The Difference Between Reacting and Responding to Life – Beth H.

Tell us your whole story. Thanks, Deb. Hello, everybody. My name is Beth Hartley. I'm an alcoholic because of God's grace, AA sponsorship. I've been sober since June 26, 1988. And that is a miracle. Ten days was a long time for somebody like me to not drink. And I've always said if you were hanging out with me, it was even longer for you because i'd be a little edgy by the fifth or sixth day and usually by the seventh or eighth day you'd be saying oh i bet you can have a beer it's okay really we might have been over correcting here you know um i i still i got sober in cincinnati ohio and they call them leads there as well and uh and we moved to north carolina in 2002 and down there if you lead a meeting you are chairing the meeting and opening with a topic that you discuss for you know a few minutes and then open the meeting so it's uh it's not even that ohio is the only place you hear lead it means different stuff different places so when somebody calls me to see if i can lead a meeting i always have to say okay what exactly are we talking about here um but it's good to be here I think Deb and I met in 2004, 2005 down in Key West. So we've known each other for many, many years and through triumph and tragedy and heartache and heartwarming because, you know, we get to live life here and we getと live all of life, ups and downs and in-betweens. My screen says Destin almost because I've been from Cary, North Carolina since December of 2002, but I am retiring on June 30th and moving to Destin for good. I'm very happy about that. Chuck has wintered down here the last couple of years. We had a little kind of rental place that he and the dog would come down and escape the winter weather in North Carolina and escape me during tax season because I'm a tax accountant and it gets a little tense around the house by March. So it's kind of worked well, really. I just had to be nice to the cat, you know. And then when we decided to retire to Destin this year, he and the dog came down and we bought our forever place. And so he and The Dog came down and stayed and I flew down April 16th with the cat and the cat stayed. So like everybody's here, but be um but uh 38 days from now that will all be different so i um i always i i gotta tell you if you are new newer and you are not excited to be here it's okay um i was not excited to be hier i you know i we don't really care if you're excited to be here or not um you know just what matters is that you're here you know as with a lot of stuff in Alcoholics Anonymous, I have found that if I take the action, God changes my heart while I'm not looking. And everything catches up. But I actually grew up in Ohio, not too far, maybe three, four hours from where Deb grew up. I was in Oxford, Ohio, which is southwestern Ohio near Cincinnati. Miami University was there. It's a small college town. Sandy Beach has always said the longer you're sober, the better your childhood gets. And that's my experience. I, uh, you know, cause really growing up in Ohio as it was happening, it was my first resentment. I was born in Northern California where the Redwood trees were and, and, uh. And moved against my will when I was two and a half, three, two and a half. I think, you know, apparently my dad was drinking and mom wanted to be closer to her family. So there's strike one at mom who I was pretty sure was trying to ruin my life through most of my life you know she had these crazy ideas that you should be accountable for your actions and i don't know do what you said you'd do when you said to do it and all these things that apparently everybody's been trying to teach me my whole life that i didn't learn until i got to alcoholic synonymous and then it was like oh my god i learned the coolest thing and you know our parents are just like oh god you know so glad you heard that honey but uh oxford was it was a great place to grow up i just didn't think so while i was growing up there um what i know now is i was already restless irritable and discontent as a kid i the first day of first grade there was a gigantic u.s map on the wall and i'm looking at california where i'm supposed to be you know in all the oceans in the gulf of mexico and texas and florida and there's palm trees and you know and then then there's ohio um and i i'm in first grade looking at a map thinking that you could tell looking at a map that nothing's happening in ohio and uh you know where does that come from when you're six you know what i mean and i know now like i said i was already restless irritable and discontent but you can't articulate that when youre six if you had said what's wrong with you i couldn't have told you i was suffering from a spiritual malady that only a spiritual experience would conquer you know I just thought I hated Ohio and uh and it went back farther than I was an only child um and uh you know my favorite promise to this day in the big book is the one that says we can be alone at perfect peace and ease because I couldn't I never could I had a chorus of voices in my head from the very beginning that you know would all uh convene and and uh vote and tell me that nobody liked me and you know everybody was talking about me and everybody's laughing at me and and uh and i just you know if we had a big family next door i would just kind of stay at their house because if i was in a quiet room i was an unfriendly place my first escape was reading books i learned to read before i got to school and i could just dive into a book and not hear anything else that went on and when i got the school school was easy probably because i've been reading