The Spirituality She Wanted from Other People’s Examples – Deb H.

hi my name is Deb and I'm an alcoholic it's nice to be here tonight I'd like to thank the women who invited me to speak I'd to thank you for doing that although right now I'm not so sure I'm glad I'm here there's I always I always wonder whenever I am asked to to talk at an AA meeting you know what am I going to say what I'm going to talk about you know and and I always remember that there's really not anything that I know much about except for myself and even sometimes that is questionable so what all I'm gonna do tonight is what I know how it's just to tell you how it was what happened and what it's like now how it was when I was growing up was awful it was terrible I didn't grow up in a good home. I grew up in a very violent, abusive home. My father was an alcoholic, although he wouldn't have had to have been an alcoholic to have be abusive. People know that already. But he was very abusive as was my mother. I've got three sisters and we're all a year apart and then I have a brother who is seven years younger than me. And we all experienced the same type of violence and abuse at the hands of both of our parents. And it was not a good way to grow up. It was not good atmosphere for children, for adolescents, and even for adults as we got older. I learned at a very, very young age that reality was something that I'd just as soon check out of. I wasn't particularly crazy about it because my reality seemed to be a lot different than everybody else's, and it may have been. But on the other hand, it could have been the same too denial is a real powerful thing my reality when I was growing up was that I didn't have anything or anyone and quite frankly that was pretty true I really didn't I didn't any parents so to speak of they cared for me and loved me like normal parents do I had my siblings but we were all afraid to stick up for each other for fear of what would happen to us from our parents so reality wasn't pretty and neither was neither was growing up in the home that I grew up in. I started drinking at age 13, and when I started drinking, I started drink along with the rest of my sisters, which seemed to be quite convenient at the time. We never had to leave home. We lived out in the country in a small town. I grew in a small town in Minnesota of about 4,000 people, and we lived out in the country about seven miles out of town and we drank a lot together when my parents would leave we would get drunk when my parents were home we would get drunk it was it was the thing to do who wanted who wanted to be in in any other state except for oblivion when when you were when you're in our home so at age 13 I found booze and it was the most wonderful find I'd ever come across I am I knew I knew that alcohol wasn't something that that I wanted to dabble in too much I mean I knew from the very start because I knew what an alcoholic was an alcoholic was my dad you know he beat people he sexually abused people he was I mean that was an alcoholic to me and he drank in the morning he drank he drank all the time and I knew what an alcoholic was and I was never ever going to become one never ever would I turn into that man as far as I was concerned but when I first started drinking I never thought of that I did that that slipped right into the back burner so to speak of my mind and it never came up again well until a little while later but the thing that i appreciated about booze so much was that i didn't have to think and i didn t have to deal with it and i could check out and i did check out from age 13 until my later later teen years it was it was to me probably the the lifesaver um i don't know for sure if i would have been able to if i would have been able to keep going in my life had i not had a means of checking out and that might sound sort of funny but um i i think that that's probably that's probably what what kept me alive was that i knew i could always i knew like i was check out into the booths my my behavior while i while i was drinking was was that if probably most of you women out there um like marge was saying we were always more beautiful we were always taller i could always sing better um everything that i didn't have the booze made me half and the number one thing that i got from being drunk and from drinking was that i was okay for the first time in my life at age 13 i got drunk and thought that i was okay this was an okay thing for me to do because i felt good and it had been so long in my life. And I don't even know for sure if I could go back and think of a time when I actually had felt good, but when I got drunk, I felt good. I didn't have to think about anything. My sisters and I would, like I said before, drink a lot together, and that was real handy for me, and I liked that because I didn' t have to go out and find friends to drink with although that came later on in my life too my um my behavior when i was sober was was what frightened me as i look back on my life probably more than my drinking behavior um my behaviour when i were sober was what i would probably call insane i did a lot of nutty things and i was drunk too i mean let's face it we all did i would climb the water tower when i was drunk and look at the stars on top of the water tower and do all of that other crazy stuff. But for some reason, that was okay because I was drunk. But the things that I did when I was sober were the things which probably frightened me more and probably classified me in that insane category more than anything else. I had a real problem with anger. It was very dangerous for me to get angry because when When I would get angry, I was very, very abusive. I was abusive to my siblings, my two younger ones in particular, and I was just, I wasn't so much abusive when I got drunk because like I said, I checked out then. I wasn