Step 4 Wasn’t a List of People I Hurt — It Was Finding Out Why I’m a Selfish Son of a B*tch – Glenn S.

Hey everybody, let's have an AA meeting. My name is Tim and I'm 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 stories describes 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 of bad taste. Our hope is that many alcoholic men and women in our room tonight, listening later on aabluechipspeakers.org, desperately in need, will hear our speaker. And we believe it is only by fully disclosing, our speaker, and our problems, that any of us shall be persuaded to say, yes, I'm one of them too. I must have this. I've gotten to know Glenn, who's our speaker tonight, pretty good. We're together most Saturday mornings at a meeting at 7.30. Our speaker last week, that's her home group also. And it was a coincidence that we got two back-to-back fresh air speakers, but we definitely got great sobriety up there. Glenn's an excellent example. I really appreciate him taking time out of his busy schedule. Thanks for coming and doing the deal. Thank you, Tim. Thank you for doing this. Hi, my name is Glenn Smith, and I'm an alcoholic and an addict. Tim, thanks for inviting me to come up here. It helps a tremendous deal to talk about the past, what happened, and what it's like now. That's what it's all about. My sobriety date is January the 15th. It's the 24th of 2007, so I just celebrated 10 years. Life is immeasurably better than it was, because I was really a dead man walking at that point. I guess the best way is just to go back and start when I first had a drink. I was born and raised in Atlanta, right over by Chastain Park. I can't say anything about my childhood, except good things. Great parents, love in the household. I never heard my dad raise his voice to my mom. I'm sure he did to me, and I just heard it, but basically it was the Cleavers. We had great grandparents always involved. My parents to this day always tell us they love us any time we see them. Everything was really special. There was alcohol in the house, but it was never really abused that I can remember. I know I've never seen my mom drunk, and maybe I've seen my dad have a few too many back in the day, but there was never anything in that household that would influence me to get to the place I went. Going through high school like anybody else, I probably started drinking when I was 15 or 16. Stole liquor out of the cabinet just because it was cool. It was just like what everybody did. You find beer, and as you get older, up into your teens, it was drug, sex, and rock and roll. We wanted to listen to music. We wanted to chase girls, and that's just basically what you did. I would say that from an early time on, I liked it as much as anybody. I liked getting drunk. It wasn't out of hand at that point, and we were still in high school. But as I went off to college, where it became more prevalent, and even though the drinking wasn't every day, over those four years, and I've met some of my greatest friends to this day, but I was introduced to pot pretty much in college. My name was around in high school, but I wasn't interested. And by the time I got to college and I got involved in that too, I was pretty much a pothead for about 17 years, along with the booze. But going back to college, we worked hard, but we played harder. We did what we had to do to get by. But I would say that at any given party, if I wasn't the drunkest or most messed up person there, I deserved honorable mention. I mean, I was always out there. And but that was it seemed harmless at that time. I mean, that was just whatever it seemed like everybody else was doing. I mean, we were just, you know, if you're going to parties, you're going to get drunk and you're going to do any drugs that came across. And if it was there, I was not afraid of it. You know, getting through that four years and then a lot of a lot of different friends would, you know, go off and were going to get jobs and know I wanted to go out west. I wasn't done. So I met up with a buddy and went out west for that summer. And it was just, you know, it was the endless road trip to California. The party didn't stop. But at that point, it was it just still seemed like it was just we're just having fun. I mean, that was and we were I mean, I look back on that time actually finally, even though we were behaving like idiots and I was planting the seeds for what was going to come decades later. But, you know, after about a year and a half in California, once I got there and then I called my parents and said, well, I'm going to move, I'm going to come back to Atlanta. But I said, on the way, I'm going to stop in the Rockies because some other friends are living out there and I'm going to stop and go fly fishing for a couple of weeks. And then I'm going to come on back to Atlanta. And so I stopped there and I stayed two and a half more years. And I was working in a restaurant out there that was it was not only the place that I worked. It was the place that everybody hung out and it was the place that really the serious problems started to develop. There were drugs. There was it was a constant. I mean, there was drinking on the job if you chose to. It was it. But once again, it was just it was just fun. I was twenty three, twenty four, twenty five years old just having the time of my life. But and actually, after a couple of years there, even by my standards, I