Steps 1-12 by Beth B. (4.5hrs) – Part 3 of 2 – 2017 – Local AA Speakers

fall into place for me. And it was just amazing, and that's when I really started to think I could trust. I could trust a God that makes everything come together when you do the right thing. That's something I could try. And I thought, what do I have to do? So now things are going well for me for this first couple of years in sobriety, and And, you know, little by little things are getting better. I'm getting less, you now, left debt and I wasn't getting out of debt but less debt and, you kno, a little better in my personal life and starting to make friends and starting work the program and I started to think third step is cool, you know? And I did a fourth step and everything but then you know life has its way, right? good things don't always happen to good people. Sometimes bad things happen and so a bad thing happened to me and it was interesting how it happened, I mean it's kind of a very personal story but since you guys are hearing every personal detail in my life I might as well tell you. So I was in the rehab this one time and I was pregnant and I was working with the women and I started to feel pain and I didn't know what was happening turns that I was miscarrying and just like always in the right place at the right time that's a horrible horrible thing and I was middle term so it was a very very painful situation but it's funny because that the night before I had had a fight with my husband who was struggling in another 90-90 period that he struggled with and I have said to him why don't you come with me to the rehab in the morning and talk to this friend of mine that, you know, did the men's side of the commitment. And work with him and read the book with him, and that will be really good for you. And he said, no, you now, he's going over to Oaks and he's gonna make breakfast because they're having a celebration there. And I said, well, why don't you come to the meeting, come to me, and we had not a fight but, you kno, a disagreement, a very vocal disagreement. And so anyway, there I am and I don't know it at this moment, but I'm losing the baby. And I start walking down the stairs and I'm literally holding on to the railing. And I look down the bottom of the stairs. I was just about to fall down the steps from the pain. And there he is. And I thought, what are you doing here? And he said, no, I figured you were right. That was a miracle in itself that he thought I was right. But then he was there and we were in Secaucus and my doctor was in Manhattan, you know, how about ten minutes away? You know, had we had to come from Maplewood, now it's a half hour away. So, you Know, somehow I was exactly, now you'd say, oh that's terrible, right? But it was awful and I felt awful after the experience and, you know, when I came home later that day, I just felt like I wanted to die. I just felt like so awful about all the damage I did to my body over the years. I was starting to feel, like, all that guilt and shame, you know, that we feel. And, you Know, and I got, I must have gone out in the backyard and I didn't hear the phone ring. I came back in and there was a message from my sponsor who had been my early sobriety sponsor but who I hadn't seen in a couple of years. And she left me a message two words. She didn't say, hello, this is Kathy. As soon as the deep went, trust God. And I came in the room and I sat down and I just cried because I knew she was right. Because I knew everything was happening exactly as it was supposed to happen. And that if I wasn't supposed to have a baby, I wasn'T supposed to. And what can I do? Am I going to, you know, deal with life on life's terms and get a little, you know, because not worry about it. And so, you know, that was really when I started to learn the depth of where Step 3 took me. And finally, my last Step 3 story, and then I'll go on to the meaty stuff, is a number of years ago, I was in my second year of sobriety I think and I was at a job that was a very horrific painful job. I won't even describe the torture that I went through with this job but almost immediately when I got there I started to look for a new job and oh I was getting hundreds of resumes and going on interviews and, you know, it just seemed like every time I got something that I was close on, they'd say to me, oh, it's between you and one other candidate. And then the other candidate got the job. You know? I mean, I was like always the bridesmaid thing. And I was so frustrated and I came home at night crying and I just felt so alone and so left out. And I found myself on my knees one morning praying to get a particular job that I had done my fourth interview for the day before. And I was praying, please give me this job. I need this job so bad. And all of a sudden, I heard myself. And I thought, reliance not defiance, right? I have to trust that God will give me the job I'm supposed to get. Maybe it's not that one. And I caught myself in the middle, and I changed my prayer, and I said, if it be your will. And it changed my life that morning. And I went into work, and I just kept saying to myself, I will be done. I will be done, I will be done. And nothing happened that day and the next day I got a call from a headhunter they had a job interview for me in a different place. Ended up, I won't go into details but it ended up to be the job that I have today. The dream job. See I was praying for the wrong one and as soon as I caught myself praying for the wrong one, and I said just give me the right one, I got the right one. Amazing. And I don't know how that worked, but it