already. So I got good grades, because school was easy. And if school had been hard, I wouldn't have had good grades because it requires a lot of work. I'm not super interested in that. If it comes easy, great. But if I have to try hard, and part of that I know now too is that if I tried hard and failed, you would see me fail. And that's not acceptable. But my husband Chuck, who you'll hear next week, got a master's degree in sobriety and social work. And he told me one day that I had a type AL personality and I was like, I've heard of type A, but what is type AL? And he said, well, you know, I have no doubt that you're type A but you're lazy enough that you are not annoying. And it's true, you know. But I just, I would stay with other families and I, you know, my dad got sober when I was seven years old. It was 1966. I'm 61 now so you don't had to do that math um but I was the kid I was attending AA meetings in the 60s you know I was the kid over in the corner with the color and book at the Hamilton Ohio Friday night speaker meeting because my parents couldn't afford a sitter every week and I knew that AA was full of old old old men who drank coffee and ate donuts and smoked because I'd seen it you know my god my dad was 37 38 years old by that time and you know they're his age and even probably somewhere 40 my god you know and so I met AA I so I grew up in a sober household my mom is not alcoholic never I just don't think she tried hard enough I mean she drank two drinks and get sleepy and I used to tease her it's like you know you can push through that and but she just was never willing um and so I you know I knew about AA I knew AA had a lot to do with not drinking so of course that didn't interest me much when I drank I remember you know my dad told me all of the horrors and tragedy and loss through his drink and if he told me he had fun I don't ever remember hearing it I just remember hearing all of the downside and and you know how we are I mean And I start drinking and I'm just thinking I feel bad for him that he had such a hard time, you know. Drink a little more like me, Dad. You could hang in there longer, you Know. But I, and I didn't walk through the doors of AA and say, oh, thank God I'm home. This is where I want to be and get sober and live happily ever after. I tried everything to stay out of Alcoholics Anonymous because I got, for one thing, like I said, I knew it had a lot to do with not drinking and that I didn'T want to not drink. I just wanted to drink without consequence, which got harder and harder to do. But when I was – so I kind of did – you know, I always try to make clear I did not relapse. I did Not come into AA and relapse, I didn't come into AAA and stay sober and drink. There was nothing to relapse from. I never came in and recovered. I went through treatment to stay out of jail. I went Through treatment to get the heat off. I would come out of now I'm a test taker, you know, and if you're a test taker you know who you are and I got to tell you can ace treatment if you are a test-taker. You know I can come out most likely to stay sober forever every time and I would get out and circle 90 days on my calendar and never see it but you know I'd get out I know I have to do this and I know what I gotta do and and you know i would for maybe a week you know but I never so So I never really made a run at getting sober until 1988. So from 1983 to 1988, I just kind of think of it as drive by AA. You know what I mean? I just circle through and I would hear them talking about being self-centered and I just never really thought that applied to me. Now, I found out later I didn't really know what it meant. I thought self-centred meant vain or selfish. And, of course, I didn' t think those applied to me either you know um I looked up selfish in the dictionary at about 10 years sober and it says um because I just thought of selfish as like I kept the biggest cookie for me you know uh the dictionary has other thoughts the dictionary says being totally consumed with one's own affairs often to the exclusion of all others and I went okay fair enough you know I could I could see that but but i you know i didn't know self-centered was how i had lived my entire life you know until i came and stayed and so i guess what you know one of the messages there is you do not have to understand all of this to stay you know I don't have to wire be able to wire my house to walk in the door and turn the lights on you know. I don' t have to understand how every wire and every you know, every junction and all of that works. I just know like flip the switch. And I'm glad I didn't have to understand because so much of my sobriety understanding and sobriete has been hindsight. It says, oh, that's what that was. Oh, that'S what that did. That's what that meant. And so self-centered, you know? I didn t know that self- centered was that you won't see me try anything new in public because I might fail at it and you might laugh. You know, I didn't know self-centered was that I usually had one good friend at a time and don't talk to my friend because she'll like you better. And then I'll have to get another friend, you know, and you guys will probably talk about me. I didn'T know self centered meant if I can't win, I don't want to play. Not because I have to win or winning is good, but it's not really that I had to win and say, you can't see me lose. You know? I didn'T know self centred meant that if I walked into a room and two people in the back leaned their heads together and laughed, I knew they were talking about me. I didn't know that self-centered meant I was always keenly aware of everything going on