Sandy's Journey: From Early Drinking to Long‑Term Sobriety

- Hi, my name is Sandy, I'm an addict and an alcoholic.

- Hi Sandy.

- And I wanna thank Scott for inviting me

to come participate in my own recovery here.

It's always an honor and a pleasure to be asked

to speak at a meeting.

And let me just see, okay, there's a clip right here.

Trying to keep track of my time here.

So I'm gonna tell you a little bit about what it was like,

what happened and what it's like now.

I like to kind of follow the format.

I'll tell you that I too, like Abraham was a late bloomer.

I didn't actually start drinking till I was like eight.

I didn't start drinking until I was like 13.

And what I found was that I was, I'm half Japanese

and I have literally this allergy to alcohol.

Like my whole face turns bright red.

My head feels like it's a 50 pounds heavy.

And whenever I drink, like I emanate this kind

of 105 temperature, right?

And I feel like, oh, just plop me up against the wall, right?

And then, so that brings in other party favors

'cause I need to stay up because all my friends

are out drinking me, they're out partying me.

And I'm gonna fall asleep unless I'm gonna pass out,

unless I like kind of keep up with the crowd.

So then I remember, as a young woman, 13 years old,

being jealous of my friends, like (indistinct)

just this lightweight, you know?

And I remember like experimenting with different things

and you know, and for me, I didn't like beer.

So I hated the taste of beer.

So I remember like, oh, I'll just take the tequila, right?

And then after a pint of tequila, I'm dry heaving

and I'm like, oh, never, ever, ever, ever, ever again, right?

Same thing happened with Jack Daniels, same thing happened

with Jim Beam, I mean, I kind of went through 'em

to go like, okay, you know, that is not for me.

That's just not for me.

As a young girl, I was in a sport

'cause my dad was a basketball coach.

So I started playing basketball when I was like six years old,

no, eight years old and running trips when I was six.

But as a girl, I was like into sports and school.

And then as a teenager, all of a sudden,

it just kind of like flipped into now I'm interested

into the opposite sex and drugs, right?

And I remember at that point in time, you know,

Nancy Reagan, the Reagans were in office

and she had this huge just say no campaign

and you know, just say no, sounds so simple, right?

And I remember like a poster and the poster had like a photo

of like an alcohol bottle with the skull and crossbones

and then a picture of what pills look like

and a picture of what like heroin looks like with a needle

and a picture of like these.

And then somewhere across the bottom,

it said something to the effect of, you know,

just say no, 2 million people are addicted to drugs

and whatever in the world or in the United States,

whatever it was.

And I thought to myself, 2 million people, huh?

Must be something good about that.

So I kind of got this opposite message

that like I was reading between the lines,

but I don't think that was a message

that they really intended to give.

And of course you never think

that you're gonna be the one with the problem.

You never think you're gonna be the one, you know,

that really needs to ask for help.

You know, I didn't think I was gonna be the one

that felt like dying.

I didn't think so.

That was the furthest thing from my mind.

I just thought, oh, I just wanna party.

I just wanna have a good time.

I had this like, you know, this like secret life

and not only secret life to all my friends

that also partied with me,

but also a secret life to those friends

that I partied with, right?

So I have this one persona that I portray to, you know,

my parents and their friends and my school.

And then I have this other persona

that I portray to my associates and my friends.

But then even when I'm not partying with you, right?

Later, I'm back over here and thinking to myself,

I remember like, you know,

I remember going and getting a, you know,

they called it a sham, but it's PCP, okay?

And yeah, angel dust, right?

And I remember at 14, 15 thinking,

Scott will think bad of me

if he knows I'm smoking angel dust, right?

So I won't tell him that I'm smoking angel dust

because he'll think bad of me, you know?

So I'd be like, oh yeah, I haven't done that in so long.

And it's been like maybe three weeks, right?

So I'm already like learning these survival skills

to lie and cheat and to be someone else, right?

Anyways, you know, we learn when we get here,

it's actually in the doctor's opinion, you know,

it talks about alcoholism being a progressive disease.

And then there's a whole premise.

This is a hypothesis really that says, you know,

the alcoholic is different from other people

because we are like physically different

and mentally different, right?

And then spiritually different also than other people.

That's why my friend can drink, drink, drink, drink, drink.

And then at the end of the night, she said,

oh, I gotta be at work, I gotta go.

And I'm thinking to myself, what are you talking about?

They're staying here, I didn't freaking leave it.

I'll leave at three or four.

I'll make it to work at eight.

Then of course around 5 a.m. you're thinking,

I'm not making it, I'm not making it, okay?

And there's nothing like a well-looked ass

that'll make you willing, that'll make you willing.

People say like, oh, I don't know about this God's concept.