worked for me, you know, and it was only, you now, in October 2001 that I realized that had I gotten and that job I was praying for, I'd have been on like the 85th floor of the Trade Center. Trade Center 1. And I thought, you know, why do I always think I know what's best for me when I've never known what's better for me? You know, what I know that's best for me is to keep showing up and accept whatever I'm given. And that's what I'm going to do. That's what's good. That's good enough. That's the way I know it's best for me. You know, the other thing about, you know, making a decision is I have to make the decision all throughout the day. Like, you make a decision. Like, I can say, you now, I decide I'm going to wear yellow tomorrow. You know? Big deal. Unless I actually pick out something yellow and put it on, right? And keep it on by the time I leave the house because I often change a couple times in the morning. But, you know, I mean, and step three is like that because I want to take my will back. And I just want to share a little poem that I had been given or I had read in rehab. And a lot of people probably heard it, but just in case anybody didn't. It goes like this. As children bring their broken toys with tears for us to mend, I brought my broken dreams to God because he was my friend. But then instead of leaving him in peace to work alone, I hung around and tried to help with wings that were my own. So finally I snatched them back. How can you be so slow? My child, he said, how could I help? We never let them go. So, you know, so that's what I have to do is all day. I have the key to putting my toys down. You know, and it's all about, you know, it's like, okay, I'm a lion. Okay, I am still the lion, you now, still the Lion because I want to be defiant, you know, I want slide back into that all the time. It's my nature, it is my nature. I want take charge, you kno, everything I was taught my whole life I have to keep saying it's not me, it' s not me it's God, Father do with the works. I have to do all those things, you know. So that's, you know, that's really what the third step is for me and there's also another book I read called The Course in Miracles and some of you may have come across it. It's got a lot of good stuff in it and there's a quote I always like, there's no strain in doing God's will as soon as you recognize that it's also your own. Yeah, yeah why am I always fighting you know so that's it and you know and so the next thing I got once I finally got step three which obviously took a long time. I got you know busy with step four and I started to write this inventory and you know first I didn't like the word moral inventory. I didn't like that, I didnít like the religion thing. I didní have a lot of background in that but I knew what I, what I knew I didn' like and I didn´t like the idea of judgment, you know, well itís not my fault, itís his fault and you know if you really break it down, you know he was not that great a person either, you And so I really had to kind of walk away from right and wrong and just say, you know, this is what happened. This was the behaviors and this was the behavior of the other person and, you know, how I felt about it and this is how I reacted to it because that's how it broke down for me. In the beginning I was, you know, I was a step-Nazi group so they told me to do the 12 and 12. And so the 12 and the 12 has a lot of questions especially about, you know, your sex life and it asks which sex situations have caused you anxiety or bitterness And I thought, don't they all? Do people have sex situations without anxiety and bitterness? I sure didn't. So I didn't really even know what to do with that question. But they asked a lot of questions like that. And I did the best I could. And I wrote down. I remember I gave it to my sponsor, this woman Kathy at the time. And she said, where's the women in this book? And then I had to go back and redo my whole story and think, why are there no women in my life? I have a mother and a sister. I don't even have any brothers, you know, who have a father. But you know why are they no women? Why are there are no women friends? And I realized how many people I push out of my life and you know I talked a little bit about this last week. And something I struggle with in sobriety is you know keeping people in my life that are not physically right in front of me. And, you know, recently I've actually been going through something because my sponsor moved three towns away. And we kind of like lost contact there for a while. And then I got to the point where I thought, I need to get a different sponsor. I even asked someone to be my sponsor. And just this last week I was thinking to myself, no, what I need to do is call my sponsor. I keep choosing a new one. So why don't you live three pounds away? We all drive, you know. And I really, you now, I have to change the patterns in my life. It's all about change, you kno. These steps, these work steps, you kow, the three through nine, it's all about change. And so, you gno, that wasn't working really well for me in my life. I never really had friends that knew me to the core because friends went in and out of my life for years, you know. And that's what I really had to find out from my fourth step. But, you Know, I had a lot of problems. In the big book it says, Selfishness, Self-Centeredness. That is the root of all our troubles. I thought, What do you mean? Not me. And, you know, I've only come to find out, you know, even in sobriety, not even sobriete, especially in sobriet how selfish I can be. You know? Now that I have all this