My Sponsor Told Me I Hit Bottom the Day I Stopped Digging – Karen

Take me where the promise stands. Hey everybody, let's have an AA meeting, okay? My name is Mary and I am an alcoholic. Welcome to the Monday night Blue Chip Speakers Meeting at the NAVA Club, where a member of Alcoholics Anonymous with one year or more of sobriety tells his or her story. This reading is based on a passage from page 29 of the Big Book of Alcoholics Anonymous. Each individual in our personal story is described in their own language and from their own point of view, the way they establish their relationship with God. These give a fair cross-section of our membership and a clear-cut idea of what has happened in their lives. We hope no one will consider these self-revealing accounts in bad taste. Our hope is that many outcasts, alcoholic men and women in our room tonight and listening later on aabloochipspeakers.org desperately in need will hear our speaker and will believe that it is only by fully disclosing ourselves and our problems that any of us shall be persuaded to say, Yes, I am one of them too. I must have this thing. And now I get to introduce our speakers. Our speaker tonight is Karen. I don't know how hard it is. For y'all to walk into a meeting when you don't know anybody. But I had to walk into a meeting where I didn't know anybody a few years ago. And I was pretty, I felt just like I didn't belong at all. And I've been around the program for a long time. And there was Karen. She was one of the beautiful women that welcomed me. And I did not know her background at all. But I will tell you that when this lady shares, I listen. And I hear. She's got a lot of years in this program. And I think she's going to offer an awful lot of good stuff for us to hear tonight. So with that, I give you Karen. Wow. So my name is Karen. And I'm an alcoholic. It's so interesting to me to think about those words. Because when I first came to AA, I wasn't at all sure that I belonged here. I got sober in New York. And they use the word, when you tell your story, they call it qualifying. You're qualifying. And when I heard that word, I thought, oh, my God, there's a list of qualifications somewhere. You know, and they're going to decide as soon as I open my mouth that I don't belong. I don't belong in AA. And, you know, and there were other things that happened. You know, I heard stories in the beginning, you know, where somebody would say, yeah, I drank 24 hours around the clock the last few years of my drinking. I was like, I didn't do that. And then somebody else said, oh, I carried booze in my purse. And I thought, damn, why didn't I think of that? And then the clincher was, I heard the story about this guy who came out of a blackout and he had washed up on a beach on the island of Tortola. That never happened to me. And so I went, you know, I heard very early on, as I heard tonight, that it was good to have a sponsor. So I'd gotten a sponsor, the first lady who wrote her number on a piece of paper and also wrote, call me any time. And she meant it. So, you know, she became my sponsor. And I called her and I said, Lee, Lee, how do I know I've hit bottom? She said, you hit bottom when you stop digging. And then I said, but these things never happened to me. And she said, they never happened to you yet. All this can be yours. All you have to do is pick up a drink, you know, and then you can have all of that and more. So she was the one, she said, just keep coming back. Just keep coming back. You'll find. But I'm sure there were many old timers who wanted to kill me because I would, every meeting I'm Karen and I think maybe I'm an alcoholic, you know. So one thing I did know was that I was desperate. I had come, I had come to the point where I had lost my apartment. I was living in a room in my parents' house. That was the only thing between me and homelessness. I, some days I couldn't get out of that bedroom. I had a bottle that I hid, which wasn't difficult to do because the floor was covered with piles of clothes. And so I just picked some of them up and threw them over the bottle, you know. And so that was that. And one day in this house, I was making a list, like I always did, of 20 things that I was going to do to change my life. And as I was making the list, I had this thinking feeling. I'd done it so many times before. This is, you know, this is not going to help. And then there was a thought that I called the voice of God. And it was, girl, if you keep going the way you are going, sooner or later, you're going to commit suicide. And it really doesn't matter whether you throw yourself in front of a train or drink yourself to death. Now, I don't know many non-alcoholics who think about drinking themselves to death. But that was the thought that came to me. And my brother had announced. To the family that he had come into AA. And so I called another 12-step program. Because