had enough. I could. And that was actually the first time when I was out there in Colorado that I went to an AA meeting because I started to cave. Things started to go. I was I was losing control and I would go, you know, weeks at a time without slowing down and and I went to the my boss at the time and said, I need help. I need to stop. I need to stop living like this. And so I went to talk to a therapist that they sent me to. And then a couple of friends took me to AA and that was my first experience with it. Well, I think. I went to two meetings and everything we talked about. They I was I was young and I was just, you know, they were talking about God. And I saw all these people that were happy to be there and I wasn't. But I ended up surprisingly staying sober for like five months. I mean, I just I just was thinking, OK, it's summer and I'm out here in the Rockies and I'm going to work out and I'm going to get in shape. Well, that was great. And then the next winter came around and I got right back into the same old habits. And a couple of months later, I finally did. I left. And came on back to Atlanta, moved in with some some good friends from high school and in college. And the drinking continued. But, you know, none of the other extracurricular stuff was around. But over that same period, over about the next year and a half. And this is now into the early 90s, 91, 90 or 91. I got to be wise within about seven months. But no, the first one and the second one, I kind of weaseled out of it cost me a lot of money. But it never occurred to me that I had an alcohol problem. I mean, you get to be wise and so on. Maybe the problem was me, but it never even that didn't slow me down a bit. It was like I'm just not being careful. The first one, I ran a red light and the second one, I had a tail light out. And I just thought you're just dumb. You did. You did stupid things. Never. But you should have been drinking and driving or you shouldn't have been in that situation in the first place. So, you know, I actually had a. I had a good job in Atlanta working for a restaurant company and had a career change, and at that time I met my future wife and we fell in love. And it was it was a whirlwind courtship after really just a couple of months. And I had a career change and a job offering in Orlando, Florida. So two of us having known each other for literally we had mutual friends going back since high school days, but after about two and a half months, we up and back up a U-Haul and she quit her job and we moved to Orlando, Florida. And if you've never done something like that and you've never even shared a bathroom with somebody you had known for two months, you get to know somebody really quickly. And fortunately, it it was wonderful. It worked. And we had a great three years down in Florida together. You know, the drinking continued, but it was controlled. You know, she would she would say now probably that she was an enabler even from the beginning. And I. Just say, no, that's not true. There's nothing anybody in that situation can do. Now, anything you're going to try, I was going to shut it down. And that and that went on for, gosh, 15 more years. But we ended up we had a great time in Orlando. I ended up getting a job and moving back to Atlanta to work for our family business. And so we moved back here in ninety five. And at some point during that, you know, it's it's slowly but surely it's cunning, baffling, powerful. Everything we talk about in here is all true because, you know, we're going out to bars and we weren't going out to drink. But at some point in that transition is when I started buying the Jagermeister bottle and put it in my own freezer or buying a big handle of bourbon and having all the liquor that I needed right in the house, where if I get home from work, we don't have to go out to a bar. We're not just I'm just not going to grab a beer. I'm going to go get a tumbler and just start pouring straight liquor and chasing it or whatever. It you know, it I can't even say it crept up on me. It just it was just boom. It was just there. And that started mid nineties all the way up to ninety eight. We were back here in Atlanta and our twin daughters were born in ninety eight. And I remember the night they were born, they were preemies and they were almost eight weeks early, less than three pounds at birth. And my wife's water broke. It about two o'clock in the morning and I passed out drunk at about ten thirty. And she had to wake me up in a stupor to drive to Northside Hospital for my for my kids to be born. And I was drunk. I can't get those back. You know, I just you can't. But you know what? Looking back on it and that was that they're almost nineteen years old back then, I didn't give it a second thought, feel guilty about it for about five minutes. It's just that's fine. You know, everything's going to be great. Well, girls were born. We ended up moving out to Alpharetta. You know, we're just we're happy family. Everything's fine. Drinking did not slow down one bit once my kids were born. I mean, you got little kids, little preemies with heart monitors on around the house and I was drinking every day, just never slowed down. We ended up moving out to Alpharetta and I was commuting back and forth into into Buckhead every day to work some point along the way. Got to where I'd sometimes stop, pick up beer on the way home just to drive