That's all right, you know, well-looked ass

will bring you right back in here.

Try a little bit more experimentation.

And when I got here, I didn't even know I was done.

Oh, by the way, my sobriety date is January 23rd, 1990.

I was 20 years old when I got here.

Like I said, you know, I was kind of running and gunning

since I was maybe 13 years old,

but I wouldn't even think of it like running and gunning.

I would think of it like I was a party animal

that just liked to party on the weekends, you know?

I had thought of myself as someone who liked to work hard

and play hard, you know?

And this is what I'm telling myself in my mind, right?

And next thing I know, my job really as a daughter,

as a student really is to go to school, do well in school.

And I went from doing well in school

to progressively doing worse and worse

as I was progressively drinking more and more.

As I was, and I remember going to the parties

with the Boon's Farm and the Mad Dog 2020

and all this kind of stuff.

And like I said, I kind of went through it

and thinking to myself like,

and what's so weird about that is because I'm half Japanese

and I have that allergy

and the doctor's opinion talks about it,

we have this physical allergy,

but this mental obsession, right?

And it never even dawned on me.

Just don't drink, just don't use.

As a matter of fact, when I got here,

my life in shambles, feeling like I wanted to die,

thinking of suicide.

Yeah, now I get homicidal, not suicide.

I consider that progress.

But when I got here, yeah, wanting to die,

now I can't remember my train of thought,

but being like, oh, let me get sober.

I was thinking, let me feel better, let me feel better.

As a matter of fact, you told me just stop everything.

And even then my life in shambles,

I think that's what I was gonna say.

I thought like, this is the craziest idea ever.

Like what, stop everything.

It had never even dawned on me.

I thought at that time when I got here in 1990

that I probably had a cocaine problem,

a severe cocaine problem,

but I probably didn't have a marijuana problem

or a drinking problem.

And what they told me was, you know what, Sandy?

You start drinking,

then you're gonna go back to hard drugs, okay?

Or worse, you're just gonna continue on for years, right?

And then that's gonna get bad, right?

Or, and I just wasn't thinking like, oh, give up everything.

It just never even dawned on me that this was the problem.

I thought it was the situation that was the problem.

Oh, I was in this unfortunate situation, okay?

So here I am, a teenager, I'm trying to go to school,

I'm trying to go to college.

And now my partying is getting

more from my hobby to my vocation.

I am, it's kind of teetering on my mood.

It's like, how was your weekend?

Well, it depends.

Do I remember it?

What kind of drugs did I have?

What kind of alcohol did I have?

What kind of parties did I go to, right?

More based on that than, just like a little lost,

just a little lost.

But still thinking to myself in my head,

I'm just a party animal.

I just like to play hard and work hard and play hard.

But I wasn't working so hard anymore, right?

Now I'm not working so hard anymore, okay?

So anyways, I'm kind of cute and I know this

and I try cocaine, okay?

And at the first time I tried it,

I think I was 13 or 14 years old.

13 when I tried cocaine,

14 when I tried smoking cocaine, okay?

And at the time I had a boyfriend

that had a little bit of a speedball problem, okay?

So he was 17, I was 13.

I'd go over to his house, help him tie off.

In the meantime, mind you,

I have no idea that this is never anything

you'd want your 13 year old daughter doing, right?

People are bringing jewelry and VCRs over to his house.

Or Betamax, it was Betamax back then.

I was thinking to myself, why am I doing this?

I don't understand this.

And he goes, you'll see, you'll see, you know?

And I was like, I didn't really get it so much.

Then later when I tried smoking cocaine,

all of a sudden I had this rush.

And I thought to myself, it scared me so much.

I thought to myself, oh my God, I'm halfway cute.

Like if I keep on doing this,

I'll be walking down to Florida by the time I'm 15.

And I knew that, like I like this.

So then I started to think to myself, you know what?

I'm not gonna do this because only scumbags do this.

I'm not gonna do it 'cause scumbags do it, that's what.

So now I'm just back to, you know,

drinking and smoking pot and I'm trying to moderate them.

Keep it staying away from the cocaine

or at least smoking the cocaine, you know?

Fast forward, now I'm 18 and I meet this stockbroker.

And this stockbroker's got this Porsche outside.

But he's got a little bit of a freebase in the issue, okay?

Now I think to myself,

well, if you can't beat him, join him.

Well, you know what, he's not a scumbag.

Look at the Porsche, right?

Justifying and rationalizing all this stuff in my mind, okay?

So now all of a sudden, you know,

we're like on runs together, okay?

And just to kind of make a long story short,

in January of 1990, January 15th, 1990,

we woke up, we started freebasing like we were doing,

you know, and by 10 30 in the morning,

he had taken his 357 Magnum and he had blown his brains out.

