Step 12 and the Short-Term Pain for Long-Term Gain – Mike

Okay, I'm Mike. I'm an alcoholic and thanks Diane for that warm welcome and the opportunity to be of service tonight. What a fantastic group of alcoholics that we get together here this evening and and I just feel honored to be a part of it. You know when I when I got asked to uh to to share tonight i really did not think that much about what i was going to talk about you know i um i thought you know since i sobered up the late october it was october 27th of 87 and i sober it up in little rock arkansas and i live in fable now and my home home group is the dixon street group i thought you know i'll share with them that um our group is on the college strip for bars in a methodist church we've got a couple of churches on one end of the college bar street and all of the bars on the other end ofthe street that touched the university and i think it's kind of ironic that uh on one hand you get drunk and on the other end that you can get sober and uh and that we're here tonight and i'm here in this town because i got my first dui in this time when i was a freshman in college and so you know to just be able to share my story a little bit about what it was like what happened and what it's like today is really what um i'm entrusted to do here i'll just share briefly i think it's important uh for me to give a little bit of a background uh not that it caused my alcoholism but it set the stage for the internal drives for me to be more than what i ever felt like i was i grew up in a little small town in eastern arkansas in the delta part of arkansas a little town called earl it's kind of halfway between two you know towns that were about five or six thousand we were smaller than that about 35 miles uh west of memphis and um we grew up relatively dirt floor poor where you could you could see the ground underneath the floor in parts of the house and and i always kind of felt like all of the farmers in town who drove the new fords and the new rams and the dude chevys had had more than what we had and i always felt like we were trying to climb up out of you know financial ruin or financial straits or i was always pressed to make good grades i was almost pressed to you know play good sports i was also always pressed you know go to church i was pressed to do the right things and i wanted so desperately to do that and i want to fall in line and i mostly did i wasn't really the rebel kid. I had two older sisters where one of them was, and I watched her and I noticed that the more trouble she got in, um, the worse it was for the home. So I learned how to skirt around that, but there was a lot of dysfunction in that home. Uh, there was alcoholism growing up. My mom was a periodic. So you just never knew when, um、 she would blow her top and then go off on a, you know, a two week or one week, a three day bender. And it would just turn the house upside down. But you never talked about it. You never talked about mom's drinking, you just hope that that she didn't, she didn't do that. But I swore I wasn't going to be that way. I swore, I wasn' gonna be that wa but I took my first drink, not thinking about her and the damage for the 15 years that I had seen that had caused the home and granted her father was an alcohol. So there's generational alcoholism dysfunction all the way through. And I understand today why my mom needed to drink if it wasn't that she was taking some kind of pills. But when I took my first drink, the only reason I really took it was not to get drunk. But more importantly, was to fit in with the other three guys that were in that car because they were older than me. Automatically, I felt less than and I was always trying to get from minus three back to zero. And if you're going to do that, then you better overshoot zero plus three. So I was Always trying to go beyond just to get back to even. And I didn't want to I didn'T want to get shunned at night or shame. So II poured out half of that bottle of Coke, Coca Cola and I poured in the rest with cherry vodka. And I remember taking a swig of that and the warmth that went down and it hit my stomach. I thought I was going to get sick, but I just held in there with it. And I mean, I'm just like fighting because I'm in the backseat of a Lincoln Continental in that little town of 3,000 driving around cruisy and I didn't want to throw up on those leather seats and almost hit that carpet. I could not do that. I could not do that. But I was able to drink the rest of that 10 ounce coke and I remember getting lightheaded and all of that, and then going home and going straight to bed. I don't think I got drunk that night, but I can hear to tell you one week later, they had this older people's, I would say probably in their early 20s, had this party in town at the community center, PGA Punch and Miller Ponies. I got there about 8 30 and I remember dancing having drank a little bit of PGA punch and the next thing I know I wake up come to at about 10 30 out behind that community center having passed out. So I want to share that that that's my history with drinking. My drinking was that way. I was never a social drinker. I know there's a lot of people