in May, dies in December at Hashi's two-year mark — first spiritual crisis, later daughters born in May and December as restoration
• 40:00 Closes with the 12 and 12 passage on the Steps expelling the obsession and making the sufferer happily and usefully whole