t in reality anymore. But my behavior when I was sober was the type of behavior that makes me real nervous to think about now. it makes a lot of sense to me why so many times the cycle continues on. I was so very, very angry about so many things that had happened to me in my life. I mean, just so many of the injustices and the abuse that was inflicted upon me that I never asked for and that I never wanted, and I was very, very angry. And when I was drunk, I wasn't really that angry anymore because I didn't have to think about it. But when I was sober, I was very, very angry and I didn' t know how to deal with it. And so I started becoming very abusive to my siblings. And that is something that even today that I think about and it still puts knots in my stomach. And this is one of those shall we drinking behaviors that we all have that I still have a hard time with. That was very difficult for me. But that wasn't what got me into the program, because if I would have had to have relied on my behavior at all, I mean, I think I probably still would have been drunk, because see, it was all justified to me. Everything that I did was okay. I mean it really was, whether I was beating up on somebody or what, it was, it was all okay at that time. I don't quite know why, it just seemed like it was all okay at that time for me to be doing all of that my drinking escalated very very quickly and my drinking and moving moving into the use of drugs it all escalated very quickly because i had found something that i loved i had found something that could take away the pain and it could make me the person that i had never ever been able to be before and so i wasn't going to let go of that for nothing my life started going away from me, though. I didn't care about anything anymore. I really didn't. All I really wanted to do was get drunk. And my story about my drinking is not that much different than anybody else in this room. We all know it. We all know the song and dance of becoming a drunk and of drinking and knowing that that is the only thing that we really want to do or at least for me it was the only things that I really wanted to do and towards the end of my drinking it was the only thing I cared about. I couldn't depend on anybody else. My friends didn't know me. I mean, who was I going to let know me and know the horror and the terror that went on in my home? No, nobody's going to know that about me because they're going to think something's wrong with me. So I put out another phrase. I became a different person than what I was. And that wasn't okay. It seemed to be okay at the time, but it wasn't Okay, because I wasn't being true to myself I didn't know who I was nobody else knew who I was and so I wanted to drink all the more it's the whole cycle things got so bad for me that I remember all I wanted you to do was die I think it was on my last drunk yes in fact it was at my last drug see I didn t forget it I'm always told by my sponsors and people in AA don't ever forget your last run well i i don't think i ever will um because i remember that that was probably about the lowest time of my life i couldn't figure out what was wrong you know i'm i'm bent over the toilet i'm puking i'm sick i i couldn'T FIGURE OUT WHAT WAS WRONG why do i just want to die i i just i couldnT FIGURE IT OUT i thought you know what what more could a person want i'M HERE AT A PARTY AT MY SISTER'S HOUSE I'M DRUNK I'M DOING DRUGS I CAN'T SEE STRAIGHT more could a person want you know why why do all i want to do is die i went home that night and um there were you have to remember that there was there was a bottom we all hit a bottom we don't just wake up one morning and say geez i've been drinking a little too much i think i better join that aa group down the street you know there was there was big build-up to this and i was i was doing bad at school i was you know i was an athlete i couldn't do any of my athletics anymore i mean things were just things were going downhill for me and i remember coming home the night of my last drunk and thinking that really all i wanted to do was die i just didn't i just didn't care and i was 17. and that's and that terribly terribly sad for anybody to get that point in their life but i think that that for somebody as young as that I think it's equally as, I mean I think its almost doubly as sad. Because many people say that's supposed to be such a wonderful time in your life, although I don't buy that for a second. Seventeen, no way. But I did. I wanted to die. I just didn't think there was anything else for me. And when I got home, I crawled up the stairs and I was laying on my bed with the towel over my face and i remember i remember my dad coming upstairs and telling me that that he wanted me to come downstairs because he and mom wanted to talk to me i went downstairs and mom and dad said that they had had it and then i needed some help i have to tell you that i am i am grateful for for that evening with my parents and that they did see fit to get me some help i am grateful for that and so they said that they were going to take me into a treatment center for an evaluation and i was a little nervous about this evaluation um all my friends said well what's the problem i mean you don't have one what are you so nervous about you're going for a three-day evaluation you answer a few questions you get back out again and i'm trying to convince myself yeah that's right that's there's no problem here this will be just fine this will be just fun well I go into this three-day evaluation and I don't know how they run treatment centers now and I know how they write them out of state but in 1979 which is when I went into treatment was November of 1979 they robbed you of everything I mean I gave him my clothes I gave them my cosmetics I gave then everything that I came in there with and they tossed