Thirty-Six Years Sober and I Still Tell My Sponsor I Hope I Never Catch Up to You – Owen
About This Speaker Tape
Owen shares his story at the Monday night Blue Chip speaker meeting, approaching 36 years of sobriety. He grew up in Florida in a 1960s home he describes as a pretend-nothing-is-wrong household: a 6'1" citrus-farmer father who drank a fifth of gin daily like clockwork and a 5'2" mother who was prescribed Librium, Valium, Xanax, and eventually Haldol. Rage filled the house. As a teenager Owen lay in bed plotting to push his drunk father down the narrow pine staircase, and waited for the church minister to come rescue him. He turned against his parents the summer their longtime caretaker — the only person who ever loved him — was retired, and at the same moment he turned against a Higher Power and declared himself an atheist.
His first drink at 14, home alone, was not experimentation: it was the thought "I need a drink." He chugged cheap bourbon and a Valium from the kitchen cabinet and found it "incredibly stimulating." A bottle of Ripple in high school gave him his first blackout; champagne at a friend's sister's wedding ended with him vomiting out of a stopped car while his date's father pulled him from the driver's seat. He blamed the cake. He binged through the Marines under a first sergeant nicknamed Lord Higher Power Jesus, sailed charters in the Bahamas, met his wife, and after kids were born became a daily high-class drinker — imported beer, a third of a bottle of single malt scotch, cognac to finish — always stopping one ounce short of the room spinning, always craving more.
His last drink was a single bottle of beer the night before flying to a New Jersey Al-Anon workshop he hoped would fix him without touching his drinking. Instead a 77-year-old woman who ran the place looked up from his written critiques and told him flatly: "You've got a problem. You don't know who you are. You need to begin by admitting that you're an alcoholic." A hundred-pound bag of fertilizer lifted off each shoulder. A phone call about a Lutheran minister who had quit meetings after 14 years and was drunk came in seconds later. Owen has not wanted a drink since.
He warns that he hit a much harder bottom sober — impulsive investment decisions that wiped out his inheritance, a year of daily suicidal ideation, a plan to drive his Lincoln Continental off a bridge at 120 miles an hour so he could die sober. A voluntary repossession of the car took the plan away. He stopped trying to prove he was a good person, told his wife plainly "I am not a good person," and closes every day now with Psalm 131 — "I am not proud, I have no haughty looks" — the prayer a bishop once told him to memorize before he understood why.
Discussion
Be the first to share your thoughts on this tape.