great stuff and this great life and you know how selfish I can be. How I want to keep it. You know. And so I try to turn it to advantage and say well I want to keep too. You know, and so but I had to really get real about the selfish nature of my relationships with other people because that's where I always failed was in my relationship. And that's why I always drank because bottom line was the relationships were unfulfilling. I always knew I could count on the bottle. And the people were just unreliable for me, you know, and I had to really look at how unreliably they really were or was it my expectations or was I the unreliability one? You know and I have to go through each one of these people And that was deep and that was hard, and I had a lot of problems with that. And one of the gifts of the 12 in 12 book is the line where it says we had to drop the word blame. That's been one of gifts that takes me through every day because I want to blame people every day. All the time. You know, people, places and things. It's all of their fault. And you know if I didn't get here on time tonight it would have been New Jersey Transit. That's for sure. And so I still want to blame and so I have to, you know for a while I worked on forgiveness because I was told that I need to experience forgiveness to get peace. And I thought, I just can't do it. And so I worked on acceptance to get me there. You know, I said well I can't forgive that person but I can accept that they were who they were. And that was my first step towards forgiveness. And then the next step after accepting that they were who they were, was to stop blaming them for being who they were. And once I could drop the word blame and I accepted the person, forgiveness didn't even seem like a hard thing anymore. It was natural because there was nothing left. There was nothing else to forgive because then I started to see that I didn't have to forgive them, that God already forgave them. Why do I have to do that work? That's an awful lot of work. Why am I judging them? I just have to accept them for who they are, stop blaming them for my life, and let God forgive them. Wow. You know, I could do this. I could really do this, and I started to take responsibility for my wife. And I did that by telling somebody, right? So I finally read my fourth step and the fifth step. I didn't get back with my sponsor to do it because I really felt like urgent need and I couldn't get a hold of her. And I was on a retreat, and I did my fifth step with a priest by the name of Father Bernie. And he was so helpful to me. I grew up, like I said, with no religion of Jewish descent. And so I didn't have that kind of fear of priests, but I basically knew that priests were professional secret keepers. I was pretty sure of that, that good, bad or indifferent they didn't tell anybody secrets. And this was a priest that was in recovery and not only was he in recovery for alcoholism and various other things, but he was also a recovering mentally ill person. And he had a very, very wonderful, powerful story that I'll never forget. And he gave me so much hope that if he could go from where he had been to where he was, that I could also be healed. And so I told him my fifth step. I asked him, you know, would I be able to do that? And he said, yeah. And I told Shane. He gave me great guidance on it. And I thought, who did it? And, you know, I felt really good about that and I moved on to six and seven, you know like I suggested right away. And, kind of started going out and doing amends and we'll get into that next week. But, a number of years later, I started to, because I would always share this in meetings. I go to a step meeting every week. Being the step master that I am. And we read the 12 in 12 every week, and it always, when I get to step five, it always says a perfect stranger would be okay, you know. And so I always share how I did with this priest who was a perfect stranger when I did it, although I got to know him later. And it started to get kind of like something wasn't feeling right. I noticed in this program when you start feeling like something's off, it's because it's off. And so I thought, I need to tell my fifth step to my sponsor. Because telling it to a stranger, even though he's not a stranger anymore, but telling it to a professional secret keeper who is actually mentally ill and had since, you know, years later retreated into Alzheimer's and couldn't remember how to tie his shoes, I thought I might have cheated. I might have a little bit. So it was the best I could do at the time when I did it. It really was and it gave me what I needed to get and allowed me to move on to the further steps. But I really felt like it was important for me to tell this to a person who knew me and who was going to be ongoing in my life. And I told her my fifth step, and I felt that weight lifting off me that they described in the book because I finally felt like I had no secrets. There just weren't any. And what an incredible feeling to let go of that baggage finally, after years in sobriety, you know, to finally know that there's nothing I need to be ashamed of. And so that's really the beautiful gift that I got from this program. You know, I know I talk a lot about step three, but to me, step three is, well, I think they say it in the book, it's a cornerstone or something. It's like a critical, critical part of, you know, working the steps. If I can't trust that I'm being cared for by God, care is actually for me the key word in that step, trusting the care of God. If i can't trst that I am being cared for, I can do the rest of the