around me. It's like I was a spectator in my own life. There was like the committee in my head had a little camera and they were always scanning the crowd to see how we're doing and how's it look. And when I got sober, in the big book it says that one of the things we find out in inventory is the world and its people dominated us. And I didn't get that, you know, because I see the word dominate and I just thought physical domination. And for whatever reason, that wasn't part of my story. I was not in physically abusive relationships. I never, I hung out with a lot of people that fought, but I've never thrown a punch in anger. Now, most of that is an acute fear that you would hit me back if I hit you and it would hurt. And then I would look bad, but still, you know, and that's too, I've said for years is like when fights break out, drinks get spilled. You know, it's just a hassle. So, you Know, I didn't understand that what dominated me is what you thought of me. And that was really surprising news since I spent my whole life telling me and you and anyone who would listen that I don't care what you think of me, you know? I could have passed a polygraph. I don'T CARE WHAT YOU THINK OF ME. I don't care what you think of me. And apparently the whole time I didn't care what you thought of me, I desperately cared what you taught me. And what I have found out is that I, like, I always felt like if I told you my name's Beth, that you're just waiting for the rest. You're thinking like, so, you know, and, and so that's why I was always super busy. You know, Jim and Sally's daughter, I'm Beth and I daughter, I'm beth a cheerleader, You know, Beth doing this, doing that, doing That I was just dancing as fast As I could because if I sat Still and it got quiet I was in An unfriendly place You know and so So since I had to Be Something be somewhere who do I Have to be with who do i have to not be Seen with what do I have to wear where do I Have to work you know what color should my Motorcycle be what you know on any Of that all of this stuff And I know now what I was doing was trying to arrange your perception of me so I could be comfortable because the big book you know in the example where it's showing you know three-fourths of the inventory and that third column it says self-esteem, self-esteem, self esteem, and by the late 80s some you know treatment and therapy lingo was creeping in and so you know even when I hear self- esteem my immediate thought is, well, that's how I feel about myself. But you know, if you're an alcoholic of my variety, how I feels about myself has nothing to do with my self-esteem. How you feel about me has nothing do with myself esteem. However, what I think that you think about me has everything to do my self esteem and you know I can say that in an AA meeting and see laughing and heads nodding all over the room. And I got to tell you, if I said that at work, I'm a CPA and I work with a bunch of accountants. I'm still not sure how that happened. They're not really my people, but every now and then I say what I really think at work and it just gets super quiet. They just try to ponder and figure out exactly what I'm talking about. When there were big tax law changes years ago and there was going to be one year with no estate tax, zero. Like you could be a bazillionaire if you died in 2010, no estate tax, right? So I'm in some kind of continuing ed in 2008, and they're all at lunch talking about it, of course, because it's not bad enough we've got to sit in eight hours. We've got a talk at lunch too. But they're offhandedly said, yeah, that's the year that I was going to push my mom down the stairs, and I went back to my sandwich and you know and all of a sudden I realized I had gotten very quiet and I look up and like everybody is around taking with nine other people and they're all just kind of like you know with their sandwich just not like did she mean that you know but you know wouldn't you you know anyway um so but if I said that you knew know at work that how I felt about myself depending on what I thought you thought of me they would not get that but you know we get that if you're new and you followed any of that you are in the right place you know all those years that we thought nobody could possibly think the crazy crap that we did guess what you are now one of my the favorite things I heard out of a newcomer she got up to speak and she said I got to Alcoholics Anonymous and I found out I was unique like everybody else you know and I just love that so here I am not caring what you think of me while I'm trying to arrange your perception of me so I can be okay and I'm dancing as fast as I can and that's you know by the time I'm in junior high and high school that's yearbook staff pep club honor society you know band cheerleading student council you name it I am doing it I'm doing it I'm doing it because if I stop it's quiet and I'm in an unfriendly place and when I drank I drank at 15 years old enough that I felt the effects of alcohol and uh I didn't know I'd been holding my breath for 15 years until I exhaled you know I felt The Effects of Alcohol and I could breathe and I didn t know I hadn t been able to breathe until i was breathing again and within a year most of that stuff was gone you know some of it i gave away some of what i threw away some have got taken away but my life pretty quickly focused around drinking i wasn't a daily drinker because i was in ohio and it was a 21 state they had this horrible affront to beer drinkers everywhere called 3-2 beer which was a lower alcohol percentage that you were allowed to drink if you were 18. Horrible stuff and at Oxford was a 3-2 