that hour through that traffic while I'm just sitting in. I'm parked on four hundred anyway. There's differences to make if I'm drinking a beer. This is just the whole pickled thinking. And, you know, I think that that was 20 years ago almost. Anyway, back in 03, move forward and the girls are there now in preschool. And I had a job offer to move to Alabama, to Decatur, Alabama, and so we it was a good opportunity for me at the time. So we packed up the girls in preschool and left the grandparents and left everybody and moved to Alabama where we again didn't know anybody. But I had a good job and it was a it was the cost of living is very inexpensive over there. And it was a great place to raise kids. We really we really enjoyed being there. But once again, the drinking, I brought it with me. It continued to escalate. And if I can, you know, I'm just trying to fast forward two times over that period of from 03 to about 05, I started to embarrass myself publicly. I get, you know, we'd be at parties and I'd be, you know, it's one thing if you're in college and you're the drunkest person there. But when you're 40 years old or close to it and you're staggering around a cocktail party where nobody else has had but one glass of wine, you're just making an ass of yourself. And I did that repeatedly. And to the point that my wife, you know, obviously she had requested multiple times, you know, please, will you talk to somebody, please, will you try to stop? This is affecting our marriage. This is affecting the girls. This is, you know, the Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde thing. I don't know who's going to come out once you start drinking. And I just completely blew it off. I mean, I remember having a marriage counselor that we had calls with and met with, and she would flat out ask me and say, you know, she's asking you about your drinking. And I would say, well, that's fine, but there's no way I'm going to stop drinking. I must define about it. And I look back on those things again and can't get that back. So over those couple of years, and this is like 2005 or so, finally, for all the right reasons and God bless her, my wife had had enough. And she said, we're done. I'm out. I, you know, I can't live. I can't live with you anymore. I don't love you anymore. You're you're hurting yourself. You're hurting me. You're hurting your friends. You know, you name it. And this is just not working. You know, I don't want to be married to you anymore. And, you know, at the time it was very upsetting and having to tell your basically first grade kids that you're getting a divorce. They understand that. And at the same time, it was emotional. It was emotional for all of us. But you know what? I didn't care. I really didn't. I mean, I just thought to hell with it. I'm going to get a place of my own and I can do what the heck I want to do. I was actually kind of excited about it. So we ended up at that point when you started thinking, OK, we're going to have to get I'm going to have to get an apartment. We sold the house, bought them another house. We had no money. I mean, a good job. We had no money because I'm a drunk and I pissed everything away. That's just what I do. So. I go off living by myself and over the course of the next from somewhere around 05 to 07, those two years were where I really became one from amateur status to a real professional drunk. I and I should have mentioned to those last couple of years, even when we were married and together, I that's also when I was I was hiding liquor. I mean, I wear boots to work every day. I have for two decades and a half pint fits really snugly right inside these boots. When you walk in the house and you've got a half pint in each boot along with booze hitting around the house, I mean, I had every conceivable way to hide it so that I could get away with it. But once I lived alone, if I was so I became completely paranoid. I mean, I was drinking all the time. I would imagine I'm living alone, but I would still think. And nobody ever came over. Because nobody knew where I was or nobody cared. I mean, I go to work and I still actually was still working really hard, but I was drinking harder and I was hiding liquor in my own apartment. I would get a gallon bottles of vodka and pour it into water bottles and pitch the liquor bottles and mark the water bottle and had them like under the bed or in the I mean, just I can't even rationalize how I did that or why. But. Now, granted, I had always had one in my desk at work. I, you know, I would still go pick my girls up and take them to the bus every morning when they weren't staying with me, which was becoming more and more more less frequent than ever, because there was several times when I would have the girls and my wife would call and I wouldn't answer the phone. And I mean, honestly, she would call in a weekend. I'm supposed to have to come over and I'd be just passed out on the couch. Girls are running around my den in my apartment. She just take them rightfully. You should have, you know, looking back on it to me, I guess it was as bad as it gets. But it still didn't. I still didn't see that. I had, you know, I knew I had a problem, but I wouldn't do anything about it. And I wanted everybody to leave me alone. And I wasn't being included. I hear about weddings or I hear about hunting weekends with all my buddies that I've known since forever. And I