I thought, they'll never accept me in AA. But as a result, I got hold of a big book. And I started reading the stories in the back. And that was how I became convinced that maybe I had a problem with alcohol. So I met with my brother over lunch. And I told him, I think maybe I have a problem. And he said, You drink alcoholically. That's all I have to say. And I'll take you to your first meeting. And he did. And that was the beginning. But I'm getting ahead of the story. I was born in 1953. That makes me 66. So you don't have to do the math. I was born in Virginia. My father was a farmer. And when I was five years old, he became a Baptist preacher. But even before he became a Baptist preacher in the late 50s, when he and my mother got married, she made him promise that he would never keep booze in the house. And he agreed. He had no problem with that. She said, You can have a drink with your friends outside, but do not bring it in this house. So he agreed. But then when he became a Southern Baptist, he became a Baptist preacher. Well, I mean, back then, anyway, Southern Baptist preachers, you know, were teetotalers. So that was the end of that, right? I was a very good girl. I grew up in the church. I tried to do everything that people told me to do. I took the Bible so seriously, I think I scared my parents, even. And I was a straight-A student in school. I was... I had, you know, just like any teenager, I had my circle of friends, pajama parties, dates, all of that kind of thing. I mean, I was just a normal kid, you know. And then when I was 16, and I'm only going to touch on this because... But it does impinge on my story. When I was 16, we were living in North Carolina, and my father was finishing seminary. And... And... And my brother... I have two younger brothers. The brother next to me in age, we were both in high school together, and we would have a party and invite our friends. But the schools had just been integrated, so this time, some of our friends were black. And... And so about an hour into the party, somebody pointed a double-barrel, 12-gauge shotgun at the front window and pulled the trigger. And... In an obvious attempt to wound or kill. And that was traumatic, as you can probably imagine. But the thing that really made me furious was that the church that my father pastored asked him to resign, and when he refused, they fired him. And I want to tell you, you know, I was such a good girl. But something in me just went, bam! That door just slammed shut. And I thought, you people, I want nothing more to do with you. You know, and I couldn't wait to get to college. And when I got to college, it was 1971, the first thing I did was buy a pair of jeans, which back then really meant something. You know, you buy a pair of jeans, you were really making a statement. And the next thing I wanted to do was get drunk. I had never had a drink all those years, and I wanted to get drunk. So, a friend of mine who lived in the dorm with me and I convinced an upperclassman, whom we called Uncle Dave, to get us the biggest bottle of the strongest thing you could find. And he came back with a quart bottle of green alcohol, 190 proof. So, my friend Julie made the punch. We sat there and we matched each other drink for drink, and we got two-thirds of the way through that bottle, and she went to sleep. We were passed out, I don't know. But all I could see was that there was still a third of the bottle left, and I could not be happy until I had finished that bottle. And I mean by the end, I was holding my nose and pouring it down my throat. Now, at some point I blacked out. I didn't know that it was a blackout, that I came out of the blackout, and I was holding this rolled up newspaper in my hand, and I said, I had set on fire. And I had a moment of clarity, you know. I'm like, this flame is coming toward my hand, right? And I'm thinking, if I hold on to this paper, I'm in trouble. If I let go of this paper, I'm in trouble. What the hell do I do now? And just then, the door swung open and somebody came in. I will never know who it was. And in the middle of the night, and grabbed the paper out of my hand, stomped the flame out on the floor, and I don't remember anything else until the next day. Hanging my head over the toilet bowl, and praying to throw up, because I felt poisoned. Well, I mean, it was my first drink, and I had just drunk two-thirds of a quart bottle of grain alcohol. It's a miracle I survived. So, but I couldn't throw up. So I stood up from that toilet bowl, and I can see it like it was yesterday. So, but I couldn't throw up. So I stood up from that toilet bowl, and I can see it like it was yesterday. I thought to myself, good, I'm not a sloppy drunk. Now I can drink with the big kids. You know. And the only other thing I took away from that experience was that I would never drink grain again, because that shit will make you crazy. And