town because two-thirds of the population was under age 21. The students outnumbered us 2-1 but I would have been a daily drinker if I had had daily access. There's no doubt in my mind you know I never had a line in the sand about morning drinking because my god if you could drink in the morning why wouldn't you? You know I mean my day just went better if I could start with a drink I had a huge capacity for alcohol from the beginning so I can drink with the big boys so I did you know I uh when I got to Alcoholics Anonymous you know on one of the drive-bys they said hang out with women and I was just horrified by that because I thought I don't even drink with women And You Want Me To Hang Out With Them Sober I mean you know talking about hearing the gates of hell just slammed shut and and I just because in high school when the girls are drinking it's just embarrassing I mean they're you know they're falling down they're throwing up they're giggling and everybody likes the same boy you know and then later on there's husbands and that gets kind of you know those lines get a little blurry because I don't know about you but I did most of my dating at last call and uh you know are you married just doesn't seem important at 2 30 in the morning you know it just doesn't come up and uh and so you know like hanging out with women was never high on my list um but i you know what i have found because the big book says that drinking is a symptom and uh and of course when i was new i thought whatever because i really knew that drinking was causing all the problems but the longer i'm sober the more i see that drinking wasn't a symptom you know my thinking was so far off long before i drank you know that the whole self-centered thing i was telling somebody today i did not take a pic like we we went down to gatlinburg for something and and i'm i wouldn't take pictures if i was visiting somewhere because i didn't want to look like a tourist like somebody 10 years later is going to go oh my god there's that stupid girl that was taking pictures in gatlinberg you know like like that you know i thought nobody had anything better to do than think about every stupid thing i've ever done but i am not self-centered just ask me You know, and there's a story I've been telling for years about my daughter because it just really opened my eyes to how different my thinking was. Sarah was four years old when I got sober. My son Robbie was six. They had not been in my custody for three years when I Got Sober. So losing the kids didn't sober me up. And Sarah is the one that we would have told you was going to be an AA by the time she was a teenager. I mean, she just she had a gleam in her eye. I was a liar and a thief and a shoplifter long before I drank. My parents were merchants in uptown Oxford, so I had the run of high street as a kid. And I was pretty accomplished shoplifer by second grade. And Chuck and I used to tell people, you know, you might be saving for college. We're saving for treatment because we just knew it was coming. And so when Sarah was 11, a lot of her friends swam and she wanted to be on a swim team. So we took her to try out and the coach said, well, I think you'll be all right. But she didn't have much experience in the water. So he said, I'd like you to practice down an age group until your skills come up. And so this means she's 11 years old and this is age group swimming. So this guy wants her to practice with nine-year-olds and she's eleven. And I'm seven years sober when this happened, dying a thousand deaths because my 11-year old has some practice with nine-year-olds and you know how am I gonna look she was okay with it you know and so two weeks later is the first swim meet and these are big USS sanctioned teams where there'll be 15 20 teams and they just run heats and post the results and her very first race ever she was 70th out of 72 and it's on the wall so anybody walking by can see and uh that was saturday and sunday morning she was up and dressed and ready to go back to the pool i gotta tell you i would have been trying to get my parents to relocate you know um and we said well sarah you didn't win um but but yeah you have a baseline time now and and in your next race even if you don't win that race if you beat your time that's a successful race because you have an impersonal best and the whole time i was telling her that i'm thinking right you know i mean my parents told me that when i swam it's just the stuff you're supposed to tell your kids you know I didn't buy into it when they told me she beat her time and she was happy now the rest of that story is two years later she's a state double-a swimmer she swam all over the midwest for what you know until she was about halfway through high school and uh what i realized was that when she started that at 11 years old she had never had a drink and when i was 11 i had never had a drink but if that had been me and the coach said practice down an age group that would have been the beginning and end of my swimming career on day one i could not have gotten in the water with the nine-year-olds because how would it look you know and so we got chuck and i are now we're watching sarah with interest you know because we're not sure what to do with this behavior um you know it's like like we would recognize normal you know but we kind of waited to see what happened and she took that turn with the swimmer because she somehow got set a goal work for the goal achieved the goal she just got that and she did it now you know I understand the concept but my outlook has pretty much just been just give me the goal I mean you know why would I work for it if I could