that grow into social drinking or go into alcoholic drinking. I drank based off of the craving from the first time. So if I was whatever it was, I would drink. I would want the next one and the next One and the Next one. And it wasn't until years later and I stopped drinking at 27 so my drinking career was not that long but it wasn't until probably five years maybe I was 22 when I began to really try to control my drinking otherwise it was only a phase that I was going through and I was always wanting to be somewhere other than where I was. I don't know if you can relate to that but when I was in the ninth grade I so desperately wanted to be in the 10th grade. When I was in the 10th, I couldn't wait till I could become a senior because I thought around the corner was where it was. And if I can just land there, then my insides would match your outsides. And so of course, I get to the senior in high school. And I'm waiting on the fact I just can't wait to when I get to college. And I left that small town of Earl one Sunday morning on my way to Conway, Arkansas to go to the University of Central Arkansas. I couldn't get out of there fast enough because that's where all the problems were. And i'm going to start new. I'm always starting new with something. And so by the time I got to Conaway, I came out of high school with a 385. Now I'm not bragging on that because the academic standards in eastern Arkansas in the late 70s were not high, but evidently the advisor at UCA thought they were because he starts putting me in college algebra and all of these classes, you know, English lit and some things that normal people that come through high school would probably be able to handle. Well, I couldn't handle it. But that wasn't the problem. The problem was I was off on a drinking bench because all of a sudden, I leave that small town. I get to Conway to UCA and college opened up a whole new opportunity for me when it came to drinking. Fraternity parties, sororities, just football games, just cut loose. So that 385 went to a 165 my freshman year and got my first DUI. And I share with you that in that first DUI, I remember talking with my parents about that. I had a car in college and kind of like if you follow football, when they get penalties by the NCAA, a lot of them will self-impose a penalty on themselves, hoping that the penalty coming from the NCAA won't be as strong. So I went to my dad and I said, you know, dad, I got a plan here for my punishment. You know, I think I'll surrender my car and give that to you. And he went with it. I mean, I gave up my guy, brought a bike back to college. And, you know,, I'm always trying to stay a step ahead and manage, you don't we can rest satisfaction out of life if only we managed well. And so I'm trying to manage my life school is a far down priority to me. So managing my life was more important. How can I keep my head above? Uh, how can I get out of this DUI? How can you know, take on whatever it is that's, that's bothering me. But I know when I came home that freshman year, my dad got my grades. He said, if you ever go back to school, it won't be on my dime. And I copped a major resentment with that and i said well hey i don't need college so i stayed out that next fall semester and worked and i remember going back to him and october and saying dad i really would like to get back in school he goes that's not happening only you're going to make that happen so i ended up saving enough money to get bad well the next two years i got two more duis the grade point improved because i was paying for it see i was using somebody else's money the selfishness that i had if i'm using yours you know whatever is yours is mine and whatever's mine is mine that's the way i looked at my family unfortunately that was my kind of attitude toward it but somehow i graduated and by the time that i'm graduated i had three duis and somehow two of them i had gotten an attorney and gotten out of so the first one was the only one over there i interview for a pharmaceutical company and i get the job somehow the first one had fallen off but in this pharmaceutical company i'm drinking on the weekends i'm trying my best not to drink through the week but i end up in a sample closet where there was a cocktail of a prescription drug that had alcohol in it it had hydrocodone in it and it had phenylpropanolamine in it so it had a kind of a triple cocktail that i began to take during the days without anybody knowing and just stayed you know liquored up drugged up for the entire three and a half four years that i'm with that pharma company and what what i'd like to share is that once again i'm always moving and i'm always trying something new and i've always looking around the corner because it's got to be better i end up leaving little rock and moving to memphis and i took a territory downtown memphis with the university of tennessee and then parts of you know northern mississippi parts of west tennessee and parts of eastern arkansas and that lasted for about a year and i wore out my welcome there um and i'm married at the time uh i took hostage to the lady that i met in in at uca and i recently started dating her was because she didn't