me a pair of hospital pajamas and said get used to it honey you're going to be here for a while i mean i i had i had nothing and so and so i went into this three three day evaluation and i knew that there wasn't anything wrong with me so i wasn't gonna lie and and i didn't lie i'm talking to this guy and he's asking me these questions and i think the questions are a little weird you know but but i'm talking to him to him and i'm thinking that you know the questions are well all right i'll answer them because i really didn't think i had anything to hide and the thing about this man was that he was answering, he knew what I was going to say next he knew almost what was going on inside of my head and it frightened me but at the same time I thought where has this person been? here I have finally found one person who knows what I'm going through who can understand that yes I am a better driver when I'm drunk who can understand some of these things that nobody else would believe and who can understand that yes drinking is my best friend so big deal some people have women friends or boyfriends you know big deal I got booze so what and this guy understood this and I thought this was great I couldn't believe it I'm thinking I'm getting a clean bill of health right because we're clicking so well after after my three days of that evaluation are up i'm thinking that you know he's going to call my parents and they're going to come and we're all going to go home and live happily ever after again but he's looked at me and he said deb he said you're sick you're really really sick and and i looked at him and you know the first thing that crossed my mind was i don't feel sick you know i really don't think that i'm sick and then it started to dawn on me what he was talking about he said you've got alcoholism and if you don't take care of that it's going to kill you one way or another and and i i thought this is not possible because i know what an alcoholic is and i'm not that alcoholic i may like to drink a little bit but i'm not an alcoholic because i didn't do those things forgetting a lot of the things that i did do when i was sober were quite similar to some of the other things that had been done to me and so i was i thought that my world was going to come to an end i really did i what i felt you know what what am i going to do here what am i going tell my friends what what am i gonna what am i gonna tell everyone and so i begged and i pleaded that i could stay in outpatient this place was 40 miles from my home this treatment center he said no you need impatient you need impatient and you didn't you need it now i couldn't i really did thought that i was gonna think that i was going to die i didn't know what i would possibly do without booze because then you have to deal with life then you has to face reality no matter how painful it is you got to do it and i didn t i wasn't ready to i really wasn't and so i just i did not want to do it but i was too afraid not to i mean there there was a big contradiction going on inside of me i was too young but then at the same time i was two afraid i was to afraid of what would happen to me if i didn't because i remembered how i felt the night before i went in for that evaluation i remembered miserable i felt and i did remember that i wanted to kill myself and that was not the first time and I did remember my behavior and how I treated my siblings I did remembered that stuff and I thought well maybe he's got a point I guess I'll hang around listen to what he has to say so I stayed in treatment stayed in treatment for 28 days and quite frankly treatment wasn't much different from home the only thing that didn't happen in treatment is nobody was hitting me they were yelling at me they where abusive they were were rotten. And there was a part of me that thought, well, what is the matter with these people? Who do they think they are treating me like this? Then there was another part of me this said, listen, you know, just listen to what they're saying. And I sort of listened and I sort didn't. There was a party that knew that this wasn't going to be the big portion of my life, that this was going to a very, very small fraction of the rest of my life i don't know how i knew that but i do remember thinking that one day when i walked out of group after being on the hot seat thinking oh boy is this a joke you know this is this is going to be a small fraction of any type of sobriety i ever have i can tell you that i remember thinking that so i stayed in treatment for 28 days and i probably learned about oh i learned one thing in treatment i think that i was an alcoholic two things that i wasn't alcoholic and that i I had caused a lot of people a lot of harm. Two things I learned. Those were valuable things to learn at that time in my life. I got out of treatment, my counselor says, you better go to AA. I said, what about aftercare? Can't I go to that aftercare instead? You know, everybody talks about after care. I want to go to aftercare. And I don't know if this is lingo that people from out of state are familiar with, but in Minnesota we're real familiar with treatment and aftercare and all of that kind of lingo. Some of that's unfortunate. but I wanted to go to aftercare and he said no, no, you don't need aftercare you need good solid Alcoholics Anonymous and I'm thinking oh wow, Alcoholics Anonymous, give me a break, at least at aftercare I'd have people in my group that I could come back to every time and talk every week and talk to about what was going on and what crises had happened in their lives but no, this guy wants me to go To AlcoholicsAnonymous so I figure, I'm thinking to myself that I don't know if this is such a good idea but at the same time, this guy really scared me and I did not want to cross him he yelled at me and he was real icky and I didn't want