steps, so you know it's been an incredible gift for me and And I like this. I just picked this up in the back, this third step logo that you guys did. And it says, God's will, nothing more, nothing less, nothing else. Do you want more, Lisa? Thanks. I'd like to introduce our guest speaker of the month, and it's Beth, and she will be speaking on steps 6, 7, 8, and 9. Hi everybody, my name is Beth and I am an alcoholic and addict. And so Jameson noticed I have the big book, the little tiny big book. And it's funny because I carry around a whole stack of big books because I do a big book commitment at a rehab on the weekends, so I always carry extras. And this one, I give a lot of times to the guys in the rehab because this used to be my husband's and one of his many, many sponsors over the years wrote in this front page change or die. But then Marcia stole the line from me so anyway, so change or die, you know, I'm on that side of the fence, you now. And it's funny because one of the clients at the rehab that I go to must have been reading from this book once. And they wrote in it, they started to write the 12 steps of active alcoholics. One, get money for booze. Two, go to the liquor store and wait for it to open. Three, get booze to go to work. Four, drive while you drink. Oh, no, wait, three, that was four, drive all you drink, and five, tell your boss that you have, and then it ends. So I'm at the court, I'm not paying attention, and so we stopped doing it. But, and I don't know, you know, at one point that got added, but, you know, and it's funny because, you know, this has been a long time since I've had a drink in me. You know, I remember the feeling of powerlessness and the feeling of unmanageability at the very, very, very end. You know, and I touched on that a lot the first week I spoke. But even like, you know, like Marcia was talking about she was a partier and I was a partyer too. And for many, many years I would have said that I don't have any problem with alcohol or any other substance. I would've said I have issues with reality. You you know. So, you know in a very real way I did, you know and you know but when I think back you know I especially had a problem admitting I was alcoholic because I knew if I admitted I was a drug addict I would stop doing drugs but if I admit that I was an alcoholic that meant I couldn't drink and you know and I really resisted that in the very beginning and you You know, I remember telling the rehab people that I drank about a quarter vodka a week. And of course that was silly, I drank like you know gallons a week . But my thinking was, see I was awake 22 hours a day because I did coke all day so if you're awake 22 hour a day, you know, a quarter day of vodka is not really much of anything. You know, I was just awake so much more, you know. And I didn't really have a lot of time to eat, so that was really my sustenance. And so I really had all these, you now, things in my head about it. But the fact is, you kno, even during the years that I was kind of like a partier, I drank abnormally. And that's important for me to remember and to say. You know? I drank vodka. It was my favorite drink for many years. And I was convinced that the mixers were the problem. It was the things you put in the vodka that got you sick and that got you hungover. So, therefore, I didn't enjoy mixers. But I knew you have to have something in the vodka at least in the beginning of the evening. So I used to have like cranberry juice or Kool-Aid, whatever it was. And all the bartenders, I used a biker bar, big giant bartenders. You know, and so I used to get in the habit of just ordering my drinks by color. So I would walk in the bar, and I would say in the beginning of the evening, give me red. And my bartenders knew that that was, you know, what I wanted was, you know half vodka and half juice. And then I didn't believe in that one shot, so like, you whatever. And then, you the next bar I'd go into, I'd say, you you know, I'm going pretty pink right now, you know. And they would know that's like three-quarters vodka and one-quarter, you know, mixer. And then by the time, you know, the wee hours were coming around, you know, I would say to the bartender, if I see any color in that drink, you're dead. Now regular people don't obviously order like that. The other thing that was fun, and my bartenders, you know, participated in my madness and they never charged me a dime for any drinks. And they participated in it to the point that if I was leaving a bar, I would of course never leave half a drink on the bar. They gave me these giant pink drinks, you know. And I would never want to leave it on the bar so I would gulp it down really fast so I could get to the next bar or some party or something. And my bartenders, God bless their souls, would see me gulp down my drink and quickly start making me another one. And I'd say, no, I got to go. I'm going to so and so's party or, you know, going over this bar to see this band. And they'd look at me and they'd say but you'll want one to go, right? And they make me these giant styrofoam cups to go or sometimes just give me my glass and get glasses rolled. So, you know, it was like for me, it looked like that, you drive while you drink. Like I would not have thought of driving 10 minutes from one bar to another without a giant drink with me. You know? It wouldn't have even occurred to me that there are people who do that, who stop drinking for the 10 minutes that they're driving from one part to another, much less even people that called taxis, you know. So those people were not people I knew. And so, you