drink drink. And I kind of thought her not drinking with my drinking would kind of balance each other out and she would be good for me. Little did I know the screws in her head kind of fit the nuts in mine. And later when we got into recovery, she went to Al-Anon and I went to AA. But in that relationship, I remember coming home in Memphis one night and saying there's a territory open either in Tupelo, Mississippi or Paducah, Kentucky. And I made the choice to go to Paduca because I had looked at the numbers and I thought I could move that territory better than I could move the one in Tупelo. And why that's important is see, because when I would get out there, I really believed that I was, I could be somebody. And when you believe and you think you can be this, because you feel like you're not you so desperately want to prove yourself but i really didn't understand the the handcuffs that addiction and alcoholism had on me and so instead of going inside i looked outside because it had to be the problem out there it had to be where i was living it had be the territory i was in it had to be you know the the numbers the sales numbers that are being recorded it was somebody else's fault but my fear was with the you know uh the the stealing if you will of those those pharmaceutical products and the duis because i had been to baseball games in st louis swearing i wasn't going to drink paducah to st louise was a couple of hundred miles and i had friends that came up one weekend ago so i said you know what i'm definitely going with you guys matter of fact i'll be your designated driver not going to drink a drop we got about halfway to st. louis they wanted to get a six-pack because we had stopped for gas and they wanted to drink a couple beers on the way up hey i'm driving And I just, I remember it like it was yesterday. I said, Mike, why don't you get a case, get one cold and just put the whole case on ice because that way y'all can drink a few more because it's going to be a lot less expensive than when you get into Bush Stadium and into the baseball stadium. Well, that makes perfect sense. So they ended up getting a case. So I thought, you know, I can have one. I'm driving, but I can Have One. I ended up drinking three beers before we get to the stadium and I came to after being out in the bleachers at Bush Stadium and then the next time I came too I was down on Laclede's Landing and then The Third Time I Came To I'm On My Way Back To Paducah now we're supposed to stay two nights I'm on my way back to PaducaH Kentucky with only one of the guys not two of the guy that was what my drinking was like once i get going um i could easily go into a blackout but i was definitely going to go all the way to the end and drink uh and so those are the kind of things that i was trying to control at this point this is about a year or so before i got sober i began to really look at it because i had friends even back in college that says lock if you would just state a beer if you would just do this if you and even you know dates that that would call the next day and say whatever you do my clock don't ever call me again I go what are you talking about you were supposed to pick me up last night and we were going to go to the Alpha Gamma sorority party and you never showed and I must have been in a blackout when I was asking the day. And so all of those kind of things began to kind of come down on me, but it's a phase I'm going through because see, once I get out of college and get a real job, that's going to be over. Once I get off of Memphis and get to Kentucky and start over, that could be. So my next one was, why don't you just leave the pharmaceutical industry and move back to Little Rock I ended up moving back to Little Rock leaving a wonderful job and actually sold my wife on moving from Memphis at Le Bonheur Hospital she had a great job in the medical technology in the laboratory there selling her on moving up to Paducah Kentucky where she had to start over in the hospital work nights now so that I could this is the selfishness the self-centeredness you know, just basically taking hostages. I went up one Sunday and looked Paducah over while she was working, helping her mom do some stuff back. And I said, I'm just going to go up there and look this town. I came back and I had about five or 10 bullet points that really were the greatest selling points to her. The lakes, we know we had a boat at the time and you know how beautiful Kentucky Lake and Lake Berkeley was. The camping, we used to love to go camping. The cost of living there is lower than it was in Memphis. I had all of this laid out and she was buying hope. You know, I was selling and she was buying, but it was hope because she sensed that, you know, maybe she made a mistake in who she's married. But I promised her when we get to Little Rock, things are going to be different because I'm not with that pharmaceutical. I'm not going to have those pressure of sales. What did I end up doing? I get a job with Merrill Lynch to be a stockbroker. Now, I've got to pass a Series 7 exam, which, you know, is a pretty tough exam and they didn't think I was going to pass it. But I end up continuing my drinking