I was told that it would make you temporarily blind, and temporarily crazy. And I thought, well that's what happened. That's why I don't remember anything that happened. I couldn't see it. So anyway, so the theory was that now when I drank in public, I would feel myself going too far and I would stop. And it never, ever happened. Once I started, I kept drinking. And I was a morose drunk. I never was one of those happy-go-lucky drunks. I was told that a couple of times I was the life of the party, but I couldn't remember it anyways. So who knows? But I would wander off in the middle of the night. You know, that whole incident from my high school years had set up a pretty strong self-righteous anger in me. And it's one of my main character defects now to this day. So, you know, I would sit and I would critique everybody at the party. And finally, I'd say, oh, these people, I'm out of here. And then I'd go wandering off into the middle of the night. And anyway, so I started flunking out of all my classes. This is just the first semester. I was flunking out of all my classes. I promise I won't go into this much detail about every single year. But that first year was a microcosm of the next 18 years. It was, you know, I started flunking out. And then I thought, okay, I've got to get this thing under control. I've got to limit my drinking to the weekends. And so I limited my drinking to the weekends. And I got my grades back up. But on the weekends, it was the same thing, you know. But I did clear up enough to realize that I was in the wrong college for what I wanted to study. And so I transferred schools, probably my first geographic. And I went to this other school. And truly, drinking took a backseat at that point. I started excelling at school. I met a man that I fell in love with. He was a perfect candidate for my project of getting away from my upbringing. I wrote from left to right. He wrote from right to left. And, you know, he was from a culture I knew very little about. And it was all very exciting. We were going to travel the world. And we were going to live this bohemian life. And, you know, all this stuff. Well, what happened was he turned out to be a human being. Like everybody else, you know. And he wasn't going to fit into my plan. And so the drinking started coming back in at that point. And I remember not long before we separated, we had friends that we would drink with. And we would go to their house. And he would have a half a glass of wine and curl up on the couch and purr like a kitten. I mean, it was like he didn't want any more. He set the half a glass aside and that was it. And his friends and I would match each other drink for drink. You know, we had this thing where, does my ear sound like China yet? No. Okay, I can have another drink. And anyway, on this one particular occasion, we were... We were drinking this really cheap, you know, the gallon jug, red wine. And I don't remember getting to the car. The next thing I knew, I was lying on the floor of the bathtub and the shower was pouring down on me. And the next thing I knew, I was in bed in the morning. And as I began to come to, I realized that my pillow was purple and his pillow was purple. And that there were bits of my dinner, undigested, just lying there on the pillow. And then I realized, to my horror, that I was sleeping in my own shit. I cannot tell you. I don't have to tell you. But that was the moment. I spent the day... He had not slept in that bed, by the way. And there's no wonder. He never mentioned it to me. And I was six months sober before it dawned on me that... He was the one who got me home safely, who got me into the shower, who got me into my nightgown and into bed. Never dawned on me. We never talked about it. From that day forward, we just started living separate lives in our apartment. And finally, nine months later, that relationship ended. I moved into my own apartment and then I was off to the races. I would work this little part-time job. On my way home, I would stop by the liquor store and pick up a bottle of wild turkey because my father liked to drink wild turkey. So I thought, yeah, you know, that's... And it sounded like a grown-up drink. And then I would stop by the grocery store and pick up a great big box of Hungry Jack mashed potatoes. And I would make this huge pot of mashed potatoes. And I'd eat the potatoes and then I'd pour back, you know, the bourbon. And... Oh, my God. I started having a lot of problems physically. For the first time in my life, I was in my late 20s. I had acne. Couldn't figure out what was going on with that. I was completely... I was very depressed. And very... I began to think, like, really fast. So I decided the thing I had to do... I had gone to visit my brother, who was living in New York. The one who later brought me into the program. I went to visit him and he said, Come to New York. I'll take care