know, that was it. But the point is that I did have to change or die. And I didn't know that when I first came in. I really, really thought if I just stopped doing drugs everything will be okay. And then I kind of, you know, realized that at least for some time I had to stop drinking. You know, I kind of got with that and started going to AA meetings. And that's kind of, you know, and then I was presented at this group in Secaucus that was these deaf Nazis and they, you know, worked the steps and they you know everybody asked in that group you know what should I do? Read a step a day, call your sponsor, call three other alcoholics, yeah they gave you this whole list of stuff and it didn't matter how many people you asked, you got the same answer. So there was like no out. There was no like you could walk away from your sponsor and ask somebody else and get a different answer. You always got the sameness. So I kind of knew I had better do it and I started reading my step every day. And for me that was really helpful because it was a daily discipline. It was something that if I could do in the morning, I would feel better about myself. You know, I started to realize that things were going better for me on the days that I read my step in the morning. And it may be just because I felt better about myself or it may be because the step was having a positive effect on me, you know. And I read the 24-hour book. They said you had to read the24-hourbook every morning and I hated that book. It was far too spiritual for me at that point in my recovery. And finally I threw it out my car door one time and said, you know. And it's funny because the thing that made me most angry was it was one day when I read about wearing life like a loose garment. And God, I don't know what was going on with me that day. I was reading it in the morning in my car parked at the train station before work and it just made me so mad because, like, whoever wrote that book didn't have my life. They didn't know how complicated my life was. And this was, you know, in sobriety. And I just got so mad. I just threw the book out the window next time I was like on the road and I just said, I'm not reading that book ever again. And it's so amazing, you Know, that a few years later I realized that that was what I wanted most in the whole entire world was to wear life like a loose garment, You know? And I noticed that, You Know, that was literally where I was going. That was part of my objective, and I didn't even know it. And it made me so mad. And so, you know, I started to give up my suitcases, you know, to drop them off with the fourth step and, you know, the fifth step. And I started TO feel a little bit lighter about my past. But still, there's me, right? And, you know, like I always like to remind myself, only step one mentions alcohol. The rest of the steps are to address the actual problem, which is me. And so, you Know, and so it is me, and I have to do the work. And, You know, I know in this program a lot of people talk about steps four through nine as the work, right? People call that the work because it's like a cool thing. That's the work. And it's funny because, you know, most of the time they say that because of step four and step eight where you have to get out a pen and a piece of paper. And I don't consider a pen or a piece de paper work. I consider step six and seven work. That's where I have to turn my whole insides, like twist them around and turn them upside down and completely, like, change myself. But, you know, I found that's just how I see them. And I found there wasn't a lot of guidance for those two steps in the books. And, you know, the books are really where I go to and the books are my reference point for sponsors. I usually will, you know I go my sponsor and say I don't understand, you know. I have this going on in my life. The book says to do this. It doesn't feel right. These are the things I go of my sponsor with. Well, here I didn't see a lot of guidance in the book. In the big book it gives a good section on step six. It's about one sentence and it pretty much says after you do step five, you know, get on your knees and think about it and, you know, did you do a really good job and, have you missed anything in your first five steps and, then it says okay if you haven't missed anything then you're willing. So, you know, pretty much there you go, step six. And then you go to step seven, which is the next two sentences, you know. And I thought, well, all right, you know, that's great. You know, that works for that one minute that I just finished my step five, you know. But I find that step six and step seven require daily action from me. So, you know, and I guess not everybody looks at it like that. Some people look that as more of a 10-step thing. But for me, every day I have to be willing and I have to be humble. And I have too keep repeating that. It's like a little cycle throughout my day. Am I willing? Am I humble? Am willing? And sometimes I ask myself that question through the day and I'm like no, not. What happened? An hour ago I asked myself and I was fine. Where to go? And so, you know, to me it's a daily activity. The step book, the 12 and 12, also my least favorite chapter is the step six chapter. I dislike it. It talks about the difference between the men and the boys. It's not the sexist language that bothers me really. It's just that I don't understand that striving for a perfect objective which is God. Does that mean I'm not perfect? Does that mean everybody's not perfect? Aren't I created in God's image? Aren't they perfect? I don't understand that. And, you