all the way through that in the early stages, but then finally decided maybe I need to talk to somebody because I kept hearing an advertisement on the radio for this, you know, more psychological mental illness. And I ended up going in there one day and talking with somebody and they referred me to an outpatient treatment center for alcohol. And so I decided in order to keep her kind of happy, let's her and I go talk to this place. I wasn't going to go talk it alone because I was more of a shopper versus a buyer. You know, I'm going to go and do my research and due diligence before i really get in there because well i'm going to control my outcomes and basically that's my kind of my wiring there was to control them however things happen well i ended up uh we ended up joining um you know because it was a family disease they said and she needs in there just as much as i do and i knew that you know but i decided five o'clock to eight o'clock, three days a week, I can do this. Put eight days back-to-back without a drink or a drug. And that's the first time I had gone two years without drinking and drug. I had eight days. And when I got that job with Merrill Lynch, I ended up celebrating one more time because now I've got Merrill Lynnch that's paying me more than the pharmaceutical company was. I've got this outpatient treatment thing they introduced me to AA I was going to AA meetings and matter of fact I thought it's so funny moved into an apartment complex that right across the hall I mean if you walked out my front door you go right into the front door of the guy and gal crossed and come to find out he was in those AA meetings and I remember going to one of those AA meetings and seeing him not knowing he was in AA, and I had a big book. And I remember turning that big book over so he couldn't see Alcoholics Anonymous on it because I was so embarrassed that if he knew his neighbor was in AAA, how bad would that be? And come to find out he was there too. What was interesting about that apartment complex, there were three other people that were instrumental in my recovery that ended up in that apartment, were in that apartment complex. I totally believe today that was a God deal, that was where we ended up. But I didn't stay sober. I drank after eight days and then I go on about a 60-day run. Now, I had been to enough AA meetings and in Little Rock, well, I can't brag enough about the recovery in the late 80s or going even earlier than that all the way through. Joe, Joe McWaney, Gene Walters. These guys are dead now. Tag Christian. I mean, just, you know, a wealth, a wealth of sobriety. So I end up at this Thursday night, 11-step meeting of all things, and I'm still drinking. And all I could hear that night was the word honesty, Honesty, honesty, honesty. And the more that I drank, the worse I felt. But I ended up going to the office that morning to try to study for the Series 7 exam and do what I'm supposed to do. I'm maybe three months into this job and I can't even stay in my seat. I thought, why don't I go and they would allow me to do it. Go to the University of Arkansas Little Rock to their library and get a desk and just sat down and studied there. Well, I ended up leaving Merrill Lynch that morning, drove right to the liquor store, got a bottle, kept it in the bag, put it in my briefcase, walked into the library, go to the third floor, made sure I had a desk that had a partition in front of me and I proceeded to try to study with a suit on while I'm sweating, drinking, trying to get drunk, trying to trying to not get drunk i'm trying to get somewhere near even where i can just feel halfway okay and i remember looking out all over campus i was by window and i remember seeing those those kids changing classes and i remembered when my life seemed like it was this big and alcohol was that big and on that day alcohol was that big in the ruins of my life. This is what I felt. The desperation was this big and my life was that big. And I thought, if I've got to live this way, I just soon die. God, you've got to help me. And the only thing that came to me was go to that outpatient treatment center and talk to your therapist because, you know, she'll tell you to just dust your seat off and get back on the horse. And let's just do this one day at a time. I go there. She's not there. I go to leave, and the administrator catches me. Mike, what are you doing here? I said, well, I came in to see Karen. Oh, she won't be in until about two o'clock. Can I help you? Now, this is where I ended up at a intersection of divine intervention and a little degree of willingness because she began to kind of strip me down with questions. And she says, well, what do you think we ought to do? And I said, well I think I might ought to dust my seat off and get back on the horse. She goes, that's not working. We think you need to go to an inpatient treatment center. Now that's the last thing I want to do because either that or I'll lose control. I got to give up. I can't do this. Merrill Lynch will find out. Parents will be disappointed. My wife, I mean, she thinks I'm still sober. I'm trying to fake it out to her. least i think she thinks i'm still sober she wants