The Disordered Ego and the Inability to Be Comfortable – Don M.

Everybody, welcome back. If we could just stay seated and open this meeting with a serenity prayer. God, grant me the serenITY to accept the things I cannot change, the courage to change the things that I can, and the wisdom to know the difference. Alcoholics Anonymous is a fellowship of men and women who share their experience, strength, and hope with each other that they may solve their common problem and help others to recover from alcoholism. The only requirement for membership is a desire to stop drinking. There are no dues or fees for AA membership. We are self-supporting through our own contributions. AA is not allied with any sect, denomination, politics, organization, or institution. It does not wish to engage in any controversy, neither endorses nor opposes any causes. Our primary purpose is to stay sober and to help other alcoholics to achieve sobriety. Anonymity Statement In accordance with our singleness of purpose, only alcoholics will participate in this meeting. This is an open meeting and all are welcomed. Public relations are important. Good public relations save lives. We seek publicity for AA principles, not AA. Anonymity at the public level is the cornerstone of our public relations policy. The 11th tradition is a constant reminder that personal ambition plays a role in AA. and with that done I'm really looking forward to this this has been a very nice weekend gotten to spend some time with these guys as Alice provided me the opportunity to do quite a number of times and this is something I'm very thankful for appreciate it very much thanks I'll give you Don and i think you folks would be awfully tired of listening to viva now but uh and and thank you so much alex and al and allison and ross and and just every one of you you've all been wonderful, wonderful host and hostess. And Billy and I have already agreed that this is a weekend that we'll remember fondly for a long, long, long time. And I really hope our paths cross as we're trudging the road of happy destiny. Well, the harder part for me is over because what's left now, i got a formula for that i got a formula and it's a it's a real simple formula and uh it's right in chapter five it says our stories disclose in a general way what we used to be like what happened and what we're like now and if i will let god get me out of the way as i mentioned today getting me out of the way is too big a job for me i have to have god to do that and if i'll let god do that that that's what i want to do and and some what you hear is going to be a repeat of what you heard somewhere during the day today and sorry about that but my story's my story and i'm supposed to tell my story tonight so that that's with god's help that's what i want to do my body grew up on a farm down in southwestern kentucky and the rest of me still trying to grow up you know that old deal of growing up and growing old at the same time and and lord i hope the ups going faster than the old, but I don't know. And before I got sober, I had a tale that elevated itself to a saga in the course of telling it about how by my iron will and my sterling intellect I had pulled myself up by the bootstraps from the depths of poverty to those staggering heights I'd reached. And I believed that so sincerely that I'd usually bring tears to your eyes and my eyes both in the course of telling it because that was the absolute truth. And I hadn't been sober a month before I realized that that was all a bunch of crap. We weren't even poor. We really weren't. We were middle-class farming people who had everything we needed and a lot of the things that we wanted. And in the second place, my heights were a whole lot more staggering than they were. I've always been a legend in my own mind. Cherry Carpenter, my first sponsor that I mentioned a lot today, had told me during that first week that I was sober. Sometimes I feel kind of like the title of that book, Everything I Needed to Know I Learned in Kindergarten. I think Cherry may have told me everything I needed to know about Alcoholics Anonymous first week. Of course, I'm still in the process of realizing those things and think i will be all of my lifetime still in the process of them becoming real to me but one of the things he told me was that i've got an incurable progressive and fatal malady that's made me real sick on every level but he went on to tell me that it had not started out as any of those things that the first thing wrong with me the thing from which everything else flows is in other words the root of my alcoholism is that i've got a disorder of my ego and that on account of that disorder of my ego i'm so obsessed with myself that without something from outside to do something about it it's impossible for me to be comfortable inside myself that's where the disease comes from that's Where all of that emptiness and that pain inside myself comes from is that disordered ego. I want to look back on my childhood in light of that. The only thing that seems important is the fact that that inability to be comfortable was always there. I can't remember a single time feeling comfortable inside when I was a child. I never felt like I was in the right place at the right time with the right stuff. i was never quite sure what was wrong and i didn't know whether i'm more than measured up and was too good for my circumstances or whether i didn'T measure up at all and and i've always been an egomaniac with an inferiority complex so i've always been capable of feeling both those things at the same time feeling too good for something and not nearly good enough for the same thing at the same time too smart for something and too dumb for the same thing at the same time And I didn't realize there was anything abnormal about that because that's the way I always felt. Now, you take that and you add to it that I have all my life been intensely ambitious and woefully lazy. Now,you take all that mess and you've got a mess inside a kid. You've got to mess inside anybody. And on account of that disordered ego, I never could stop and kind of be still inside myself and say you know hey don how you doing i guess you'd call it a gut check you know anytime i ever tried to do one of those i got a real uproar from inside saying hey don't be asking that you know boy don't you be looking down here because you can't stand what's down here and what's missing down here keep moving do that cute and smart deal and if you can'T get that to fly then just create a negative disturbance of some kind you know but do whatever is necessary to keep anybody else from drawing a bead on you and seeing what's there and what's missing because something in me knew that if anybody else did see then i might have to stop and look and i couldn't stand that it'd be like the earth would swallow me up through that emptiness in my own belly and on account of that same ego