of you while you're getting your feet on the ground. And so I went to New York to be a singer. An opera singer. And I was going to be a star in two years. I made up my mind. The only problem was... I heard somebody say this last Tuesday night. He said, the only... When you do a geographic... It's very important that you don't take yourself with you. You know, if you take yourself with you, all bets are off. I took myself with me. And my drinking... You know, I can look... That was the last... I moved there in 1980 and I got sober in 89. So that was the last nine years of my drinking. And the progression I see... I was always very careful to be only in places where I knew... Knew everyone. So that I'd be taken care of. You know. Then it became... I'd go to parties with all my friends at a place that I didn't know everybody. But they would make sure I got home. Then it became going to the parties and they would say, we're leaving. And I'd say, bye. And then there were the parties where I went. And I would go home with somebody I'd just met. That I had never seen before. I mean... One of those people turned out to be a crack addict who held me prisoner in his apartment while he was using. And I was in therapy. I escaped because he had to go out to buy some more. And I escaped. And I went to my therapist and she said, if you ever see this guy again, I want you to go to Al-Anon. I said, I'm never seeing this guy again. She said, okay, that's fine. But if you... If you do, I want you to go to Al-Anon. I'm never seeing him again. Well, long and short of it, I ended up in Al-Anon. And I guess somebody there must have known something was up. I was there for about three months. I learned the slogans there. And one day we're all putting the chairs up and this guy says, keep coming back. Maybe it'll do some good. I thought, you, I'm out of here. You know, I left. And I never went back. But, you know, meanwhile, I'm living in this room in my parents' house. I'm holding on to the shower walls. And I'm not kidding. I would stand there holding on to the shower walls and saying, let go and let God. And easy does it. And all the things that I had learned in that program. And somehow, you know, it doesn't work very well when you're still drinking. That... That house was also the parsonage. And so sometimes I would bring strange people home with me. We were all drunk. Those people later would get DUIs on the Jersey Turnpike going back into Manhattan. There were two men that I was dating. One took me to these sort of classy jazz bars and the other one took me to these down-and-out Jersey bars where all the working guys went. And the end result was the same. I mean... I mean... I drank. I started getting concerned about my drinking. And I started limiting my drinking to white wine spritzers because they're not a real drink, right? So I would go to parties where I was supposed to be professional, you know, with these people that I was going to be working with. And I would start with the white wine spritzers intending to go home at a reasonable hour. The next thing I knew, I was coming out of a blackout, really. And I was reciting poetry in the middle of the room to my hostess and her boyfriend who were clearly ready for this woman to leave, you know. And I ended up going home with one of her neighbors. And then... And then I won't go into details about what happened, but it was suitably X-rated. And then... And I was disgusted. And I was in and out of blackout. And at 6 o'clock in the morning, I woke up on the... on the couch of this guy's apartment and remembered that I had to be in New Jersey leading the church choir in my father's church. Yeah. So I peeled myself up off the couch. I got myself home. I laid down for 20 minutes. I took a shower. And then I got, you know, out to New Jersey and I led the choir. And I just explained that I had the flu. I mean, you know, it never dawned on me that somebody would ask me, if you have the flu, why didn't you stay home? You know? But it seemed like a good excuse. Anyway, when I... So it all kind of spiraled down from there. And I was living in this room in my parents' house. And I was working this dead-end job that was paying me a part-time salary to work full-time. It was the kind of job I didn't even have to put a resume in for. Nobody else wanted the job. Somebody recommended me and the next thing I knew, I had it. And then I found out why, because nobody wanted it. But that was fine because I was freeloading off of my parents. I was living in their house for free. I was not contributing to the food budget. I was somehow not managing to pay for my share of the utilities. But I had plenty of money to get into the food budget. I had plenty of money to get into the food budget. I had plenty of money to get into the city and go drinking with my friends. So what happened was, at this job, I was trying to turn a piano around and