to think that i'm still sober or at least i'm trying i said well you know what gail i can't go to treatment anytime soon because i have no idea now this was back when they advertised a lot to these places i need to go do some shopping for a treatment center she goes well we've got one picked out for you i go really i go which one she goes the care unit she says my my boyfriend is the uh and he is a harley h was a recovering alcoholic in a addictionologist and a psychiatrist he's on staff there and that's a wonderful place for you to go yeah that's good but i can't go anytime soon because see i'm without a car when i was in the pharma business i had a company car but now that i would that we're down to one car i mean you know i wasn't really making a lot of money yet at merrill lynch she was putting all the bills working at uams the hospital and so i'm i'm just kind of like borrowing her car i drop her off at work and then i go do my thing just selfish self-centered and so i said my dad's restoring a 65 mustang that he's going to let me have and i'm gonna have to go back to east arkansas this weekend it was thursday and pick up that car she goes you're the luckiest guy now you don't need a car in treatment but uh i knew i'd get her with this one i said well you know gail i really appreciate it but merrill lynch thinks i'm at the office or you know at ulr studying and i can't just up and go do this what you're talking about she goes oh yeah yeah you can't she goes i'm an administrator that deals with hr and all you have to do is pack it back i'll call their hr and matter of fact we will we'll get that all worked out when i left there that day i made a decision to go all i had to do was pack a bag and walk through the door but i leave this outpatient treatment center i go back to merrill lynch to get more stuff before i went home to pack a bag and i remember having this feeling come out and over me like probably for the first time i had surrendered at that moment to this thing and i felt a freedom that i hadn't felt in a while and when i walked through that treatment center that night i was so happy to be there and i'll tell you why because when you're running hard and you get a clean bed and somebody's going to take care of you and you're going to get to go through kind of a medical detox and you've been running a marathon and you finally get to stop. I was so happy in that first week to stop second week it all came roaring back made the worst mistake I'd ever made I'm too young for this these folks don't know what they're doing I can't believe they got us going around to all these different classes. Third week, something changed. I'm going to be an alcohol drug treatment counselor. I had gone to a couple of AA meetings. I saw people cry in these therapy sessions. They were working with this. I'd even actually got recommended to be group team leader. And I was in the running between me and this other person. They ended up getting it, and I think it was kind of a hoax. But that group team leader got to lead all the other patients to the hospital to get dinner instead of having it in the service, in the unit. So that was the key thing for the group team. But I was vying for it. You know, I was campaigning. But I wasn't on fire. You know? This guy named Columbus, beautiful man, brought meetings in every Sunday night by himself. And I would listen to the people talk all day. they had great information on on the you know alcoholism and all the things that you learn in treatment he brought recovery in and the one thing that he kept saying is that whenever you get out of here the very first thing you need to do is get to an aa meeting because i really didn't think i was an alcoholic i thought i had probably more problems with drugs but i'm talking to my counselor one day and she goes have you ever had any real major problems with alcohol i go well what do you mean she goes like with the law i said well i've had a dui but two the other two i got out of she goes you've had three duis i go no i've only had one the other too i got outta she goes man just by the way you say it my radar goes up you might be an alcoholic and need to to go away well i ended up in aa on thanksgiving day in november of 1987 and i remember being maybe 15 people there and i thought this is not too bad you know it's not a very i mean nobody's going to know who i am this isnot that crowded but all i remember is come back tomorrow i came back on that friday there were about 100 people at wolf street and i remembered they asked if there's anybody here doing I raised my hand and they turned the meeting toward me and I heard what I kept hearing was don't take the first drink keep coming back but there was something there I felt a part of you know how I've been chasing something around the corner I wasn't chasing that day I felt like there was a seat for me I didn't think I was an alcoholic Like, I didn't catch alcoholism until I got here because I had to learn what it was. And it was by going to meetings in that city that gave me enough grace where God came in and expelled the obsession. There was one time that I knew I was going to drink. And I'd heard what you need to do is