get you to give it to me you know I'm fine with setting up a lawn chair at the start line and let you bring me the trophy but she she just got it and she just kind of you know so she took this weird turn on us and she just kept going that way she she got a summer job and she saved money um she graduated you know through 12th grade in 12 years um same school same friends she decided during her freshman year that when she graduated she wanted to join the military. And three years later, when she graduated on time, she joined the military, she served active duty 10 years, you know, and another three in the reserves, she, she met a man in the army, and they got married, and then they had a daughter 18 months later. I mean, who does that? You know, we did when she was 14. We said, you Know, there's supposed to be one mature person in the house we think it might be you because we just we just didn't know what to do with her but she just you know and so when I look at that and Sarah and 11 and me at 11 is really obvious that what I used to think is we just react very differently to life and you know what I think now is Sarah doesn't react to life Sarah responds to life and there is a difference you know there is a different between reacting and responding and I just was kind of i used to have this toy when i was a kid it was like dino the dinosaur from the flintstones and and it you know you turn him on and he'd kind of roll this way till he hit something and then go this way until he hits something then he'd go thisway and that's kind of how i roll you know i'll just go until i crash into something then i'll change directions but she just you know she grasped that concept of you know do what you said you do and work for a goal and all that stuff that i know people tried to teach me i lived by two rules that i'm pretty sure my parents never taught me one of them was it's not all right not to know you know because because it's just not you know i was doing fake it till you make it long before i got here and it's Not you know if you asked a question in school i was embarrassed for you you know cuz now the whole class knows that you don't know i would not and that's that same self-centered thing if i ask you'll know i don't know so i am not ask any questions and the other one is it's never ever ever ever should you admit ever that you have made a mistake you know it's like go down with that ship you know I uh I ended up married for five years living that one out it should have been a one-night stand you know. I said for a lot of years there shouldn't have been second date but truth is there wasn't a second date he had keg party and i just stayed you know because i i was uh i had been in south florida for about eight months and and it was a little town bonita springs and there's like three bars and by the end of eight months i'm out of places to work already and i'm not a people to date since i dated last call and there was only three bars it was looking like i might have to go back to ohio which i did not want to do and this guy moved to town from california you know we've joked for years they really need to sign at the state line in florida and probably california and arizona that says this state doesn't work either and then if you saw somebody pull up and read it and just turn around and leave you have found the alcoholic you know um so anyway i you know there's a five-year mary's that never should have happened and an inventory showed me later you know i could have written books on that, books of inventory on all that he did. But the truth is there's a, in the inventory before it shows the example, there's that paragraph that says selfishness and self-centered is the root of our problem. And then toward the end of the paragraph, it says, you know, sometimes people hurt us seemingly without provocation, you know? But invariably, which is, you now always, we find that at some time in the past we made decisions based on self which later placed us in a position to be heard and that's been a key paragraph in a lot of my inventory because there will be things maybe I resent somebody for this and you know I had a big one on my first inventory and my sponsor just kind of said what were you doing there and I was like what do you mean what was I doing there and I told her what I was doing there she just kind of went there you go and I'm thinking no that can't be it you know because that cost me a lot money and it should only cost this much but It was this much. And I remember because I was three or four weeks sober when I did my first fourth and fifth step. Thank God, thank God I fell in with people who read the book and did what it said because I couldn't have gone two months or six months or a year or five years without writing that inventory. That first inventory was for everything that kept me up at night, everything that I was never going to tell anyone. You know, and I really believe if I'd remembered it all at once, it would have killed me. I trust God to shove it up to the top on its time. I get nervous when I see the 600 question inventory helpers because they dredge up a whole lot of stuff that I wouldn't have been prepared to look at. But anyway, that's just my brief off into Beth Hartley opinion land. But I'm back now. So, you know, I did that first inventory early and my sponsor had kind of said, what were you doing there? And I, you Know, intellectually, I sort of got it. And I remember going home that night and just saying to God, okay, God, I don't really get this, but she's sober longer than me. I'm going to take her word for it and trust that you'll explain it to me later. So, you know, two years