disorder i'm convinced on account that um during the first 37 years of my life and i got sober in april 9th 1981 when i was 37 52 now doesn't seem possible but i am during that first 37 years and i don't mean it doesn't look possible i know it looks real positive just doesn't feel that way from in here and you know how ladani feels is the most important thing uh but but at any rate for that first37 years of my life on account of on account that ego disorder i don t think i ever gave any consideration at all to the idea that there might be a power greater than myself that had anything to do with running my life on a daily basis. I never thought of myself as an atheist. I always had some sort of, you know, cockeyed intellectual theory about creation. But I guess the religious folks would say that I just absolutely rejected the idea of a personal God, of a God that actually had anything to do with the daily runnings of my life On Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday. And I believe that that was because my disordered ego couldn't accept the idea that there might be some power greater than little Donnie's brain insofar as actually running Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday and so on for me. And I believe on account of that same ego disorder, I don't think I had any teachability or humility whatsoever until I got sober at 37. And the reason I don' t believe that is I can' t remember a single time in that first 37 years that I voluntarily followed a suggestion that anybody made about how to run my life unless I understood it and I agreed with it and I thought it would work. You know, that doesn't even sound bad standing up here 15 years sober. Sounds sensible, doesn't it? Why in the world should I do anything about my life if I don't understand it or I don't agree with it? I don' t think it'll work. Well, I'll tell you why. Because I've got an incurable progressive fatal malady called alcoholism. And as long as I leave that ultimate veto power in my brain and of course it didn't feel like the ultimate veto power in the universe it felt like common sense but that's the way most things feel that are getting ready to kill me they're not many things that feel insanely dangerous that don't cause me to get a little cautious and say hey maybe i better not obey this thing the things that are really getting readyto kill me come up look i'm common sense don you know anybody with any sense would do it this way so the reason that i needed to do some things that i didn't understand didn't agree with and didn't think would work is that with what i've got wrong with me as long as i left that veto power in my brain i was under death sentence and i believe i go back toward that death sentence just exactly to the extent that i give that veto para back to my brain today tell you one more thing about the way i always was i always wanted to be an alcoholic it was always my ambition to be a alcoholic now i didn't know by name that that had been my ambition until i'd been sober about a year but the reason i believe that now is see by the time i was maybe four years old i started looking around that farming community where i grew up and i started noticing the men around there and what i was looking at was basically a group of decent, responsible, hardworking, mature men going about their lives. Tell you what I saw. I saw that all these guys had a lot in common. They would usually drive old, beat-up pickup trucks, 12 or 15 years old. I know now that they usually didn't owe a nickel on those pickup trucks they were paid for. And these guys would be married to ladies that even though I was just a little bitty kid, these ladies just didn't look interesting to me at all they were real dull looking you know and their world dresses looked like flower sacks and and and these guys would have three or four five six little old snotty nose kids you know whole house full of men and they would get up every morning and eat breakfast with that drab looking woman all those kids and they'd go getting that beat-up paid for pickup truck and go right exactly where they were supposed to go that day and do exactly what they were supposed to do the whole day and then come home to the same people they left that morning and eat supper and go to bed with the chickens and get up the next day and just do the same fool thing right over again. And then maybe on Sunday, you'd see them load the whole crew in an old truck and go up the road to Julian Baptist Church or down the road to Locust Grove Baptist Church. And then on Sunday afternoon, they'd do something like go visit people for God's sake. Well, see, I looked around at these guys And another facet, I guess, of this disordered ego of man is that on my own I have never been and on my alone will never be capable of having but one knee-jerk reaction to anything. And those of you that are alcoholics, if you'll just give it a couple of seconds' thought, you'll know what that is. It is, what has this got to do with me? So I looked around at those guys and I had the only reaction I'm capable of having you know what's this got to do with me and the answer came well you're a little boy and they're grown men so maybe when you grow up that's what it'll be like for you like to scared me to death i mean i can still remember how physically terrified i felt to think that i might grow up and have a life anything like those decent responsible hard-working mature men i've got an older brother dan dan's 12 or 13 years older than i am and let me tell you brother day and didn't cause my alcoholism. I don't mean to be smart-alecky and anything that helps anybody, please do it, but I don' t have any idea on earth what a dysfunctional family is and couldn't care less. I know that I've been told by a lot of people they have dysfunctional families. I've never heard anybody talk about having a functional family, so I don''t know what a functional one would be. But I do know this, I know the most dysfunctional thing in my family was me. And I know my family didn't cause my alcoholism. But Brother Dan would take me over with him, and he took me over because I was his little brother and he loved me. And Brother Dan Would Take Me Over to the Beer Joints in the Wet County by the time I was five or six. And Dan would drink beer, and I would sit around and drink big oranges and eat pickled eggs, and I'd observe and listen, you see. And the first thing I observed was that a lot of these honky-tonk heroes had big flashy cars in the parking lot of course no they couldn't pay for them now but they had them that's all that mattered to me and we'd walk on in there and those guys could sit at a bar so cool i looked for 30 odd years i guess trying to find somebody that could sit in a bar as cool as i remembered those guys being and i never found it man they'd do stuff like sit there and stare into a beer bottle just gaze into that sucker look like me that