And I called the paramedics, they came.

They thought I killed him.

They saw all the drugs in the house.

They thought I killed him because most people,

nine out of 10 people will kill the girlfriend first

and then kill themselves.

But let me tell you, I didn't feel lucky.

Like, oh, I survived.

No, I didn't feel lucky.

All of a sudden I was like in this huge world of hurt,

you know, I could always point at someone else to say,

you know, like a lower companion to say,

actually they really have the problem, not me.

They really have the problem, okay?

Now all of a sudden I'm 20 years old, by the way,

my boyfriend at the time was 28, okay?

And at the time we were living at,

we were living in a apartment off of there,

off of like Parthenia and Reseda.

And the night that he killed himself, so the cops come,

they see all the drugs in the house, they arrest me, right?

They take me to jail.

They see, they take some GSR prints off my hands,

gunshot for gunshot residue.

They asked me if I'll take a lie detective test, right?

And someone broke into our house,

stole the keys to his Porsche

and stole his car that night.

So then his father is asking.

Now his father and parents live in Northern California.

They have to be called.

They have to be told what's happening.

My mother's like, she knew that I liked to smoke pot,

but she had no idea that I was putting on

two pairs of shorts and two pairs of jeans

just to go over to her house at Christmas.

So people wouldn't go, what?

Then they threw me in a, I don't know if they call it 5150.

They put me on a three day hold.

I begged to get out so I could go to my boyfriend's funeral.

I did that, my mother took me to it.

And I came back here and they checked me

into Kaiser Permanente CDRP,

chemical dependency recovery program,

which at the time was on Balboa off Devonshire.

This was the building that fell down

in the Northridge earthquake, okay?

But so I go there and I think it was like

a three or four week program.

You go eight to five and then you go to a meeting

and don't even bother coming back

if you're not gonna go and get this course card signed.

Don't even bother, okay?

So now I'm doing that.

And I'm over there arguing with people saying,

well, of course I have a cocaine problem,

but I don't have an alcohol problem

and I don't have a marijuana problem.

Shit, marijuana is like cigarettes.

Why can't I, you know?

And here I am actually, the doctor at the time said,

I think, you know, you need to,

we're gonna need to send you downtown to Kaiser downtown.

And I said, oh no, I don't think I need that, sir.

I don't think I need that.

And he looked at me, he was like,

you just saw your boyfriend blow his brains out.

What are you talking about?

I don't think you know what you need.

And you know what, either you go willingly

or I'll have two orderlies come and drag you over there.

Okay, I'll go, okay, I'll go, you know?

And so here I am 20 years old.

I have, you know, I don't know my head for my ass.

You know, I'm so spun around.

I'm just like, you know, I'm upside down.

And here is where people welcomed me in.

Here is where I grew up.

Here is where people said to me,

don't worry, we recover here, Sandy, we recover.

What do we recover from, a seemingly hopeless state

of mind and body, right?

And I was seemingly hopeless, hopelessly state

of mind and body because I would think to myself,

maybe I'll just drive my car off the cliff.

Maybe I'll just drive my car into a pole

because, you know, drugs have,

drugs and alcohol have a way of squeezing out

all the dopamine, all the epinephrine,

all the chemicals from your brain where you feel no joy.

You could look at a baby,

you could have a warm towel after a bath.

You could have like, you know, a massage that means nothing

to you whatsoever because you're so focused

on when am I going to get mine?

What, you know, what's in it for me

and when am I going to get mine, you know?

And it's here where I learned that paradigm shift

to start to be of service, not what do you have for me,

but what can I add to the party, right?

Not, you know, it's just like a whole different mindset.

How can I be of service to you?

What can I bring to the party?

What is my agenda coming here, you know?

God, please help me to share a message of open recovery,

you know, if not to one of you, you know,

that I preach what I need to learn the most.

And I got to tell you, you know,

I'm kind of been going through a hard time lately.

I'm having marital problems

and I've been married for 13 years.

I have a 10 year old daughter

and it's like the happiest I ever was.

And now all of a sudden I'm having marital problems,

you know, and I caught my husband with drugs.

And this is a big thing to me because to me it's like,

you know, it's a real, it's real dirt in my face, you know?

So, you know, the first time that it happened,

he said, "Oh, well, I didn't know you felt this way.

This, I can take it or leave it," you know?

And then the second time he said, you know,

"I'm not moving out, we're in love," you know?

And then the third time it was just like,

buddy, you know, this either you don't want to be married

to me or you got a problem, which one is it, you know?

And he's still sticking with,

"Oh, well, I don't have a problem."

Okay, bye bye then.

Because I can't have this around me

and I can't have it around my 10 year old daughter.

I want to say a few things about recovery and relapse.