later, I'm sponsoring someone who had been in prison and the, uh, and she was, you know um, I mean, she wasn't fat, but he was, you know, big boned we'll say. And, and, uh and so the guards harassed her a bit she thought that was unfair because she had towed the line and followed all the rules and she didn't deserve to be treated that way and I heard myself ask her well what were you doing there and uh to which she said two years and I went no I mean did you just wake up and say hey I think I'll go to Marysville today you know well no she had robbed a store and robbing that store was her decision based on self-debt later placed her in a position to be harassed by the guards And when I saw that one with her, mine went from the head to the heart. All of a sudden it was very clear. So a lot of times I'll tell people, you know, when you're writing that inventory and you just, that fourth column is just empty, you Know, I can't figure out what I could have done to deserve this. Maybe it's because that didn't happen right at the point of, you know, being hurt by this other person. I might need to say, how did I get here? You know, and invariably, like the book says always, I will find that sometime in the past, I made a decision based on self, which put me there to get hurt later. And that was really eye-opening for me, you know, to see all of that stuff. But I just, you knows, I'm rolling. I'm self-centered. I'm drinking. Like I said, I love to drink. My day just went better with a drink. I'm a child of the 70s. We had many other things. You know, better living through chemistry was always our motto. and you know there are a lot of things easier to hide in the school locker than a fifth of whiskey you know and uh but i didn't i didn's struggle with where i belonged when i got here you know i mean i started out drinking i did a ton of drugs all the way up down the other side but the deal is as my alcoholism progressed drugs began to interfere with my drinking and so they had to go you know because anything that interfered with my drink being had to go and by the time i was done that was my integrity my employability my children the first marries it never should have happened anyway but still you know all of this stuff and and uh sharon in los angeles talks about that she pushed her integrity across the bar for a drink you know that she sold it all for a drank and and that made sense for a long time but i you know i really if i sit and think about it i don't think i even sold it for a drunk i pawned it i pawn'd it because I always thought I would go get it back. You know, I just thought I was parking it over here and I'll come back and get it later. And I just never got it back, you know. I drank from age 15 to age 29 in that time. I told you I lost custody of my children in 1985. I had, you know, gotten out of Ohio, moved to South Florida. I worked in, it was in the Keys for a while. I'd probably spend my trip to AA by a bit. I worked in this fabulous place that had seven bars and three restaurants, and I had keys to all the bars, and they paid me. I mean, I just did the best job ever, you know? And I got fired from that job because I'd gone in at 5 for happy hour, and I was still there at 11 when I had to clock in. And I kind of intuitively knew I wasn't going to find another job quite like that anywhere else. So that's the first time I ever went to an Alcoholics Anonymous meeting and said that I was an alcoholic. Because, you know, I've heard people say they sat in a bar and said, I'm alcoholic, who cares? Well, with a sober parent, that's not an option. I always knew intuitively that if I put that A word in the same sentence with my name, that a big book was going to drop out of the sky. So you would never hear me wondering if I was alcoholic. But I got fired from this job and kind of intuitively knew nobody else was going pay me to drink all night. And so I go to a Tuesday night Key Largo group of Alcoholics Anonymous. It was 1983. I'm 24 years old. They're very nice. You know, they're old. These people are probably 40 or 50. It was a little circle discussion groups and nowhere to hide, you know, and everybody's relating to everybody. And I'm just thinking, you Know, and if I didn't think I had gone to hell yet, the meeting's over, and they all run over and invite me to Perkins. And I'm just if you don't have Perkins, it's like Denny's, you know, and I just remember thinking, it'S like, great. It's like, I have a Harley Davidson out there. I'm 24 years old. It'S 930 on a Tuesday night, and I've been invited to Perkin's. Like, I just, you Know, it' s like, do I kill myself now? Or do i get pancakes and then kill myself you know i just oh but you know as luck would have it i made an appointment with my ex-boss told him i knew i had a problem i was going to aa and you know i was always one of those you remember that cartoon with the guy that kind of toddles down the sidewalk in the safe the pianos are just crashing behind him he's oblivious you know and that's just how i rolled i mean i might get clipped every now and then by the edge of a piano but I never got crushed like I should have the only time I ever got suspended from school for drinking it snowed the next day and there was no school so I have my records clear you know because that's just how I roll and uh so I went to my boss and told him I knew I had a problem I was going to AA and it's luck would have it they put the weekend girl up to full time she didn't want to work full time and everybody hated her so one AA meeting and I get my job back because AA works It really does. So I go back to the Friday meeting, and I tell him I got my job