wouldn't bat an eyelash for an hour and a half, and they'd turn that beer bottle around real slow and tap on it with the ring. And I could look at them and tell they were deep. You know, those guys impressed me. They were so much more interesting and romantic than those old drones out there on those farms, you know, digging in the dirt and doing what they were supposed to do. And you'd look over in the booth and you'd see them with their arms draped around ladies that looked a lot better than those ladies in those flower sack dresses on the farm, you know. went. And those fellows didn't care if they were married to somebody else, and they didn't care if these women were married somebody else. But the most magic part of all, I didn't have to sit in there very long before I found out that every single one of those guys was only about that far from being rich and famous. Every single one of those honky-tonk heroes had at least one great big deal that was just about to pop and they were flat going to be some battle. Now it was usually a positive big deal where they were going to be literally rich and famous but sometimes it wasn't but if it was a bad deal it was still a big deal like if one of them had some trouble with the law he didn't know i got some trouble for law he is going to the pen for longer than anybody ever did by god you know it was all big deal and of course chariot explained to me that on account of this ego disorder that what's what's wrong with me is that i've got a disease of big deals that i'd made a big deal out of everything in my life and i love big deals and i'm still drawn to those big deals to some extent but but thank god today i'm beginning to get some of that recoiling as if it were a hot flame because i've been able to i've ben given the realization that the big deal ism it doesn't even work on any level anymore there's not even any rush in the big dealer for me anymore there is not the payoff anywhere the big dealers just paying for me now but i don't have any idea about that for the first 37 years of my life. I chased the big deal. I worshipped the big deal. The big deal was all they was. And you see what happened to me when I was in those beer joints as a little kid. I looked around at those guys, and what I really did was take my first good long look at total lack of consideration for other people, at total disregard for honesty on any level at just complete selfishness and self-centeredness and really just plain old insanity. And when I took that first good long look, I fell in love from the very first time I got a good look at those guys. I really didn't have but one ambition in my life and that was to grow up to be just exactly like them. I wanted to grow up, to look like them, I wanted to sound like them lord knows i wanted to treat people the way they treated people i wanted to put off the very vibrations that those guys put off and i got my ambition i just didn't know what the right name for it was first time i got drunk i was either 12 or 13 years old and that first night i got in an awful lot of trouble and i puked i blacked out passed out woke up the next morning i had a terrible hangover and swore i'd never do that again and of course i was drunk again in less than a week because you see before any of the bad stuff happened something else happened when i got enough of that booze in me to irradiate it all the way out to the ends of my fingers and my toes and my face got all hot and flushed and started tingling up around my mouth that hole in my belly quit hurting for the very first time in my life i felt like i was in the right place at the right time with the right stuff for the first time i wasn't too good i wasn't too bad, wasn't too smart or wasn't too dumb. And for the first time in my life I could be still and kind of do that gut check and say hey Don how you doing down there? And the answer I finally got back was everything is lovely you're okay. As far as I'm concerned that's a great big piece of my powerlessness over alcohol. Of course my mental obsession and my physical allergy are right in there but at its very base my powerfulness over alcohol i believe is that since nothing in this universe had ever done that for me had ever made me feel comfortable enough inside that i could stand the way i felt in there without running once i found something that would do that it simply did not matter what it cost whatever the price became it simply didn't matter because it was the only game in town and when the chips got down and the pain got bad enough i didn't have anywhere to turn i had to keep going back and back and back to the alcohol and some things like it in later years and I never really looked back from that first drunk until I got sober at 37 and I'm not gonna give you folks a blow-by-blow with my drunkologue I had one and I didn't get here because it gives me the hiccups for those 25 years not only alcoholism but alcohol was the center of my life a lot of things happened in that 25 years that i'm not proud of the steps have worked their magic and i no longer wish to shut the door on those things but a lot of things happen i'm still not proud and that i still have some sadness about um i think i was almost a perfect sociopath for all those years in in a lot of ways uh one of them was i didn't have people in my life i had positions and whatever your position was in my life I always had a couple of people interviewed for that position at all times I mean whatever it was and it wasn't that I wanted to be that way and it weren't that i thought that was cute see by the time I was in mid-teens it had gotten real clear to me that if you stayed close enough to me long enough this would happen you would come to me one day and you'd say something very much like this you'd say wait a minute Don you know I'm really enjoying parts of this and man it's exciting you know being this we're being with you and everything and you're a good person and everything you need but Don there's something wrong with the way you drink and there's nothing wrong with you and there is something wrong with where you live Don and we need to look at that we need to talk about that and the day you did that you punched your ticket out of my life now it might take a year or two for you to physically get out the door you know with all the the the whining and the begging and the threatening and the bragging and all the other things that we do but if you didn't change your position if you continued to hold that position that there was something wrong with the way i drank and the way I lived i couldn't afford to have you in my life because you were threatening the only thing in this universe that ever made me feel good enough inside that i could stand it and regardless of how much I otherwise wanted you in my life, I couldn't afford you and I couldn' t keep you and you had to get out of my life. School was easy for me and that was one of the