Showed Up Drunk to My First Meeting and Figured Partial Credit Still Counted 🤦 – Jonathan R.
About This Speaker Tape
Jonathan R. shares at the Monday Night Blue Chips Speakers Meeting on NavaZoom. He describes a childhood that looked normal from the outside — parents divorced when he was three, a week with mom, a week with dad — but underneath a crushing shyness, a sense of being unique and alone, and a hunger for validation that groups and cliques could never fill. In his senior year he deliberately set out to teach himself to drink, breaking into his father's liquor cabinet, and from the first hangover he already wanted to do it again and get better at it. Alcohol made him feel like he could finally speak; he chased that feeling through college, a girlfriend in New York, a move to the city, and a long career in restaurant kitchens where the crew drank hard after shift and he finally thought he had found his people.
The fun leaked out of the drinking. He went from drinking with the crew to sneaking drinks through shifts, drinking alone in a small room, and finally hiding bottles from a partner who he had desperately hoped would save him. A management job ended when he could not stay sober through service and was drinking at the dive bar across the street. A summer job in Maine, gotten through his girlfriend's boss's family, ended after one blackout weekend with the owner asking him to leave the island and never come back. Back in New York the relationship was over, he checked into a downtown hotel, and he reached the place the book describes — drinking for oblivion and no longer able to get drunk.
A call to Central Hotline and a walk around Gramercy Park with another alcoholic led him to a men's meeting where he sat at the newcomers' table, head down and crying. Six or seven men surrounded him afterward and gave him a pocket Big Book he still carries. He flew home to Michigan, bounced between a few weeks sober and relapses in New York, and finally asked his father to take him to rehab no matter what he said in the morning. Out of rehab, a sponsor told him to listen in outpatient group therapy and look for someone to help — he met Jim, a blind newcomer, and spent a summer driving him to meetings. Showing up for Jim was when something changed and the next drink stopped being the only thing in his head.
He moved to Atlanta following a woman who has never seen him drink. A visitor's tip pointed him at the 7:30 a.m. NABA meeting, a literature meeting that felt like his Michigan home group, and cooking Saturday breakfast there gave him back the kitchen work he could not do while drinking. His sponsor's image of the keyhole — that alone he only sees the universe through a tiny slit, and every meeting hands him another keyhole and another piece of the mosaic — is how he describes a life that is immeasurably better than the one he burned down.
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