know, and is my behavior ever going to be perfect? I don' t think, right? I don''t think. And so, you now, it confuses me a lot, that chapter. That's not a good chapter for me. There's one section where it talks about patient improvement. I like those two words, patient improvement, And I wrote next to them, Take It Easy, in my 12 and 12 book, which I do continue to carry every day still and read most every morning. And that helps me a little to get focused. It's take it easy. It's do the best you can. If I keep asking myself every hour or two, am I willing? Am I humble? Am I willing and am I humble, chances are by the end of my day if I look back, I was pretty willing and I was Pretty Humble, you know. So that's kind of my exercise around it. But these are, you know, here's the way I look at it. I heard a girl tell a story when I was in early sobriety, and I'm not a really great storyteller. But it kind of goes like this, that, you Know, it's like you know that your new furniture, you know That the furniture you have in your living room is just awful. It's broken. It's, you Now, beaten. It's stained. It's just not good. it doesn't go with what you want to be so you know you talk to some people and they say you know what if you want get new furniture the first thing you got to do is get rid of the old furniture you say all right you know that makes sense I'll get rid my old furniture so you put your old furniture out in the backyard and you think about what you knew furniture could be and they are sitting on the floor of your living room and that old furniture out there in the backyard and you keep looking at it like, I could just bring in the couch, right? I got to sit somewhere, right, because it's the emptiness is the scariest thing, right and it's like, you know, and so for me step six, step four is when like I finally am understanding that my furniture is beaten and battered and step five is when I'm actually admitting it to another person. Oh my God, I can't live with this furniture. Step six is when I'm like, okay, I'm willing to put it in the backyard. And step seven is like being humble enough to sit in the empty room and leave it there and let my higher power come in with the new furniture because it takes a little time. And, you know, I also like what Marcia said, how she wanted to press a button and be happy. See, I want a mainline sobriety. Like, I want it all, you now, I like it in my vein, right? I want it in me vein. I don't want to mess around. You know, don't have everyday work. What do you mean everyday work? You know, I want it now and I want the best sobriety. You know, I want to do the top quality stuff too. And so, you know, so for me, you know, the experience of the empty room, of not knowing what's going to come in was scary. And, you know, that was something that reading the literature helped me with and also the fellowship of AA. It helped me to see, to get a vision for where my life was going. So it gave me hope and the hope helped me stay with the willingness and the humility. You know so that's kind of you know I talked a little bit last week about how we always are willing to change things that don't work for things that do work. But I'm alcoholic and I forget. Like I have that instant forgetter, they say incredibly short memory, right? I have the instant forgettor. I forget that what I have doesn't work. I forget there's something else at work. I have to keep coming to meetings and keep reading the books and keep listening to other people and keep praying because I have this forgetter. And you know my forgetter starts It doesn't tell me that drinking would be better for me at this point. It tells me that taking charge of everyone's life starts looking right to me, you know. It tells my that, you now, being in places I don't need to be is right for me, you know, and so I have to watch all those things, you know, and it also another thing that it tells me is blame is okay see my instant forgetter wants me to blame everyone else when things don't go right for me and um in the fourth step one of the most powerful lines or even phrases in the 12 and 12 book for me was when it said we have to be willing to give up the word blame like not just doesn't say stop blaming people. It says, take the word out of your vocabulary. It just doesn't even exist anymore. And I've found that since I released myself from the idea of blame, I got free from blame. And, you know, and that's what, that's the one that I have to watch, the blame thing, because after blame comes revenge and all that other good stuff, right? Because if it's your fault, you know, I didn't get you back, right? So I need to really, you know, stay with that and drop the word blame. Just drop it from my vocabulary. It didn't exist. It didn't exist before. It doesn't exist now. And that's, you know, that's been a tremendous gift for me. Blame is such a crutch. I've seen so many people, not just myself, but I've seen so many people in this program get freedom from bondage just by dropping the word blame. And you know, I remember one time I was in a meeting and someone was talking about they're working through all these issues with the therapist and their family and all this stuff. And the guy that was after this other person said you can save a lot of money all you got to do is stop blaming just stop blaming today you don't have to go to therapy anymore now I don't know if that's true for everybody don't get me wrong I'm not a psychoanalyst but for me that's been a tremendous tremendous freedom you know what I don' t have to blame anyone blaming other people only pulls