wasn't included. Nobody invited me. And then the defiance kicks in like assholes. They want me to. What's their problem? Well, they didn't want me around. It's just it's reality. And I don't blame them. So came to the fall of 2006 and over the course of those few months, things really started to spiral. I mean, you know, it's progressively deadly disease and it just I couldn't stop and I knew I couldn't stop. And we got around to the Christmas and New Year's that year and I should I should have done to rewind to go back to that. That fall, that August was also my 40th birthday. And this is another thing that I regret to this day. I remember I came into Atlanta and went to dinner to a nice dinner with my parents. And, you know, we were going to go to dinner. I was staying in town. They offered to stay up, stay with us. Oh, no, I want to stay in a hotel because I wanted to drink and do what I want to do. I didn't even want to be at their house and spend the night because I couldn't get away with what I knew was wrong. But we went to dinner and I showed up at dinner at this. And I was drunk. And I remember my mom sitting there at my 40th birthday dinner and she's crying. And. I want to do is get out of there. I just wanted to get out of there and go back to the bar. You know, I. I can't reconcile that, but anyway, fast forward to that to around Christmas that year and everything was just falling apart. And at that time, my my body was my my midsection was extended and I could it's so strange that I'm sure other people when I've talked about it before, it felt the same thing, but it's almost like I could feel my organs working and I could feel cramps and it wasn't like a muscle cramp. It was things were not good. It was not healthy. And I really thought we had a friend that a couple of months earlier that I'd known since high school who passed away of addiction, evidently laying on the couch with a remote control. And I kept thinking on that and I thought, you know, so at the very end, didn't matter who I'd heard before or what I had done or anything. I was so friggin selfish. I was just worried about my own death. I was where I just didn't want to die. And that was and so that was finally what kicked it in. I wouldn't think about anybody with myself even to the very end. But I. I went to I got drunk again again one night and I thought, hey, I thought I called some different friends that I'd grown up with. They were in the program and they were sober for years. And they kept telling me, dude, you know, you just need it. I mean, we don't know what to tell you. We're there for you, but you need to go to AA. You need to go. So I went to this meeting. It was about an eight o'clock at night meeting drunk. I couldn't hardly stand up. And I walked in there and these two guys were like, hey, buddy, why don't you? They asked me back into the Al-Anon room. And these two really kind people sat there and told me they wanted to help me. And I said, I told them I was different and they didn't know what they were talking about. And, you know, I'm sort of thinking you're the one that came here. You're obviously looking for something. But anyway, they ended up driving me home and they said, no, they said they wanted to drive me home. And of course, I refused. But I only lived like ironically, my apartment was like literally a block and a half from an AA hall. And there was God speaking to me. I just didn't know about the future. But anyway, they they followed me home. And I went inside that night and that was January 4th, 2007. And I don't know what it was. I don't know why then, but I just I started crying. I was just I was so miserable. My life was completely falling apart. And I knew I don't know something this quick. This is all your damn fault. Everything you've done is your own fault, please. And I was telling myself, just get help, just get help. So I went to the fridge and I just pulled the beer out, pulled every bit of liquor I could possibly have and just dumped it down the sink. And I sat there all night crying. And about five o'clock in the morning, I got on the phone and called my my wife. My wife and I had never gotten divorced because we couldn't afford divorce. We had been separated for two years, living completely separate lives, except for trying to jointly raise our kids or trying to because my addictions wouldn't really let me do what I needed to do. And that's a horrible thing to say. It was all me. I'm blaming it on addiction. It's not. It's my fault. Anyway, I called my family, I called my boss, I called anybody that would listen to me. Five o'clock in the morning, I called my brother who's here tonight, who was kind enough to drive all the way from Atlanta to Decatur, Alabama, to pick my sorry ass up and take me to a rehab place in Nashville, Tennessee, which is exactly where I needed to be. Another friend had helped me. And um, so that was how I got there. You know, it was it was I was in a completely desperate state. I knew nothing. I had no spiritual life. I had no social life anymore. I had no loving. I had so many people who loved and cared about me that I pushed away and all because I wanted it was it was my agenda. You know, when we talk about it being a disease of self, I was completely self absorbed in it. And for really 20 years, if I'm honest about it. So I was in rehab and like anybody else, put me in detox. They were surprised when I