back. And that was pretty – I was done with AA and the keys. But I did call Dad and tell him that I'd been to a meeting and said I was an alcoholic. And within a week, I get a box from Dad, and it's got a big book and a 12-in-12, East End New Beginning, 24 hours a day, one day at a time, a cassette tape of his talk, some pamphlets. I used to joke I didn't know how long he'd been tossing stuff in the box, but one meeting and it is in the mail you know so so within a year the the practice husband finally says get out which is what i've been waiting for because you know i can't labor it would be my fault but he only had to say get out once and uh and i'm on the phone with mom send me some money he threw me out and she would not send me money but she sent me plane tickets to ohio because now i had a two-year-old and a four-month-old baby and so i'm back in ohio in 1984 and I'm thinking okay fine maybe I should do AA but I really thought if I just quit drinking with bikers life would calm down and she lived in one of those neighborhoods that stepped out of the pages of an LOB catalog you know couldn't be more un-biker where she lived and of course that didn't work either and and I uh you know I mean I went to AA kind of you know I have my AA starter kit that my dad has sent me. And, you know, in 1984 in Cincinnati, Young People's was on fire. You know, I'm 25 years old, and the Monday Night Young People group in Cincinnati had 200 people they met in Purcell High School gym. And the Friday Night Live group was young people, 150 people, in St. Cecilia's school cafeteria. Icky Paw, the international convention of young people which moves around the country from city to city had been in ohio in 1983 in cincinnati so they were on fire you know but when i walk into a big group it splits into two groups all of you and me and i don't know what to say after my name is beth at an aa meeting anymore and i know what to Say anywhere else and so i just went to the bar because i know What to do at the bar and that set me off on within year my kids were removed from my custody my dad died while i was in treatment so i got the insurance money because i'm an only child of divorced parents and and the kids stayed at my mom's you know and uh and i was i was glad they were gone that's one of the things i realized in treatment that um you know one of those things you don't tell people if you don t want to look bad the big book talks about the alcoholic having a double life the one that we know is true and and the one we want people to see. And, of course, I can't tell anybody I'm glad my kids are gone, but I knew they were getting better care at my mom's. That was clear. You know, they got to daycare in clean clothes on time. They got dinner at dinnertime. You know? And it's not I never did any of that, but I couldn't do it all on a consistent basis. And then I had the insurance money, so I got to drink the way I wanted to drink for the next two-and-a-half years with a periodic trip through treatment, you know, to keep the heat off. And then in June of 1988, I ran off to Florida one more time, you know, because I knew they were all down there going, God, I wish Beth would come back. You know, I did that for four years. Of course, I got down there. There's no homecoming parade, and I ran out of – well, I didn't even have a kid. I took my mom's credit card, and she had money until the credit card maxed. And I've always been grateful that they had low limits back then or I'd be in prison for grand larceny. but i ran out of money on june 26 1988 i'm in the fort myers florida airport i don't have a dollar i can't even get one beer if i can get one i can gets two but i couldn't bear the thought of being asked to leave the bar because it would have been obvious i needed a drink you know that somebody else needed to buy and there weren't cell phones and atms and all that back then and so a lot of senior citizens and i thought maybe i can just snag a purse you know um from a little old lady and get some cash but i was so hung over i knew i'd pick on the little old lady that did aerobics twice a week she'd run me down and take her purse back and i would look so bad so i called mom and she said call me back and hung up uh and apparently consulted her al-anon friends and when i called her back she said you know i'm flying you home well i'm not flying you home i'm playing the kids another home because we're afraid we'll never see you again And I got on the plane. It was June 26, 1988. I hadn't had a drink all day. She picked me up at midnight at the airport, drove me straight to the local detox and said, go in or don't, but you can't come home with me. I've done everything I can do for you. You have to do this. And she left. And I went in, and the next morning I'm trying to come up with a plan B because God knows we need a plan D. And everything I could come up With, I had already tried. You know, I mean, my car is impounded, charges pending, whatever. None of that's new. But what was new is I didn't have an idea about what to do about any of it. And I realized I'm 29 and a half years old, and I'm in detox, and I had no plans to be 30. I thought I'd be dead. And a voice came out of nowhere and said, people like you don't die, Beth. You're going to live 20, 30, 40, 50 more years whether you're drinking or not. And that terrified me. And I just had a passing thought that whatever those people in AA are doing seems to be working because they're staying sober and you're not maybe you should just go do what they do and i had no idea that would be the surrender that stuck and i stayed in detox five days i got out of detox and i went to 405 oak