big ways that I tried to keep other people from seeing and thought that I could run from my alcoholism. I talked today about the fact that I knew intellectually I was an alcoholic from some time in my teens but I thought I could live with alcoholism, I thought it could outrun it, I thought could outsmart it, thought I could bribe it, thought there was some way that I could live with it and just be inconvenienced back. And I left the farm and went to Louisville to start school when I was 16 as an early admissions student, and that was just purely a geographic cure. And i drank and worked my way through undergraduate in law school. In the spring of 1968, I graduated from law school, and my daughter my only child was born and for the next 10 years from 1968 to 1978 I practiced law in downtown Louisville with with pretty good little bit of material success that's that's changed in my story over the years when I first started giving AA talks I had been wildly successful during those 10 years and if I stay sober and live 30 years I may have been a failure I don't know but the best I can do tonight, folks, is moderately successful materially during that period of time. And during that period of times, of course, my illness continued to progress head over heels, but it never seems to progress exactly the same way in any two people. You know, you can always look at your buddy like I would look at Billy back there, and maybe Billy had had six different jobs, but he'd been with the same woman all the time, and I'd had 11 wives, but I'd stuck with the same job. I'd look at Billy and I'd see the job deal and I would say, Paul, Billy, you know I get as bad as Billy I'm fixing to quit. And of course Billy would be looking back at me and he'd just be looking at the wife deal and not the job. He'd say, look at Paul, Don, you know he's getting pitiful. He said, if I ever get as old as Don I'm fixin' to quit and that's the way it works. There's always when you're out there in the trenches doing the progressing there's always some part of yourself that you can compare to that same part of somebody else and, well, if I get that bad, I'm going to quit. But during that 10 years from 68 to 78, when I could still make some money and still hold a law firm together, I couldn't do things like have anything that resembled a home life, just nothing that resembling any kind of home life at all. I couldn'T put gas in cars. For years, I ran out of gas two or three times a month, at least in Louisville, with loads of money and credit cards in my pocket. I couldn't take clothes to the cleaners. I couldn'T take a car to the car wash. One year in the mid-'70s, I had four or five brand-new cars, and none of them were ever washed one time because I couldn'T get them to the Car Wash. I couldn''T take care of my teeth. I'd just have to let my teeth nearly fall out and then go to a dentist, give a dentist a handful of money to prop them up, and then a year or so later go to another dentist because I was embarrassed to go back to that one and give that dentist another handful of Money to prop him up. I began to use some things other than alcohol as far as mind-altering things in the 70s, but I don't believe that they were an important part of my story at that point because my use of alcohol was so overwhelming that I don' t think it made any difference. And that' s not to say that I didn' t use much of those other things. I used a lot of them. But my useof alcohol was absolutely so overwhelming that I really don' T think they made anydifference. February 10th, 1978 was a Friday. i was still holding on to all the material things by my fingernails but i still had all of them together i was remarried to my daughter's mother at that time we had some conversation at the dinner table last night i think about the insanity of that but uh but we do it all time you know alcoholics dope fiends and those of us that are so alanine sick we can't crawl just do that all time you Know whether we in recovery or out but if you think about it really normal sane people don't do that they understand what words like divorce and marriage mean and i believe those words are just too restrictive for our taste i believe they're too too firm that we far prefer to be able to keep it more fluid than that you know where we can slide in and out but at any rate i was remarried to my daughter's mom and it was a normal day until i get to the wreck and i'll run you through today that day february 10th 78 just give you an idea of what my life is because because remember, I'm not going to get to one thing that was unusual in my life until I get to the rest. I was propelled out of bed that morning by the same terror that propelled me every morning. See, I never had any ambition other than to be like those alcoholics. What got accomplished in my Life or looked like it did was accomplished on account of terror. It wasn't accomplished on kind of ambition. It was accomplished because I was so terrified that if I didn't show up where I was supposed to with the right clothes and try to make the right noises, you would see what was here and I'd have to look and I knew I couldn't stand that. So I was propelled out of that bed. I'd lay there and smoke four or five cigarettes, I always did, and remember pieces of the night before because I went to bed drunk more than 80% of the time, I'm sure, in that 25 years. I'm not talking about drinking. I'm talking about drunk. And I laid there that morning as I did 80% of the mornings, and I smoked those cigarettes with pieces of night coming back in the terror of what I hadn't done and what was waiting for me that day kept building and building and built in the way it did every morning. And finally, the sheer terror propelled me out of the bed like it did ever morning. and I went in the bathroom, and I stuck the toothbrush in my mouth, and there's about a 50-50 chance that I puked. Because, you see, I poked when I brushed my teeth about half the mornings for 25 years, and I didn't know there was anything unusual about that. I didn'T know that that wasn't the way everybody was because I'd been doing it half the time since I was 12 or 13 years old. And you don't talk too much about puking at cocktail parties. You know, it's just not in. So I hadn't shared much experience, strength, and hope with other people about pucking when I brush my teeth. but at any rate i don't honestly know whether i did on the morning of february 10th or 78 or not but i went in and i did that and i put on the clothes and i went to my office and i put the band-aids on things i had to put them on i went the court and did what i had to do there and then by noon i was at a an expensive restaurant and lounge there in louisville called the fig tree and i spent the afternoon of that friday in that restaurant drinking scotch and snorting cocaine and sometime during the middle of that afternoon i decided that I'd been working so