to across that guy so I thought, well who am I to argue so I went home to my hometown and I started going to this AA meeting and this was in 1979 and I came from a town of 4,000 people like I said before. And so there wasn't a big selection of AA meetings, and there wasn t a lot of 17-year-olds that attended AA. In fact, I attended AA with men in their 40s and 50s, and they were about 10 of us. And we d sit at a table even smaller than this section right up here every Tuesday night, and we d read the Big Book. I thought the big book was a stupid book to begin with. I couldn't understand why it would have anything to do with my sobriety. I really didn't. I didn't, because I thought that I had paid my dues. I spent 28 days in treatment on the hot seat. Now, I've paid my dues, there's nothing more to this sobriete business but going to treatment, coming out, and then putting the cork in the bottle. Simple. Easy disease to take care of, right? Well, I was a little wrong in that area um because i soon found out that putting the cork in the bottle and simply quitting drinking is just does not take care of the alcoholism because you see i didn't start drinking because my life was wonderful i didn t start drinking because i didn d have any skeletons in my closet and i didn ve had some garbage that i needed to deal with i started drinking because my reality i didn't care for and also because i'm an alcoholic and it's a disease and even if even if i had studied and studied volumes of books written on alcoholism there's no way i could have avoided it um i am a believer in some some people would disagree with me but i I am a believer that I myself was pegged an alcoholic very early on in life because I never drank for the taste. I drank to get drunk. There was no other reason to drink but to get drugged. And so AA was not a very important area in my life in the very beginning. It really wasn't because, like I said, I thought I paid my dues in treatment. And I thought that that was all I had to do. Well, I didn't like that AA meeting in the very beginning. And I would go in there and I would look at my feet. And then I'd watch the clock and then I listened to what somebody else had to say. And I didn' t think it was very important at that time but I kept going. Every Tuesday night I showed up at that meeting and I can't tell you why. I don't know why. I didn''t like it. I didn ''t like the people there but I kept showing up. and maybe one of the reasons that I did was because for the first time in my life I felt like I was doing something right being sober was doing Something Right for me because I was no longer doing all of those things that I was ashamed of even when I was sober I wasn't doing a lot of the abusive stuff I wasn' t drinking and doing all of that crazy stuff I wasn''t behaving in that way And so I thought, okay, there is something to this sobriety. I didn't quite know what it was at that time, but I knew there was something to it, so I kept going. In the fall, I went away to college. I had about eight months of sobrietry when I started college, and I've got to tell you that the hand of God was with me through my entire first eight months because I didn' t have a sponsor. I didn''t think a sponsor was important. People talk to me about sponsors, and do you have a sponsor? And I'd say, no, I'm still looking. I'm so looking. I haven't quite found anybody that I would particularly care to have sponsored me. I'm just trying to find somebody who knows enough. And so I didn't have a sponsor. And I do believe that it was the grace of God that I stayed sober for the first eight months because I certainly didn't do much on my own although what I did was get to that meeting every Tuesday night for some odd reason, and I think that was probably my higher power. I went to school at Winona State, which is southeast Minnesota, a small town. And it was there that I met my sponsor, and it was THERE that Alcoholics Anonymous started meaning something to me. It was THERE THAT I realized that there was more to being sober than not drinking, that there WAS much, much MORE to AA and working a program than just when you walked in the door of your meeting. I it was there that I learned what fellowship was and what sponsorship was and what real true friendship was people who cared and loved me for who I was because I have to tell you I walked into that meeting the very first time and I thought I really knew everything that they were that they had to say because after all I've been sober for eight months and I probably went to as I thought the best treatment center on the face of the planet. And so, you know, I was going to know everything that everybody else was going to know. Well, it got pointed out to me very quickly on that I really didn't. And it was pointed out in such a way that it really went over my head. And I didn't quite understand that it had been pointed out until some time later. But I met my sponsor at this meeting and she has been my sponsor for the past ten years which I believe is a gift from my higher power I've never I've never felt it necessary to search out another sponsor and I've also never felt it necessarily tell her that she didn't know what she was talking about although I do have to admit I have at times told her that but I have usually followed her advice which was one of the things that that AA taught me early on was that I have to listen to people who are up there because the majority of and probably know more than i do and i got to tell you most of them did most of them did i had eight months sobriety and then it moved into a year and then it moved in to a year-and-a-half and i was still hearing people talk about the steps and different things in their lives and i was still thinking how come i didn't think of that you know how come I haven't been doing it that way because