Twelfth Step Brought Me Back to the Podium So I Don’t Forget Where I Came From – Joy B.
About This Speaker Tape
Joy tells her story to the Monday night Blue Chip Speakers meeting at the NABRA Club — her second time at this podium after four years — explaining she needed to tell it again to remember where she came from. She talks with a noticeable stutter (one in a million girls stutter, she says) and brings a Speech Easy device she fought to get through the Georgia Vocational Center but decides not to use it tonight. Small-town West Virginia kid, tall, Black, daughter of party-on-Saturday-after-work parents who divorced when she was 10. At 12 she discovered that wine and other substances let her talk, be the life of the party, feel at home. She had a baby at 15, graduated high school with a C average, got a business degree, and could not figure out why corporate America wouldn't hire her for a hundred-thousand-dollar job.
She moved to Atlanta in the 1980s chasing the geographic cure and walked into two-for-one happy hours in business suits. She became a master manipulator — giggle enough, laugh enough, and men would pay her bills so she had money to drink and use. She left her seven-year-old daughter locked inside the apartment until 2 or 3 a.m. and told herself she was a good mother because she made hot dogs and helped with homework. She married a fellow partier she met at a club — a perfect match because neither had to change. Her brother came to Atlanta to die of AIDS in a condo her husband bought him, and she could not sit at his bedside; the last thing she said to him was "it's not all about you." She had a second daughter, moved to the suburbs, ran PTA and Girl Scouts and elaborate neighborhood parties, and poured vodka into the Sprite cup she carried to her daughter's cheerleading games.
The marriage broke after 19 years. She blamed him first — she was the good wife, this was his disaster — but alone in an apartment, still drinking, she hit a wall. On May 1st she had driven her daughter and other people's children home so drunk she could not see the lines on the highway. Sitting on the side of the bed she picked up the phone and called an 800 hotline. The woman asked if she was an alcoholic, and for the first time in 30 years she said yes. She flew to a 30-day recovery center in Florida, did 90 in 90 when she came home, and has been sober since May 31, 2007.
Her closing inventory of the sober life is concrete: she has held the same job five years, went back and got her master's, cleans her house instead of kicking the vodka bottle under the bed, is her ex-husband's best friend, and has been told she is a role model for young women. She closes with "sometimes I forget my worth" — the reason she came back to tell it again.
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