hard, I needed a long weekend out of town for some R&R. So I started calling ladies I'd seen. Remember now that I was remarried at that time to my daughter's mother. I've never been able to remember whether I invited her or not, but if I did, she passed. And I got hold of a young lady that was a friend of mine. She said yes, she would go. I had reservations north of Louisville in French Lick, Indiana at a resort. I went and picked her I had a brand new Corvette that had a built-in CB radio now Alex is not an Alex and Allison some of you're not Old enough to remember when they built in CBS in cars But in 1978 they did and I went and picked up my friend and got the two bottles of vodka That's that I hadn't had to have for a road trip I thought they'd write you a ticket in 1968 if they caught you on a roadtrip without two bottles vodka, I took a handful of Quaaludes and I And I headed, since I had reservations up north at French Lick, I headed southwest to see my daddy in the southwestern Kentucky. There's not a thing unusual happened yet. Nothing unusual happens until the wreck, and that's the gospel. I got maybe 100 miles from Louisville, and I got ahold of my CB and got a hold of a truck driver. And he had some of those little old yellow desoxyn speed pills, and he wanted some vodka. So we pulled over, and I gave him one of my bottles of vodka, he gave me a handful of speed and i took that and i made it another 50 or 60 miles and went off the road about 130. did an awful lot of bad things to my body i ran through that today broke both legs crushed both knees lost the main artery in one lower leg had to do a bypass in the upper leg take out a vein grafted in to replace the artery it separated my pelvis and thank you hell separated my pelvic and severed my urethra so that i didn't have a urinary function for over a year i had that super pubic catheter for over years in the hospital for over six months out of the first year had a half dozen major surgeries and was two and a half months before they stood me upright on a tilt table for the first time and the doctors had told me that i would probably never walk again without at least braces on both legs and one or two canes and that they doubted very seriously that we could find a surgeon anywhere that would attempt to put my urethra back together and restore my urinary function. So I didn't know that that wasn't the way that it was going to be, and my reaction to that, again, I think I mentioned today, was to lay in the hospital bed and have my friends bring in booze and more dope than the doctors were giving me and make those smart remarks like, you know, anybody can quit drinking when the going gets a little tough if they don't have any backbone, and then talk about how it took a man to lay in there with it when the bills started coming in, and a man wasn't supposed to be out there doing the crime if he wasn't prepared to do the time and that's real insanity and it's real powerlessness you see i was right where i was after that first drunk it simply did not matter what the price had become because it was the only game in town i didn't have anywhere else in this universe that i knew to look to do anything about that inability to be comfortable inside myself now the young lady that was with me in that wreck i wound up with her and wound up married to her understandably it was very uncomfortable at my daughter's mother's house between surgeries and i found that out pretty quickly i figured that out and and began to go to her house and the young Lady and I wound up married now didn't go broke right away because a law firm of seven or eight lawyers had built up around this other guy and myself so some money kept on coming in for a while and by about a year after the wreck i still had the tube in my belly i still have the braces on my legs and the phenomenon of craving had progressed to the point the phenomena of craving is a simple thing all it is is the physical addiction to alcohol and by that time it had progressed that far in me this was around the first year in 1979 where once i started drinking i'd pretty well physically lost the ability to stop something from outside me had to intervene and stop. And then it took three or four days for me to be willing to do something like sit up in a chair. So they got me in my first asylum, and again I don't use that to be funny or cute, that's just what the big book uses. Got me in that first asylum and they got through the three or 4 days and they sat me up in the chair and they had an AA meeting and they read how it works. They got to that step 3, I climbed up on those crutches and said can you mean to tell me that people in this world who believe such crap hobble on over to call somebody to get me away from those religious fanatics before they messed up my wonderful mind. Now, that was somewhere around the first year of 1979, and I wound up getting sober two and a half years later in April of 81. And I don't remember much that happened in that two and half years. I believe I mentioned this afternoon, I've never been able to reconstruct what month or even what season of the year I left Louisville. That's just lost. It's just gone. Some of the things I do know happened are that I went back to the asylum 17 more times during that two and a half years um and i'm real good and i became addicted to hard narcotics i became a needle street junkie i'm really grateful for that because you see that brought enough social and legal pressure on my law partners to cause them to kick me out of the law firm that i'd founded and i proved that in my case i couldn't get straight as long as i had a tam x watch i sure couldn't gets straight as Long's I had a law firm uh my new wife had to leave me on account of man's sanity, and she was staying with some girlfriends and dad in an accident during that period. The state of Kentucky accommodated me a little further by jerking my law license. I last laid eyes on my daughter in January of 1980. It turned out I wasn't going to see her again for over three years in February 1983. The Internal Revenue took my interest in the office building we'd built and things like that. And the mortgage companies took the houses I'd left the ex-wives in, and the banks repossessed the expensive automobiles that was just all lost and gone, every bit of it. After all the money was gone, my dad was down on the farm in his late 80s with nothing in this world but his Social Security. I went down and stole Daddy's Social Security to keep on drinking on. And I've got a much older, badly crippled sister, and I used her and abused her and endangered her health and I'm sure her very life to keep on with my drinking and drugging. I used up everything and everybody. I absolutely was gone, bankrupt as a going human concern and had used up every soul. And for the year and a half before the fall of 1980, now that's fall of 80, still six months before I got sober but