the wheel got stuck and the piano began to wobble and I didn't get out of the way in time and it fell across my left foot and crushed my left foot. I ended up in the hospital for about a week while they waited for, you know, to be able to do surgery and put it back together. to be able to do surgery and put it back together. And during that time, my mother decided, oh, oh, my brother then announced to the family that he was going into AA. And I thought, that's odd. He doesn't drink any more than I do. You know, that should have been my first clue. But then my mother decided to reveal to me, as I sat there with my foot propped up in a cast, as I sat there with my foot propped up in a cast, that it was her father, my beloved grandfather, who was the falling down drunk. And she told me through tears. I mean, I had never suspected him. I had never suspected him. But the moment that she told me that, it was like I'd been living my whole life in a dark room and bumping into the furniture. And somebody had finally flipped the light on. And I could see, and everything made sense. And I said to her, mom, that's the way I drink. I drink the way Papa drank. And then she said, for the first time ever, yes, your father and I have been concerned about your drinking. You know, it was quite a day. So I decided I wasn't going to drink anymore. And these two guys that I was dating offered to bring me booze to the hospital. They offered to bring me booze. No, I'm not drinking. I'm concerned about my drinking. And so I got better. Two months later, I'm back on my feet. I'm feeling pretty good, because I haven't been drinking for two months, you know? So I figured it's OK to have a glass of champagne on New Year's Eve. I mean, it's festive. Before you knew it, of course, I was back to drinking. You know, in that spring, I had one of my many, many, many three weeks of booze. It was a three-week-long cold. It wasn't until I got sober that I realized the reason they were three weeks long was because my father had taught me about hot toddies. And I would fill a glass with bourbon, then hot water, and then some lemon juice and honey, and sit on the edge of the bed and knock the whole thing back. You're supposed to do one of those in a day. I was taking a hot toddy every hour. So, you know, my colds went on for three weeks. Go figure. Anyway, so I, my brother, and my brother was having trouble staying in the program, and he was falling apart. And then I made that list, and I was, I knew if something didn't change, I was going to kill myself. So he took me to my first meeting. And I'd love to say that I didn't pick up a drink after that. After the third meeting, I coughed a resentment at the speaker and all the people at the meeting, really. They looked way too happy and way too well-dressed. But that was my last drink. I went home with a six-pack of Tall Boys, not the most dramatic drunk. But I sat there thinking, as I cracked them open, I could stop now and go to a meeting. There was a meeting ten blocks away from me. I could walk to it. And then I'd crack open another one, and I'd drink it. And then I'd think, I could stop now and go to a meeting. I couldn't stop. And in that moment, I saw myself. I had gotten an apartment at that point. It was a very dark apartment that had a broken-down couch, so my butt was literally scraping the floor. And as I'm drinking those beers, I had a vision of my life. And I thought, this is the rest of my life, sitting on this couch. And it was this gray, flat thing that stretched into infinity. And it had no trees, nothing. It was just this gray, flat thing that stretched out. And that was the vision I had for my life. And I cracked open. I cracked open another one and had another drink. Well, the next day, I was hungover way out of proportion to the drinking. And I had a project I was working on with some people. She gave me a glass, a wine glass with some sparkling water in it. My hands spasmed. The glass went crashing to the floor. And I thought to myself, that's it. I didn't know what that meant. But I haven't picked up a drink since. I went to the meetings in New York. You count days. So I raised my hands and I said, I'm Karen. I think maybe I'm an alcoholic and I have four days. So this woman, very perky blonde, came up to me and gave me this piece of paper that said, call me any time. And I called her and she helped me. So I asked her to be my interim sponsor because I couldn't commit. You know, to a full, a real sponsor. But she actually was my sponsor for the next two years. She was the one that got me started on the steps. I'm sorry, how much longer do I have? Ten minutes? Okay. Good. Because I'd like to talk about recovery. She got me started on the steps. It took me about a year to do my first. Fourth step. I worked on it the whole year. But the thing was that she told me when it gets too hot to handle, just, you know, put how