call somebody before you drink. And I never would call on all the other times that I had been going before I got to treatment. but this time I called somebody and he talked me into going to a 5 30 meeting and if I wanted to drink after that meeting then I could and that son of a gun took me to dinner that night and then back to an eight o'clock meeting and I woke up the next morning not wanting to drink and I remember that like that was yesterday but this is my early two or three four months into aa and i'm sitting monday night at joe mcquain's uh meeting at wolf street and for the first time i heard my problem because i thought my problem was her i thought it was the money i thought i drank too much i thought you know i needed a better job i needed to get licensed to sell whatever that i thought I needed was my problem so i was constantly working on a solution to that problem he hit me between the eyes because it had been talked about before but it came right out of the doctor's opinion with the allergy and the obsession in step one he talked about being powerless he didn't even talk about being an alcoholic but he talked about being powerless over alcohol but because of the allergy we can't afford to put alcohol in our body because we will crave the next drink and the next drink and that's fundamental and it's elementary because if we never took the first drink we would be okay. Our main problem centers in our mind because I have a mind, a peculiar mental twist that somewhere some way it triggers a thought that it's okay to take that first drink so for the body that can't take the first drink if you didn't put it you're okay so don't take but i had a mind that couldn't keep from doing what the body couldn't take and so therefore i was totally screwed i was powerless and i felt that that night and thank god he came right back with if the problem is powerlessness then the solution is in step two it's in a power greater than ourselves and just like a doctor does a diagnosis then he in step one then he writes a prescription in step two and then he hands the prescription to the patient in step three and says are you are you going to decide to go to the pharmacy and get that prescription filled and it's going to the pharmacy that steps four through nine that we take action and we take the medication and then we begin to have we begin to see an effect and so that kind of drove me into getting a sponsor because i hadn't gotten one by this point and listening to what they said and i ended up getting a guy that had somewhere around that same time written on the back of his business card if you want we have what we have treatment centers are great for getting you sober but aa is about keeping you sober and being useful purposeful and whole if you want that here's what you do you get a sponsor number one number two you find aa meetings that are in the literature that work the steps that show you how to work the program so that number three you have a spiritual experience based on the steps a relationship with the power greater than yourself so number four you don't take the first drink and then number five you begin to give that away he was the first guy that never said don't think the first drink keep coming back he said work the steps work the program and have an awakening so that you can keep from taking the first ring and i ended up getting that guy later uh maybe a couple weeks or a month or so after that to be my sponsor so i i kind of started out um fairly early but in pretty in-depth step work and i i love what the 12 and 12 says you know it says in the foreword aa's 12 steps are a group of principles spiritual in their nature which if practiced as a way of life can expel the obsession to drink and here's the second promise and enable the sufferer to become happily and usefully hope so I went about for the next number of years just cashing in on that first that first promise of not take expelling the obsession of taking the first drink to see what happened for the last three years and he was trying hard in 10 11 and 12 for me but i was staying with the you know inventory a little bit calling uh getting into a little bit of six and seven but six and to me didn't mean a whole heck of a lot it meant same way i did the royal baptist church when you sin you prayed for forgiveness and then you go back out there the next day and do whatever you're doing so you take an inventory of these defects and you ask god to remove and then you go back out the next day and do whatever you're doing because see by the time i'm three and four years sober i kind of began to get my rights back i began to try to build the life at 30 29 28 27 well so right between 31 i'm trying to build a life that i thought i'd lost that i thought aa was giving me so i just began to kind of switch from i'm not drinking to now i'm using control i want to control my environment i want to keep my internal thermostat at about 68 70 degrees all the time so then i begin to look outside of me to how do i become the actor who wants to run the show forever trying to arrange the lights the ballet and i'm kind don't you see that if you would just listen i could help you and i could sell