I believe with all my heart that I got better during that six months and I believe I had to get better before I could begin to recover. But for the year and a half before the fall of 1980, I truly lived on the street and on an expired Blue Cross Blue Shield card. And for that year and a half, as I mentioned this afternoon, I lived with that daily conviction that I had to die of alcoholism and drug addiction because I was different. One minute because I was so great and the next minute because I was so terrible. But basically because there was something about me that was different. There was more wrong with me than alcoholism. Alcoholism was just really a result of all this big complex thing wrong with me you know and and it couldn't be as simplistic I couldn't go for y'all's myth of a higher power that was an insult to my intelligence you know. And so every day for that 18 months I lived with the conscious conviction that I had to die of alcoholism and drug addiction. In the fall of 1980 I washed up on the doorstep of an asylum in Nashville, Tennessee. That was asylum number 17, next to last. They told me later, the business manager did, that he only let me in because he didn't think I'd live another week if he left me on the street. I stayed in there about a month and I didn't stay straight. Some people in there had some dope and I took it. I was never straight 30 days in a row in my life until the 30 days following April 9th, 1981. I had a roommate in there whose family was involved just on the fringes of aaa there in nashville they weren't really in it but they were just on the fringe and and they felt sorry for me and asked if i wanted to come stay with them a few days while we figured out what to do with me and i want to tell you what to do with may in april of 1981 was or rather than the fall of 80 was some kind of question and i went to live with those folks for a year on absolute charity for the first six months it didn't even stay straight but it got better during that six months i went to a world of aa meetings most of them had a clubhouse there in nashville that we called the 202 club and during that 6 months i got to the point where sometimes i could go 2 or 3 weeks which was the longest i'd ever been able to go in my life without getting messed up on something and how i really know i got better is during that time they only put me back in the asylum one time, put me in a rubber room for a few days on Valentine's Day of 1981. That's last trip to the asylum so far. And you see at the rate I'd been going, if I could have settled for twice a year to the Asylum, I would have thought that was the picture of mental health. And late March of 81, I got up enough nerve finally, even though I had been absolutely destitute for more than a year. I had known for more then a year that if I would send a letter back into Louisville with a return address that on account of my wife's death, that an insurance company would send me a check for $2,500. And for over a year, my terror of Louisville was so great that I wouldn't send a letter into that town with the return address. I want to tell you here from 15 years sober, I don't think there was any paranoia in that. I don' t think there was any paranoid. I think it was fear based on fact. In fact, I think I was too messed up to truly realize the gravity of the situation i believe a loving god went back and poured oil on the troubled waters of the past to keep the indictments and the former criminal clients that i'd betrayed and from killing me and all that sort of thing i believe with all my heart it wasn't paranoia but in march of 81 i got up enough nervous in the letter i sent the letter they sent a check and i got drunk so by the time april 8 1981 rolled around i'd been drunk for about 10 days two weeks it had been another one of my pop-off vodka slash Listerine drunks and and I have truly drunk a barrel of both of them I've drunk a half a barrel a NyQuil and that's bad because they've got something in it that does something to your speech center and first time I got drunk on NyQuill for three or four days I talked like this and I thought well just upon my brain damage I talk like this from now on so I really wasn't any big deal I just was gonna And I got to where I liked the Listerine better than I did the Pop-Off. In fact, I still remember the Lasterine more fondly than the Pop Off. And, of course, it was wonderful because there's no more day in those thousand deaths at 4 or 5 o'clock in the morning, you know, when you'd wake up with those four horsemen on top of you. You didn't have to go throw a brick through a window or anything. All you had to do is just go down to the all-night market, get that big jug of Listerines around behind you, and wham, well, it wasn't a miracle. You know, you were well. But at any rate, on this drunk, I'd been drinking both of them. And April 8th of 81, I had been drunk, as I say, 10 days or two weeks. And I was sitting on the edge of a bed in a motel in Nashville when a loving God started giving me a whole lot of gifts. Now during the first few weeks that I was sober, I didn't have any idea that there was any such thing as a loving God or that anything was giving me any gift, just only in looking back on it that I know that. and i want to tell you that i didn't feel a bit different coming off that drunk in april 1981 than i did the 199 before then i didn'T feel a BIT less hopeless i DIDN'T anymore believe that alcoholics anonymous would work for me i DIDNT anymore think that there was a chance that it WOULD WORK FOR ME THAN I HAD BEFORE IF i had waited TO FEEL like a would work FOR ME TO GET INTO RECOVERY AND ALCOHOLICS ANONYMOUS i'D HAVE BEEN IN MY GRAVE OVER 15 YEARS BY NOW OR ABOUT 15 years from now i'm absolutely sure the big gift i believe that my loving god had given me was the first little bit of teachability or humility that i'd ever had in my life the first willingness to follow some suggestions that were made even though i didn't understand them and i didn'T agree with them and I didn'T think they would work and i DIDN'T know i had that gift i DIDNT know anything was different i heard just as bad shaking out that last drunk as I did all the ones before. And after three or four days after I was able to walk, I went back into the door of the 202 Club there in Nashville where I'd been to all those meetings. And those folks knew me real well. They knew me really well because I had shot dope in their men's room. I had passed out in their AA meetings. They had warned the people they sponsored to stay away from me that I was a loser, that I was going to die. About two months before I got sober, I was walking through that clubhouse and a big old boy about six feet six by the name of Joe W. walked up and looked down at me and said, Major, I'm beginning to think you are too intelligent for this program. Now, I'd been exposed to Alcoholics Anonymous intensely for over