Pretty Sure Normal People Don’t Try to Funnel Crown Royal — Maybe a Hardcore Frat Party 😆 – Josh B.
About This Speaker Tape
Josh B. shares his story at the Blue Chip Speakers meeting at the NAVA Club. He opens with a breathing exercise and prayer, then lays out the three-part disease concept — the mental obsession, the physical allergy, and the spiritual malady — before diving into a childhood shaped by dysfunction, sexual abuse at age seven, and a first drink handed to him by his father at eleven. He describes how alcohol silenced a grinding unease inside him that nothing else could touch, and how his disease progressed through his teens into full-blown crisis.
At seventeen, Josh found his father dead on the bathroom floor and immediately stepped over the body to steal cash from his wallet. What followed was a spiral through mental institutions, the Salvation Army, homelessness in a stolen tent behind a MARTA station, a felony arrest, and a near-fatal medical crisis — endocarditis, a collapsed lung, and hepatitis C from intravenous use. Forty-eight hours after a twenty-one-day hospital stay where priests read him last rites, he showed up loaded at seven in the morning for his IV antibiotics, illustrating what he calls true powerlessness.
Josh's moment of clarity came in a jail cell after violating probation less than three weeks after swearing he would never return. His sister, already sober in AA, served as his real-life proof that the program worked. He got a sponsor the day he walked into his first meeting after jail, worked the steps with urgency, and describes the fourth and fifth steps as the turning point where he finally disclosed the childhood sexual abuse he had sworn would go to the grave with him. He tells a vivid ninth-step story about pulling over to help a broken-down car in the rain and discovering the two people on his amends list he had been searching for six months.
At three years sober, two weeks before the COVID shutdown, Josh had open-heart surgery to replace the valve damaged by endocarditis — and the day after surgery, he was reading the Doctor's Opinion with a newcomer across his hospital bed. He started a nightly Zoom meeting that ran through the entire Big Book twice over three years. By the time he speaks, he has over seven years, a marriage, a home, a career, healed family relationships, and trips to Ecuador, New Zealand, and a just-announced trip to Dublin. He credits every bit of it to the twelve steps and staying connected to the program.
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