got there because they by the next afternoon and they checked me out, gave me the test and said, you're not drunk. Everybody comes in here is drunk. Like, no, I'm not. But I'm in the right place. And, you know, two days and I woke up and thought, oh, my gosh, what have I done? But at the same time, I need. I needed that padded room. I needed I needed to be away. And I knew even looking back on as much as a has helped save my life at that stage. I needed to go away. So went to rehab and came out 30 days, you know, obviously, like anything else, this, you know, alcoholism, you can take somebody the worst off and give them a week without booze. You feel a lot better. I mean, you know, you've just physically I was just like, man, I feel like a million bucks, but knowing there was there was strangely enough, there was a finality to it. I don't know if it was something about finally just coming out and saying it to my family and friends that I'm an alcoholic and an addict and I need I need help. So I didn't I wouldn't craving it even when I came out of rehab. You know, I've heard people many people say, guys, the first thing they think is I just want to hit a liquor store. I didn't. The thought of that was just, no, I really don't want to do that. So like they told us for the first, you know, the first 90 days, I bet I went to one hundred and fifty meetings. I mean, if I wasn't at work, I was going to AA meetings. But about those first two months. I was absolutely miserable. I was not, you know, we'd read the big book and at rehab, but I was going to all these meetings, but I didn't have a sponsor. I didn't know anything about the steps. I wasn't doing anything that I was supposed to do except showing up to meetings and relationships were not restored. And, you know, I'd read the steps and all I thought was nice. Yeah, I need to go tell everybody how sorry I am. I mean, and I tried that a few times and it was not well received. And it was all about, you know, but I promise I'm not going to, you know, I was absolutely miserable. I mean, I, I, I felt in my mind that I was worse off than I was when I was drinking. So, like I said, I couldn't I couldn't sleep at night. I went saw two different shrinks thinking they were going to find the answers. And, you know, having no idea that all the answers I needed were right there in the big book in front of me, all I had to do was follow these simple suggestions, but you couldn't have told me that at that time. I am. Like I said, I've lived right near the hall and I was I couldn't sleep at night and I was still having the drinking dreams, but the vivid I mean, because for those last few years, the dreams were just awful. I mean, people that aren't alcoholics don't understand. You know, when you think about if you're a fan of if you have hobbies, then you dream about those hobbies. But I dreamed about drinking. I mean, it was just vivid. I would I would wake up and anything I was doing had a bottle in it. And it was in a wake up and like cold sweats. So the the stairway group in Decatur, Alabama, has a five thirty a.m. meeting every morning of the week. And I'm an early riser. And plus, at that time, I wouldn't sleep in anyway. So I was like I was like five thirty in the morning. I'm going to go to a meeting. And well, this group was four or five old timers. I mean, guys with, you know, minimum 15 years sobriety up to about 40. And I and for several weeks I would go and you're in a small table. There's not that many people there. And I'd sit on the other side of the room and wouldn't say anything. Just keep my head down. But I was I was kept thinking, I'm there, I'm in a meeting. But these very kind gentlemen that were there over a period of time, including my future sponsor, Eddie, you know, after a while, Glenn, why don't you why don't you come over here? Join us. Why don't you come over here? And we'd love to hear what you might have to say. And, you know, over time, I slowly would come over to their table. And of course, it took it took several weeks. But slowly I started to listen to what they had to say. And, you know, I was still miserable. It wasn't because I wasn't drinking. It was just because I thought if I just quit drinking, everything's going to be great. And it just wasn't. I mean, life was still there and I was still broke and I was still divorced and living in this crappy apartment. And I felt like everybody owed me something. But I wanted to make I want everybody to forgive me for all these things that I've done. I was really textbook over time. This really took about three months, but I finally was one in one day to one of my best friends who had helped me get me into treatment. And, you know, I was like, well, this isn't right. This isn't right. And he said he's like, well, you dumbass, do you have a sponsor yet? I was like, no. He's like, well, then you know what you need to do? You just need to go get drunk. You need to go. You are not done yet. You need to go get hammered. You need to go. I think you just need to go buy a case of booze and go hold up in your apartment. And I got mad at him. I was like, what the hell are you talking about? That's crazy. He goes, you just are not with program when you're not you're not doing anything you're supposed to be doing, you don't have a sponsor. You're not praying. You're not reading the big book. You're not. You know, you're going to meetings. So what? Listen