i had this idea in my head that i was supposed to know everything that that i i was i was supposed to know it all and i i don't quite know where that came from but i i'm it's you know dissipating it must mean i'm doing something right in my program but another thing that happened at winona aaa besides meeting my sponsor which was a wonderful gift for my higher power was that there were a couple of old-timers there who took my sponsor and i under their wing in in such a way that they taught us more about the 12 steps and how to live them than um any anybody who's ever done anybody who i've ever encountered in my life after that and i remember charlie charlie was one of the guys that uh that i got to know down in winona one of you old timers and i remembered him saying that because i was struggling so hard with with working step three and turning it over and doing all of that good stuff that that you're supposed to do with step three and turning your will and your life over to the care of God and all of that type of stuff. It was such hard work. It was so hard, and I didn't get it, and I couldn't figure it out, and oh, I struggled. And sometimes, I swear to God, I sweat when I was trying to work these steps and figure them out, you know? And I remember Charlie saying to me one night when we were out for coffee, he said, Deb, someday you're going to cross over that imaginary line where you're no longer working it but you're living it and he's this going to happen i said when i want it now i want to happen now i'm so sick of working these steps and trying to figure out what they mean to me and how they apply to my life and he said you'll know it when it happens you'll note when it happens and so i had to believe that i had trust that i probably i saw a spirituality in in charlie that i wanted and i was off always told when i got into aa that spirituality is the foundation of program and if if you don't have spirituality you're missing a huge huge piece of the program and that made me nervous because i didn't have it and i didn' know what it was i knew that there was a higher power out there because after all the grass was green the sky was blue we had clouds and all that kind of stuff but the fact that there could be a higher power out there who wanted me to be happy who wanted me to sober and who was going to work with me well that was a real odd concept to me and i really really had a hard time with that one and i remember walking around in the group saying well you know who's your higher power what kind of higher power do you have how do you work with your higher power you know and everybody kind of looking at me and saying sort of halfway answers but you know i mean think about if somebody came up to you today and said so how do you communicate with your higher power you it's so personal it's such a personal thing that it it's kind of a difficult question to answer but i wanted somebody else's spirituality i wanted somebody to tell me how to be spiritual how to have this higher power when it's right there in the steps it's right there steps two and three you come to believe that a power greater than yourself can restore you to sanity and i i didn't really care for for the became to believe i thought well okay that sounds like it's a process to me i'm not so crazy about processes i just kind of like it to happen right now but it was it was a process and quite frankly it's still a process I quite often I have to I have come to believe all over again because there are times in my sobriety where I think that I I think my higher power is checked out and nobody's watching over me anymore and nobody is helping me through this and and I'm all on my own and one of the things that was pointed out to me probably by my sponsor was that the higher power doesn't leave very often it's usually you who moves from your higher power and um i kind of resented that because i thought well i haven't gone anywhere you know i'm right here same place that i've always been i you know kind of thought that was a bunch of garbage but it turned out that it was pretty true that yeah i was usually the one who moved and it's funny how quickly that spirituality can leave uh without me even knowing it and how it can get out of hand but i have to tell you that i would not be standing up here today telling my story if it wasn't for my spirituality and if it weren't for the many many gifts that i've been given because of this programming because of the spirituality within it one of the um one of the toughest things that that i have had to do in um in my time in aa is take a look at that fourth and that fifth step and i think that's probably i mean i know i'm not the only one in in the club. There's a lot of us in that club of, you know, geez, I'd sooner die than take a fourth and a fifth. And that's how I was. I really wasn't so crazy about it at all because I knew there was a lot of stuff there. I knew there was A LOT. And you know the thing about the fourth and the fifth step at the very beginning of my sobriety is that I thought it only had to do with my drinking. I thought the only thing that I really had to take a fearless searching moral inventory about was my time when I was drinking. What did I do when I was drunk? What did i do when i was thinking about being drunk? What was my behavior like at that time? And so for probably about six or seven years of my sobriety, I only concentrated on my drinking behavior, which was okay. I mean that was fine. It was something that I needed to do. But along about the sixth year of my sobriete, I think that my higher power thought that it was on and i say that because i didn't think it was time to move on i was happy where i was i was perfectly happy you know working my program the way that i was working it my higher power um thought that it was probably time that i dealt with