me down And I had to really, really get with that. A couple of things, a couple of the things that you know also I was thinking about with humility and with the changing behaviors. Last time I talked a little bit about a job search that I had and I was praying for certain job because the job I was in was very sick and very hurtful. And I just wanted this other job, and I prayed and I pray. And finally, I stopped praying for particular jobs, and I just started praying for God to use me the best he could when he was ready to give me a job. And that's a good story. But everything in our life is all these multiple layers, right? So, you know, I was at this very sick job, a very dysfunctional job for a year and a half. And I knew almost immediately that it was the wrong job. Within a month, I was calling back other places that had given me offers, trying to get those out again. And I was there a year-and-a-half and really felt like, oh, why is God punishing me like this? Like, I finally got sober, you I was just over, you know, a couple of years and I thought, why is this happening to me? And only afterwards, you Know, can you see why you were in a particular place at a particular time. So the situation, well there were many, many situations. One of the situations was I had a boss who was having an affair with a woman who worked for me. They were both married with kids. And unfortunately for me, how this affected me was while they were locked in his office giggling, let's just say, I had to do both of their work, right? So, you know, because he was above me and she was below me. So I had a cover a lot of work. And I was there every night until like 9 o'clock at night, you now, sweating, trying to get all the work done. So it did affect me, you kno. But the thing was that it became a very big gossip item at the job. I never was a tremendous gossiper, but it's funny how when you stop drinking, all these new character defects start reaching out to you, right? Gossip was starting to look pretty good to me at that point, you know. After all, gossip, you Know, even though I never really participated in it much, I was around it a lot, you Now, in the bars and everything. And so, you know, it was something I knew how to do. And, of course, all the gossip was kind of aimed toward including me because I was clearly in the middle of this relationship. So anybody who would gossip would like kind of try to pull me. Of course, they started to get pulled in. And every time I would get pulled into a relationship, every time they pulled in, I would go home at night just feeling terrible, Just feeling like, God, if nothing else, that was ten minutes I stood there and gossiped that I could have been doing work and getting out at ten to nine instead of nine. If nothing else. You know, it was clearly wasting my time. And I talked to my sponsor about it. And, you know, she said, you have to not do it. And I said, well, you're all gossiping all around. I mean, it's so obvious what these people are doing. She said, they can gossip, but you can't. And I said, oh. And, you know, I really, I talked to a lot of people and I got a lot of good, I used to go to a woman's group in Maplewood and I had a lot good guidance from people there. And they told me, you have to say when they pull you in, you know what, I'm really busy right now. Can't talk about it. Sorry. And walk away. And, oh, the first three, four, five times I did that, it was so hard. Because they would hear me say it and then they wouldn't hear me saying it. And they would still continue pulling me in, you know. And then after a while they got used to hearing me say that. And I walked away from the whole thing and I stopped even being asked to participate in the gossip. And in the very end of that, you know, six-month period where they were doing this, the man got fired and the girl quit the bank. And she came up to me on her last day and she hugged me. And she said to me, thanks for being such a great friend. I was no friend of hers. And I said to her, I don't understand. And she said, I know that you never said a bad word about me. And she says, you don't know how much that means to me that there was one person in this whole company that didn't talk badly about me? And I thought, wow. She was crying and I started crying and I thought that's what happens. I didn't do anything good. I just stayed away from the not good, you know. So it was, you Know, and it came from am I willing, am I humble? You know, because every time I would talk bad about another person, it was about me being better than that other person, right? So every time i engage in gossip, it's the opposite of humble. It's me, the all-powerful. And you know what? Me, the all-powerful, is going to drink and is going to die. You know? And I have to get with that. And I have to say, you know, what? I can't afford to gossip. I can afford to think I'm better than this woman who's fooling around with a book. You know, who's to say there's not some point in my future life when that would be happening to me? Okay. I don't think so, but the point is that I can't read the future. I don' t know. I can' t judge anyone because I might be that person, you know? And I really learned that through that, you know, and I learned to control my rage at that job. I used to be a crier. When someone would really make me angry, I would yell at him back at work because I'm a perfectionist and I hate not being perfect and they would yell me and I would yell back. And then they would go at me and then I would cry and run away. Literally, a grown woman, you know? Well, somewhat grown, maybe not