two years at that time, and my only response was to think, well, it's about time these people figured out who they're dealing with. But he went on and he said and you know don that's a real shame because we have never had anybody too dumb for this program and we bury you buttholes all time and you've heard the expression something feels like an icy hand grabbing you inside your chest that's what that felt like i knew that man was talking to me and when i stumbled back through that door two months later it was still stuck in my brain and thank god the door to aa swings both ways because despite all the disgusting things i done in that clubhouse those guys greeted me with the perfect combination of loving open arms and disgust and see i needed both of them in order to get sober and i stumbled back in i said will y'all tell me one more time what i got to do if i want to live and they said don we'll be real glad to it's keeping us sober they said dont drink dont take dope and go to meetings and by the grace of god the first 60 days went over 150 meetings now during those meetings most of them my brain was doing the same thing he'd been doing for a couple of years. My brain was telling me that I was too good, that I Was too bad, that it wouldn't work for me, that you all were religious fanatics, that what I really needed to do was put my shoulder to the grindstone, nose to the wheel, get back to Louisville, get a law license, get A good-looking woman, get some money, get a Rolex, get Jaguar, you know my God, be somebody. But I kept on coming to y'all's dumb old meetings because God had given me that little bitty gift, which is a huge gift of that little bit of humility or teachability. And the miracle is that y'all's dumb old meetings worked just as well as if I had been absolutely convinced that they were the very thing for me. It turned out that I didn't need to be convinced that AA meetings would work, that all I needed to do was just keep dragging my raggedy butt to meeting after meeting after reading after meeting. And finally the mind and the soul got dragged in a little bit behind it. Then they told me if I wanted to live, I was going to have to read the big book. And I said, but I've read the big book three or four times. And they said, yeah, Don, we know. So we know because you've been quoting it around here while you've been down. They said, if you want to live you better get a couple of things straight that you've got absolutely backwards. And so the first thing you've get backwards is you've gathered in your head that this big book is a philosophy book of some kind and that there's something in here that you can said second thing you better get straight if you want to live is that this deal of sobriety is not a learning process there's nothing in this world that you kan learn that'll keep you sober for a heartbeat this deal sobriete is a doing process so they say if you wanna live you better pick that book up and act like you've never seen it before in your life and start at the front cover and go through it land for land reading only the black part and not interpreting one single thing and looking not for something to learn but for something that it was about that time that they explained to me that the steps are the only program of recovery in fact they're the only programme of Alcoholics Anonymous they explain the difference between the steps and the fellowship they told me I'd have absolutely no healing of what was wrong inside unless I did those steps just like the book said they told me if I latched on to the fellowship that I might stay dry for a week or 30 years, but I wouldn't even be in the program. I'd just be in The Fellowship and I wouldn t have any healing of that disordered ego, that inability to be comfortable inside myself except just exactly as I did those steps. And I'm so grateful they put it that way to me. So I started going through y'all's dumb old book and started doing, oh, and they said, Don, in your case, on account of your intelligence and your education and your vast and unique experience, it's inevitable there are obviously going to be suggestions in that book that couldn't possibly apply in your special case and they said that's fine just be sure and do those first because you'll need them worse than anything and so by the grace of god i started going through y'all's dumb old books and doing those dumb things that couldn'T possibly take care of all those things that were wrong with me and the good news is that they were right those steps work on alcoholism just like penicillin works on infection don't need to understand how it works don't need to believe it'll work don't even need to want to do it if i've got the condition what i need to do is do it as directed as directed and i'll get just fine thank you then they told me if i won't live i was going to have to get on those my knees every morning and ask the power greater than myself to get through without drinking drugging and get on my knees every night and thank that parent that's when the tears came that's When the Tears Came because I'd tried so hard for two and a half years to make myself start thinking, feeling, and believing the way it looked like you guys thought, felt, and believed. And I tried to adjust everything inside myself to make me do that, and I couldn't. And I thought I had to die because I thought that was the whole deal here was to make my self start thinking and feeling and believing what y'all what it looked liked to me y'alls thought, thought, or believed and I told them that when they suggested that I do the praying and the tears came and I said I can't do it I've got to die on account of that second step because I can think, feel, and believe these things And I told you this afternoon, they said, oh, Don, we have never suggested you think, feel, believe anything because you're too sick to have any valid thoughts, feelings, or beliefs. And, you know, they told me my thoughts, feels, and beliefs were my disease. They were exactly the same thing. And they told Me that the issue of whether I lived or died was going to be determined solely by what I did. What I thought, felt, or believed wouldn't have a thing to do with it. So they said if I wanted to live, I better get on my knees morning and night and start saying those words and not worry about what I was thinking, feeling, or believing. And having given that beautiful gift, despite my brain's veto, and it was vetoing that loudly, believe me. Despite my brain'S loud veto, I started getting on my knees morning and night. And the beauty of the second step happened to me. And they led me on through the steps there in Nashville when I celebrated my token birthday. That was what we called one-year birthday, a token birthday there. When I celebrated that, I never got a job the whole time I lived sober in Nashville. which was 21 months uh i could never find a job i lived on just charity and