a lot of things that had happened to me even before i started drinking and it talks about that in the big book those are not the words exactly but it talks before it speaks about the um before it starts talking about the fourth and the fifth step it's on page 64. our liquor was but a symptom so we had to get down to causes and conditions that was what i had to start working on i had you start realizing that yeah i'm an alcoholic but there's a lot more to me than just an alcoholic i had to start taking a look at steps six and seven i had started realizing that things in my life needed to be different i needed to change i needed to get off that merry-go-round and sure a lot of things have changed for me in my life since i've gotten sober but i need to take needed to take a look at a lot of the issues that got me to where i was at a lot of the abuse it um because like i said i didn't start drinking because my life was so wonderful i mean it just it just didn't quite work that way i'd like to be able to stand up here and tell you that i started drinking because i didn t have anything better to do. No, that wasn't it at all. I had to start taking a look at what it meant and what it was doing to my life today. You know, because I knew what it did to me when I was a kid. But what's it doing to me today? And so I needed to take a look at that. And it's funny how the 12 steps will work on that. Not exclusively. But it was it's been probably the most difficult thing i've ever had to do is to take a look at some of those conditions and causes because they weren't very good and i have never been i'm not so crazy about even looking at them today but something brought me to that point i didn't get to that point on my own i did not get tothat point of saying hey i need to start looking at conditions and causesbecause the liquor is but a symptom you know i i didn' t wake up one day saying that I was brought to that point, and I'm quite grateful for it because I feel like I have grown and my program has changed quite a bit since that time. I look at things a lot differently than I did before. I look AT the program a lot different than I DID before, at least MY program, not the program in general, but how I work MY program which is so important to me. And I also have a new appreciation for the promises. the promises were something that that were always read at I remember the first Founders Day conference that I was ever at and for you women who are out of state that's a conference that's held here in Minnesota to commemorate the founders of AA in Minnesota and also Bill and Bob and I was at my first Founder's Day and I heard this woman telling her story and talking about, you know, her recovery and her process and all of that. And I remember her talking about the promises. And I remembered her reading the promises and that was the first time that I'd ever heard of the promises I think I had about a year and a half sobriety and I thought, hey, these sound pretty good You know, I wouldn't mind having a few of these for myself They sound really good And there was a feeling that came over me when she read those promises I mean, it was like a chill going right up my spine like oh this so this is it this this is what it's all about what i have found through my sobriety and and my my sponsor speaks of this also is that um sometimes the promises are very painful and it's and it'S really really hard and painful sometimes to be able to look at them and say yeah i've had a lot of those promises and i have i've Had a lot Of them but it hasn't it hasn'T been rose garden you know and and i think and i would like to to see the hands of all those women out there whose sobriety has just been a breeze you know i mean it's it's just not because life isn't you know it's not that it's nothing i am just an alcoholic and that is why my life is difficult uh sometimes life really stinks and you take the good with the bad that was another thing that i learned really early on you know i remember when i had my first crisis in sobriety you know and i'm thinking what this is not supposed to happen i'm sober i'm going to a.a i'm working a program i've got a sponsor this type of thing is not suppose to go on in my life anymore and charlie once again says to me just real simple deb you take the good with the bad this is life you know you're gonna have good days you're going to have bad days you take them as they come and you apply what you've learned to each one of those days. You know, I hung on to that message, and I mean, that's one that I probably passed on to more women than I sponsored than anything, is that you take the good with the bad. And that's been a powerful lesson that I've learned in my sobriety. I'm sort of coming to the close of my story. There's not, well, actually there's quite a bit more to tell, but, you know, there's probably only a handful of people in here who would be interested in it, and those are either the women that I sponsor or my close friends, so I won't take up time talking about it. I just want to say that I probably feel more grateful on a night like tonight where I have got the opportunity to give to all of you just a little bit of what I've been given in this program. Another thing that I did want to add is something that's been very, very important in my program And that's the newcomer to the group. We all remember what it felt like to walk in the door the first time. We all know what it was like. It was scary. And I'll never forget that empty feeling inside of me and that feeling of, What am I doing here? I'm too young. No matter how old you are, I'm still young. I mean, you always are, aren't you? And I remember the loneliness that I felt, and i also remember the despair because um i didn't feel wonderful at my first aa meeting and i didn t feel wonderful when i first walked in the door i was