street in cincinnati and i going to a meeting i almost didn't because i've been going all week in detox you know i could take a night off but one voice in my head said you know you skipped meetings before and you drank maybe you should go so I went and I got somebody's phone number who told my biggest secret to a room full of people because it was her story too and I went to call her the next day and I didn't want to and it took half an hour and one voice in my head said you know you didn't call people before and you drank maybe you should just call and of course just my luck she answered the phone you know I told her I'm just practicing I don't have a clue what to say to you but I know I have to call and my first 30 days was a whole lot of ignore the first thought do the second thought you know and I've heard it said around meeting you know we're not responsible for the first thought but we're responsible forthe second thought and the first action and I just fell into the middle of Alcoholics Anonymous I did a big book meeting every day at noon I did a speaker meeting every night I did it because I liked it you know there was a lot of laughter in that big bookmeeting and unbeknownst to me people who go to big book meetings on purpose are the same ones who read it and do what it says so i had stumbled into really active people there's a huge pocket of enthusiasm in cincinnati aa and i like the speaker meetings at night now i didn't know until years later that what i had done by doing that was wandered into the two types of meeting most likely to be centered on a solution instead of the problem you know there are unfortunately meetings probably not where you live um but i have on occasion been to a meeting that has been an hour of the problem instead of an hour the solution and you can tell because you feel better you feel worse when you leave than you did when you got there but I you know a big book meeting you just can't go wrong because the answer is in the book that's the foundation that I have stood on you know in the speaker meetings I met my husband in Alcoholics Anonymous you guys will hear him next week we decided to date with our clothes on which was a novel concept for both of us but it worked you know we fell in like before we fell in love and July will celebrate 28 years of marriage you know we're having a great time we're on our kind of chapter three of our AA life we were 14 years so he is also class of 88 and we are 14 years sober when we moved from Cincinnati to North Carolina and we've been in North Carolina 17 years we've been 18 if we made it till December and now we're going to be in Destin retired together and so looking forward to it because we like hanging out together we like doing a together you know I have always been in the middle I have always had a sponsor not Chuck he's not my sponsor I'm not his sponsor we agreed at the beginning that we would do God first AA second then each other you know and one of our first official kind of dates to the New Year's Eve dance we were having dinner first it was an AA thing the phone rings somebody needs a ride the phone rings again somebody else needs a rise so we had dinner and And he went east and picked somebody up, and I went west and picked somebody up. And we met at the dance. And then so, you know, midnight, you knows, speaker speaks, midnight kiss, you now, happy new year. He takes somebody home on the east end. I take somebody home to the west side. We met back for breakfast because that's dating in AA, you know? A lot of AA dating is coffee before the meeting or coffee after the meeting. And you're never really sure if you should kiss goodnight or say the Lord's Prayer when it's over, you know, but we figured it out. And, and so we have God first, AA second, and then each other. And I tell him, you know, if I'm not thinking about me, he is third in my life, you know? And if I am thinking about Me, he's still in the top five, which I think is pretty good. But, you Know, we just have a life beyond our wildest dreams and that is not something I, all I wanted when I got here was to stop getting arrested. I wanted my driver's license back and I wanted maybe someday, maybe to remarry preferably to a guy that would work this time which also didn't come up at last call a whole lot you know and and we have so much more than that you know we have history with people we've known deb for 15 years we you know in the friends we make here you may not see him for a year or two and then it's like you just saw each other last week you know we have friends all over the country all over the world um with the zoom thing going on you know we're getting to see a lot of people that we wouldn't have seen unless we were out crossing paths. You know, we've gotten to reconnect with a lot of people and they've been worried about people trying to get sober with Zoom. But it's like when it's all you know, that's what works. You know, the newcomers are not having trouble with Zoom, you know? Because that's where AA is. That's where they are. If you're new, welcome to Alcoholics Anonymous. I am now going to be one of those people that I swore I'd never be and say, I love Alcoholics Anonymous. You know, I am so grateful for everything I've been given here. And it is just as easy to be grateful as it is to not, you know, one of the things I heard when I was new is you can't be grateful and pissed off at the same time. And you can be grateful undepressed at the same Time. So I've always got a choice. You know I can be I can Be pissed off because my car ran out of gas or I can be grateful that I've got a car if it's up to me. Deb, thanks so much for asking me.