to you, listen to yourself. And he was absolutely right. Well, so sure enough, the next morning I asked Eddie to be my sponsor and went another about three weeks and I felt so good about myself. I called my buddy and said, I have a sponsor now. He was like, he's like, so what? He said, you got to keep the ball rolling. You know, you don't you're just you're so proud of yourself. You know, because you ask somebody who doesn't even know anything about you yet to be your sponsor. But anyway, Eddie was what he is. One of the kindest people I've ever known, because he was very patient. And he would say, you know, why don't you come on over my house and let's go read through the big book. We need to start step one. And then and I'd say, OK, so over the next few weeks we did, we got to step four and then roadblock, of course, like anybody else. I put that one off for actually not as long as you would think about a month. And he would kindly ask me, you know, during this time, he was really taking the time. Even after that morning meeting, I was still on every morning at five thirty. It became a habit. It was it was like I really enjoyed it. I felt like I started to feel a part of something. And, you know, slowly but surely, things it's things started to change. I don't know how to explain it. It's that once once we did the four step together and I started doing a real introspection about not just who I'd hurt, but why. It wasn't just listing those people that I'd hurt. It was thinking, why? Well, because you're a selfish son of a bitch. I mean, it comes right down to that. You know, over the years, when people have asked me that think they might have a problem with alcohol and one thing, anything that I tell somebody else about alcoholism or AA or anything that they're asking, I don't have a single original thought on it. There's nothing I know that I haven't heard from you people in these rooms or my sponsor. That's it. Or read in the big book. It's you know, I don't have an original thought on anything to do with addiction. But then somebody had told me this before years when we talk about the chemical addiction of alcohol and yes, towards the end, I was shaking so bad all the time that I had to have, you know, I had to drink vodka so that I could hold my hand steady enough for that half gallon of vodka into a water bottle. That's a little hole, you know, but I couldn't do it. So it. The chemical addiction was there, but when people ask me about their problem with alcohol and I say, well, let me ask you a question, because it was asked of me before. You know, yes, you develop a chemical addiction, but it's a disease of self, first and foremost, and if and I ask people, I say, have you ever had a time in your drinking life when a family member or a friend or anybody that cares about you has come and said, hey, you know what, I'm concerned. You know, I think you're drinking or partying too much. And it's you know, it's it's unsettling to me. I don't think it's healthy, whatever they say. They're telling you they love you and they think you might have a problem and you want to do something about it. If that's ever happened to you and you blew it off. That's the disease of self right there. And I had it full fledged. I mean, I you know, because that happened to me many times over the years. Well, long before I had this serious chemical addiction, it was all about me. And I had to realize that when I did the fourth step and that all these things that I've done and you know, I wasn't a violent drunk, but, you know, unintentionally, you know, hurt people emotionally, just not caring about what they thought. And, you know, my kids, I can't tell you how many times I drove into the school bus drunk. I mean, little preschoolers. And I did it and I justified it or I didn't think anything of it at the time. But I mean, I don't know. I look back on it now and, you know, it makes me cringe. But at the same time, you know, it is what it is. Fortunately, having worked the steps through my sponsor and over the over the period of the next year or so, life changed. I mean, things got better through obviously through marriage counseling. But even after being separated for a couple of years, my wife and I do the fact that I could finally I could be reasoned with. And I started to learn just from, you know, there's nothing. Of course, I would I would want to do my sponsor about different things with marriage. And he would say, you know, there's a there's a chapter in there, the chapter that the family after Glenn, he said, I'm not a marriage counselor. But we read that book. I mean, he was very clear about the fact that he was not going to give me any advice about that. But sure enough, we were able to work things out, which is a success story that I'm lucky in that regard. It took a lot of communication. It took a lot of sacrifice on her part to give me another chance. But I can say today she's my best friend. We communicate. You know, it's been you know, we've been back together. Gosh, nine years. We took about a year of work for that, for you know, for us to really reconcile. But. It's an amazing thing. You know, I'll look back, you know, what is life like now? This program has taught me everything about how to live life, how to be happy with what I have, how to accept things, what it's like to help other people. You know, it's taught me patience. It's taught me