ashamed and i was embarrassed and i did n t know what i was doing there because i really didn t belong especially with all those 50 year old men you know but but i really i really did n't belong but there were people who reached out to me. And there were people who told me, we don't care what you did. We don't care what happened to you in your past. There are no credentials for coming in here. All you've got to do is have a desire to not drink. That's the most important thing. And I thought, well, I've got that. That, that's no problem. I've go that. And then they opened the door and let me come in. And they, and the majority of them were friendly. You a group of people there's always going to be few who aren't but the majority of them were friendly people and they really did care i mean and that was so strange to me so strange and i don't know if it was strange to everybody else in here but it was so strangely that these people didn't even know me and they cared and because of that feeling and because i know how good it felt for me to have somebody say deb we're glad you're here you know keep coming back keep showing up keep doing the steps you know call your sponsor do all that stuff because of that made me feel so good that these people actually cared that they were going to give me pointers on how to do it you know i i remember that and i remembered that when a newcomer walks into my group and I that I believe is probably one of the most important gifts that I can give away that I have been given in this program that's probably to me one ofthe most important things that Ican give back is to say to that newcomer glad you're here, can I get you a cup of coffee you know sit down, we're all in the same boat just listen and if you like it well good, if you don't, so what, keep coming back you know and that has been And probably one of the most important parts of my program is giving away what I've been given. And I just have to tell one quick story. When my sponsor and I, I met my sponsor at college, and I swear to God we were the only two recovering alcoholics on the whole campus because nobody else would come about. Nobody else would Come out from behind the bushes or the closet or wherever they were hiding, but we knew that we were not the only drugs because we kept getting calls. We kept getting calls from people in administration saying aren't you the two who go who aren't drinking anymore? And we'll say yeah because well, we didn't have much anonymity at that time because we wanted to spread the news to everyone that we were wonderful and sober and call us up and we'll save you and I mean those were our exact words too my sponsor and i would go on many many 12-step calls because we were the only two on campus and so we get calls from administration saying so-and-so is breaking windows in this dorm go over there and talk to him do what you can and you know that was really kind of a dangerous thing for us to do because we didn't know that you know maybe it would have been smart to call the police and and maybe so this person didn't hurt themselves or something but but we went on we went and quite we had an opportunity to go on quite a few 12-step calls and and i have to tell you that um i've never won i'd never go on them alone no way not even today i would never go into 12 step call alone because there's something about seeing somebody in the same place that you were at no matter how many years ago it was that takes your heart and sort of just rips it right out and so it's always been very very important to me for me to have at least another alcoholic in the room whether i know him or not at least i'm going to walk out of there with one more person but another thing another thing that it taught me is like marge was saying you plant the seed you don't yeah you can't carry the drunk you can you can save them you can help them you could talk to them until they were blue in the face but if they're not ready if it is not their time to become sober you know what are you going to do you can't do anything but plant the seed and be there when they call because they have I have been there and they have called and then we go to a meeting that's very important part of my program and I think it's important to find an important thing in your own personal program for some people it's service for some it's other things but it's important for me, at least. I shouldn't talk to the group, but it is important for me to find some part of this program that I get self-satisfaction and feelings of gratitude from, and being able to give away what has just been so freely given to me. I don't want you to think I didn't work for it either, but a lot of it was given to me that that's a big part of this program and it's a big part what keeps me sober because there's nothing better than talking to somebody on the phone the night before and they were drunk and then come into your meeting the next day in there I don't think there's any better feeling in the world probably not such a great feeling for them right away but it's a good feeling for me and it helps me to remember that yeah I do do have some things that I can do here I do have some information that i can give away and i you know you hear it over and over again in order to keep it you got to give it away and boy i believe that right down to my toes i completely believe that i mean what are we all doing here this weekend i mean i don't think that most of us are probably going to be sitting in our rooms doing nothing we're going to get talking to people in hospitality rooms and giving away a little bit of what we've been given that's part of the energy and part of the power of a convention like this. And I think, especially with women, I think this is wonderful. I appreciate being able to share my story with you. Have a wonderful time in Minnesota. Thanks.