you on these things and i went about kind of crafting that message and living that kind of life and having people come up say man you're a great guy i began doing well at work i got back in the pharmaceutical industry i had left merrill lynch and ended up landing back in pharmaceuticals did not think that would ever happen matter of fact i had interviewed and got down to the finer interview two or three times and got passed over on another candidate and did not think i was ever going to get back in and just kind of got downhearted about it and ended up having a recruiter call me on an interview in memphis i was living in little rock that it was on a friday afternoon the interview was going to be at three o'clock and our our big meeting was 5 30 on fridays and it was juicy it was so much drama and chaos and excitement you didn't want to miss that friday 5 30 meeting and i told my sponsor i think i'll call the recruiter and see if he'll move that to monday he goes you're going to that interview because i had been complaining about not working nobody would hire me well i ended up you know getting through those interviews and i'm on a plane i didn't think i was going to get the job because now i've got to be honest according to aa i got to be honest on these applications if they ever asked me if i had a problem with alcohol or drugs yeah i come from pretty strict day well you got to Be honest well hell i don't want to be honest i'm not going to get that job kids united fly from from little rock to memphis and memphis to philly on the memphis to phillie flight i'm seated there we get 10 000 feet in this guy in front of me just pulls back his seat just pushes it back and that kind of ticked me off but then he opens up a big book of aa and he begins reading it and i just tap him on the shoulder and what's great about it is i you know got to go up and talk with him and i remember him saying a couple of things and i asked him about what he would do and he said he would be honest so it's the same thing that the people in little rock were telling me i get down on my knees that night and i told god i said said, God, I don't know. Just help me to be honest tomorrow. This is you. I end up going in for the interview, did fine, ended up going to the doctor office to get the physical. And I remember this guy, this, you know, the doc coming in and began asking me questions. And here it comes. And he started out with, am I a smoker? No, I'm not a smoger. Do you take any prescription drugs? No. I don't take any prescription drugs. Well, surely you drink. How many drinks do you have a week? And I go, I don t drink. And so the next thing I know, he says, you're going to make a great employee. So that kind of situation where God has been leading me along, I kind of feel at times, particularly in recovery today, that I'm being led, that i'm being done because I've landed in a, in a group that's very big book based. It's very spiritual based. That's very what are we doing today in recovery? I love the name of your group serenity improvement because you know, as I walked through all of those years of sobriety, I still chased a lot of the things outside, but I think what I'm looking at, I mean, Chuck Chamberlain said it well, what we're looking for, we're looking with discover yourself everything else has been taken care of and i'm not talking about the ego self because aa talks a lot about getting out of yourself and i believe that means getting out the ego itself and getting into the true self getting into the divine within deep down within every man woman and child is a fundamental idea of god i love in the uh in the appendix spiritual experience it talks about we tapped into an unsuspecting inner inner resource so that is within me that flows everywhere but if i can take that pea size of a higher power inside and grow it through the through the practice and the application and the study of the spiritual principles within the steps then that pea size will grow and my need to want to live outside of me for people places and things to fill the hole in the soul that disappears automatically i spent time trying to get rid of the outside things without nourishing the inside it's the nourishing of the inside things that ends up removing the need for the outside things and service is a big part of that i can't begin to stress you know the principle in step 12 of being able to help others because it's through that it's the we it's the connection um because i i believe once again what's been shared with me my job is to go out there and help other people god's job is to take care of me and i can share with you in these what 30 some odd years that's never not been the case it's only when i've gone out there to try to get mine first that i've ended up with the pain short-term gain long-term pain but if i'm willing to go through short- term pain the game is really long so i might be coming up on the time here and so i just want to say to to the group here out of east tennessee but all over the country how much i appreciate the opportunity to share with you tonight and to be a part of your group so and diana once again thank you for giving me the opportunity appreciate it