and odd jobs here and there um and when i celebrated that token birthday i was living in an attic uh with no phone and and no car and with my teeth rotting out of my head and i truly was happier than i'd ever been in my life um and uh as my law license got put back in order as a byproduct of working steps eight and at a year and a half sober. And much to my dismay, I had to go back to Louisville to try practicing law again to keep from starving to death. And I had just live on the 11th step to keep from dying of fear when I did that because I was terrified going back to Louisville. I didn't want to go. I thought—I didn't think I could stay sober there. It just didn't—I did not think I can stay sober practicing law. I did not take all this stuff but I did have any other choice other than just about starving to death so I headed back up scared to death and and I mentioned today the miracles that happened I threw myself into the dumb old Louisville AA meetings that I knew weren't going to be any good and I went to a bunch of them anyway and turned out they were just as good or better than Nashville and then I wound up talking at the Kentucky State Convention at 22 months sober in February of 83 by God incidents and article was in the paper and saw my daughter. And two months later, she moved in with me and all those beautiful things. And then I went and hit the wall that I talked about today. I think maybe all of y'all except Ross were here when I talked back hitting the wall because despite all those beautiful things that were going on in my life for the first nine years, I was sober. The relationships with opposite sex and financial chaos nearly killed me. They just nearly beat me to death and i had worked so hard on those things and i've used such good tools you know rigorous honesty prayer steps sponsors meetings outside counseling and it just got worse and uh then my old sponsor died and i wound up with a new spot or a new sponsor in cleveland and and five years ago or six years ago just about right now i flew up spent a weekend with him and a bunch of the old heads up there and and i was given that weekend a completely new pair of glasses with regards to step six and seven, and that's changed my life. I'd already been rocketed into a fourth dimension of existence during that first nine years, and I guess I sort of feel like I've been rocketed in to a fifth dimension of existence in the last six years. It's truly an experience not to be missed, folks. The same rule still apply in my life today as applied when i was 90 days sober you know i have i cherry carpenter used to tell me about every six months i'd call him i wouldn't know what was wrong i'd just be crazy and he'd say don you know when you got here your life was such a terrible mess that you didn't have any place to go with your life nothing would take your life and you were happy to fit your life into alcoholics anonymous and now you've gotten busy don you've gotten all these gifts you've gotten some things back and you've got other things that you never had before never had a chance of getting because of the wonderful recovery in alcoholics anonymous and you have gotten awful busy with yourself don and you're having trouble fitting alcoholics autonomous into your life and he would say you will never be able to fit alcoholics unanimous into your lifetime said if you want it to work you got to go right back to where you were in April of 1981 and you've got to fit your life into Alcoholics Anonymous because it's the only way it works. And I still have to do that about every six months. I get so messed up that I have to do radical things. I go to 30 meetings in 30 days. I've done that twice in the last year, and you know what? It's worked every time just exactly like it did, just exactly like it did 15 years ago and cherry told me something that i didn't mention today that that that billy and i talked about with alex at supper time on the way to supper is that cherry taught me about comparisons he taught me that the only valid comparison the only valid comparison i can ever make as long as i live is to compare me today with me the last day that I drank see he explained to me that if I compare myself to you or if I compare myself of what I want to be or what I think I should be or even what I think I might have been 20 years ago I'm gonna get sick I'm going to get ill that's not going to work but if I can if I compared myself today and see their days still with all of these miracles in my life and they are so many I'm not gonna i'm gonna sit down here in just a minute we're all gonna go home after this long day but i'm not going to go through things that i did today but it would be really real embarrassing to me to sit up here and tell you even a little part of the real miracles that in my life there are so many of them it's just embarrassing i mean it's truly embarrassing but even with all that my capacity for self-centeredness is so great that i have these days when i get to thinking i'm not any better the only thing that's different is i'm not drinking and taking dope i haven't made any progress here at all because i don't feel like i've made any promise when i do that and i remember what cherry told me and i look back on let me tell you something folks i haven'T peed in my britches one time today nobody is trying to put me in the penitentiary today in fact to my knowledge nobody's even trying to put me back in the asylum today I haven't stolen a thing today and I really don't think I've even told a single lack the day I got sober my daughter wouldn't speak to me and never wanted to see me again and today she's one of the best friends I've got in the world and she and I celebrated 10 years of her Al-Anon this past January, and that's wonderful. I'm married to a beautiful, wonderful lady. I could go on and on, but the bottom line is I'm a whole lot better than I was on April 9, 1981. I am a whole Lot better than i was. and if i can keep that keep that comparison simple and just go on and and go to my meetings i mentioned today i need to go to four or five a week and i do go to 45 a week sometimes i need to go more sometimes i go to less and i pay the price for going less i get crazy uh i needto do what i'm asked to do in alcoholics anonymous and i needtoremember that as an ex problem drinker my very life depends on my verylife depends on because the book tells me so my being constantly concerned with the needs of others and what i can do to help them because in a final analysis that's the only healing that i get other than the steps themselves and the steps i believe are to fit me to be of maximum service to god and those around me and thank all of you for your time and for your patience and for the wonderful hospitality i love you and hope to see you again. It's been a great weekend, and if we could, I guess it's going to have to be a smaller circle, close with the Lord's Prayer. Amen.