communication. It's taught me how to love again and and to not think that I am totally in control. I had a really hard time early on. I'm not a really particularly religious person at all. So the whole God thing, like so many other people, it really kind of, you know, I was hesitant about that, about, you know, letting go and letting God, you know, always thinking, well, they're just preaching Jesus to me. And what I had other really wise, thoughtful people, you know, say, well, Glenwood, let's look at it this way. When you were when you were consumed with alcohol, when you were in the depths of alcohol, of active alcoholism, would you say that that alcohol was more powerful than you absolutely, of course it was. Well, you don't do that anymore. Well, no. And they say, well, then there's something out there more powerful than alcohol was like, that makes sense. Sure. Why don't you whatever that is? It's God. Think about it that way. That made perfect sense to me. It's like you absolutely I'd be dead now. I remember, I remember all the love. I remember all the cliches, you know, I'll forget things. And then somebody will bring something up, you know, a year after I've heard it. That's right. The other day, the whole, you know, poor me, poor me, poor me. Another drink. I mean, that one I was just I just crack up at that one. But there's so many, so many little phrases that that just catch me with this program and have really changed my life. And, you know, one actually four and a half years in the sobriety, five years into sobriety. I had another event happen. We were still living in Alabama and we reconciled and things were, you know, things were going really well. And I had a I actually had an interview for a job back here in Georgia and up in Gainesville where we live now. And I remember talking to my sponsor. I had not had an interview with any other company since then. But I thought I'm going over to meet these guys and I'm going to go talk to these, you know, senior management of this company. And I told him I asked my sponsor, I said, I should I need to tell him I'm an alcoholic. And he said, well, that's a personal decision. Some people want to keep it very private. It's nobody's business. But I thought I need to do that. I mean, and so when I went to that interview that day and I met with all these guys individually at different meetings and I said I looked in all their eyes and when they when they did the usual, you look at the resume and say, oh, go and tell us about yourself. And I said, well, you need to know that I'm a great and successful recovering alcoholic, which they told me later. They'd never had anybody in a job interview. And honestly, had I been six months sober, I never would have done that. But as it turned out, it was the right thing for me to do at the time because I just told him, look, if I'm lucky enough to get this job and it's a couple of years down the road or next week and we're at dinner and I order a glass of wine or playing golf and I order a beer or whatever. Whatever it is we're doing. That is a red flag you need to know about if I'm going to be your employee. And if that happens, I need to either be fired immediately or send me back to rehab. And they said, point taken, thanks for your transparency. And I got the job. So, you know, good things like that happen. And that's not to say that life is perfect. It's not to say that everything is always going to turn out the way I want it to because it doesn't. But you know what? I'm I'm happy today. I am genuinely a happy person. I can still do this. Listen to the same loud music as I did before. I can still go fishing. I can go hunting. I can do all the stuff that I love to do and be around my friends. Some of my friends, my nickname is Bluebird Glenn Uber, because I can drive people around and they want to do crazy stuff. I mean, I can leave and come and go as I please. You know, it's freedom is what it is. And it's it's just the most. Amazing gift. And I don't wouldn't know anything about living sober except for what I've learned in Alcoholics Anonymous. It is, you know, it helped get me to treatment. Help me help me sober up. But what it did most of all is it taught me about having a relationship with a power greater than myself with God. That's why, you know, my God has no gender or religious affiliation. But it is a being that saved my life. He keeps my family happy and me happy. I'm just grateful. That's that's really it. That's all I got. So I appreciate it. OK, I'm happy, joyous and free after that. Who's going to take a drink tonight? Don't raise your hand. Who's going to stay sober tonight? OK, remember, say your prayers might help. OK, Jim T. Would you please come up and give out the chips? They'll end up right. I'm Jim. I'm an alcoholic. Here we have chips to mark our time in sobriety. And the first trip we offer is the white chip. It's a sign that we don't want to drink the next 24 hours. Come on up with the morning and scared of the time. He doesn't got to worry. But when it's all said and done, he ain't even started. But he's already done. Now it's paging. Mr. Bitter party. Oh, there's no reason to get him full of liquor. No telling what he'll do. It's all gone away. But he keeps moving from moon to sun. It's paging Mr. Bitter of war all around him. Ain't got nobody. No wonder. Call his older. But not wiser. No one's fault, but his own. Mr. Bitter. Mr. Bitter.