much time you spent on it and then close the book. You know, so 11 months later, when I was ready to do my fifth step, I realized I'd really only spent about three hours writing this fourth step. It wasn't that big a deal, but it was a big deal. And it was the first layer of the onion. I had always hated my grandmother for the things she had done to me when I was 12. I'm not talking physical abuse, but I am talking about, you know, she would, you know, authoritarianism and all that kind of thing. And I hated this woman. And I couldn't figure out my part. And I, then it dawned on me, Karen, you're 36 years old. And you're still acting like you're 12. You know, at the age of 12, yes, you had no defense. But now you're an adult, you know. And something about that thought, that resentment lifted. That was the first time I ever experienced anything like that. I had to go through a couple more fourth steps before I really got to what the big book says is the stuff that bothers and burns us. And that stuff. That stuff was so loaded that I called my sponsor, my then-sponsor, and said, I need to do with this stuff immediately. This stuff, I can't sit with this stuff. And she said, I'll see you Monday. I went to see her. I was sobbing and turning over all this stuff to her. And she stopped me and she said, Karen, we're not cutting off your right arm. We're not taking anything from you. That you need. We are simply scraping the barnacles off the side of the boat so that it can sail more smoothly through the water. And I got it. You know, I heard that. I heard that. And I went through the rest of it pretty clearly. Without fear, as they say. So, May 20th, 1989 is my sobriety date. This passed me. I celebrated 30 years. And this life that I'm living is nothing like what I thought I wanted when I came in to the program. You know, I thought I knew what I wanted. And you know how they say, if you make a list of all the things that you want in your life and just seal them up, open them 10 years later. You'll just go, I sold myself short. I thought I wanted to be in the opera world. I thought I wanted to be a star. I am so grateful that I'm not. I didn't like those people. I didn't like that world. I didn't like being there. You know, I loved singing, but it was not. You know, and what happened. And it started right around the time of that third, fourth step when I had four years of sobriety. I started asking myself. Well, what do I really love? You know, and that's when things started changing. You know, I started finding what I was meant to do. And it led me. It led me to this area, to Atlanta, about 18 years ago. I have. This has been a difficult year. I have been through the end of a 13 year relationship. Moving into it. I had to move to a new apartment of my own. I broke my kneecap. I turned 66. And things don't heal as quickly as they did years ago. And so, you know, it's been, it's been an interesting and challenging year. And back in May, let's just say that several of my friends left with the relationship. They were not my friends. And I was focused on that. I was really upset. And I was having conversations with people who weren't in the room. And my sponsor, she stopped me. And she said, Karen, your center has to be AA. And you are making these people your center. Get your center back in AA. And I share that because, I mean, it doesn't matter how far I am from my last drink. I'm this close to my next one. And if I don't, if I don't practice the program, if I don't stay in the middle of the fellowship, if I don't do the work, if I don't reach my hand out to another alcoholic and do the things that are suggested, I could drink tomorrow. I could drink tonight. I don't think I'm going to drink tonight because now I've done service. And I hope that this story has been meaningful to someone in the room. But you know what? It's been meaningful to me. You know, I'll never forget that movie. My name is Bill W. Where Bill goes to talk to Dr. Bob. And Dr. Bob says, what makes you think you can help me? I've had the best minds in the medical field trying to help me. What makes you think you can help me? And Bill says, oh, no. You made a mistake. I'm not here to help you. I'm here to help me. I'm here to face over. I know at least one person was helped in this meeting. And I thank you for this opportunity to tell my story. Thank you. Wow. Okay. Thank you, Karen. Amazing story. Just thank you so much for giving us your time and having so much to give. So thank you, you know. Thanks so much, Dave. So, this is taken seriously by Dinopolis. Subscriber's Note Here we go. Ah, guys. Yes. And the finalлей And- an- Yes. Still searching. In some of the modern data, there are some creating bilinguals, and those using the dark societies have been identified here. Yeah. So- So it's been a little- Well, thank you very much. Well, I mean, what do we win with demography? We win.