At any given point in time,

I kind of feel like I'm on this road

to either recovery or relapse.

So I could be stone cold sober,

but be on the path to relapse.

I could be stone cold sober,

but my thinking starts to be,

'cause my thinking's a little bit skewed, right?

So my thinking, instead of thinking to myself,

"Oh, you know, I want to do a good job for Scott.

Help me God to like, you know,

transmit a message of recovery."

Let me tell you, we do recover here because, you know,

I've not only grown up in this program,

but I'm very proud of the woman that I am today.

Like I have no doubt that I'm a good friend,

that I'm a good daughter, that I'm an amazing mother,

you know, that I'm a good wife.

I have no doubt about any of that.

Not like thinking to telling you,

"Oh, I'm really a good wife."

When in the back of my head, I'm going like,

"But shh, don't tell him about that, you know,

don't tell him about three weeks ago."

You know, no, my life's an open book.

It's much easier if I don't lie,

I don't have to keep stuff straight, right?

And another thing is, is that I've learned here

to save my butt and not my face.

Why?

You guys aren't paying my car note.

You guys aren't paying my mortgage.

I'm the one doing that.

So if I come here and throw up all over you

and tell you like, you know, that I'm having a hard time,

that I feel like drinking and using,

that I have 30, 31, almost 32 years of sobriety,

but my head still says, "You know, Sandy,

maybe you should just start partying with your husband

and you'll have..."

I tell you, my head did say that, okay?

Maybe you'll have a better marriage.

And then I thought to myself,

"Whoa, where the hell did that come from?

That, what, for 15 minutes,

I'm going to have a better marriage, right?"

Now my daughter will have not one absent parent,

but two absent parents.

That sounds like the thought

that precedes the first drink, doesn't it?

That's what I learned here.

I learned here to save my butt and not my face,

to come and be revealing to you.

Even though I'm a look good artist,

I really want you to think the best of me.

I really want you to think that I have my stuff together.

You know, I want to appear on the outside

and really have my stuff together.

Even though on the inside, I might be like, you know,

I might've been crying my eyes out in the fetal position,

you know, two hours ago.

But I want you to think I have it together.

And so lately I'm talking myself up a hell of a lot.

Why? Because I learned that here.

Instead of, you know, self-flagellation,

instead of beating myself up,

I'm going to talk myself up and tell myself,

and I just like to tell my sponsees,

"If you're going through hell,

well, shit, don't pitch a tent, right?"

Don't pitch a tent, you know?

Jessica, you're having a hard time?

Lean into God and move your feet.

Lean into God and move your feet.

Thank you, God, for my recovery today.

Please help me stay sober tomorrow.

Kind of back to basics.

How can I be of service to you?

What would you like me to bring to the party?

It's the weirdest thing because here's where I learned,

like, my favorite subject is like me, myself, and I, right?

But the more I think about you and how can I help

and what can I bring and what can I do for you,

then all of a sudden, the happier I am.

The more I think to myself, it's about me, myself, and I.

When am I going to get mine?

When am I going to be a millionaire?

When am I going to get that raise?

When am I going to get that recognition?

You know what?

Then the less happy I am.

Actually, the more frustrated that I am,

the more upset I am, the more controlling I become.

So, you know, it's so weird.

It's like to have that kind of mind, that shift of,

that's just a totally different person,

totally different person, because when I came here,

I was this young woman who thought to herself,

I didn't ask to be born.

You got all the money.

Why don't you buy me a car?

You got all the money.

Why don't you buy me this and that and that and this?

You know, I come from this wonderful family,

but I thought, you know what?

They could be more wonderful, quite frankly.

You know, I was just like really ungrateful, ungrateful.

And quite frankly, it's here that I learned

that gratitude is the elixir of more, right?

You'll want more, be grateful for what you have.

You think God's gonna give, you know,

someone was telling me about this like little parable,

like, you know, that you take this kid

to the ice cream shop and, you know,

they get two scoops of ice cream and they go out the door

and the ice cream spills on the ground.

Well, you go back inside, okay, and the kid says,

"Well, I want three scoops."

Do you get the kid three scoops?

You could barely handle two scoops.

No, you don't, right?

You wanna, gratitude is the elixir of more.

So even to the very simple stuff, you know,

I have to say, well, at least I was really happily,

contentedly married for the time I was.

At least I have this beautiful daughter, you know?

At least there is a path of recovery that, you know,

that is here for us if we want it, if we want it, right?

You kinda gotta want it.

I wanna talk a little bit about the scale of consequences.

So I kind of envisioned this like a scale, right?

And over here is this scale.

So I used to look at it like, ooh, I like getting loaded.

I like drinking.

I like partying.

And then the consequences were like,

I'll deal with that tomorrow, tomorrow, tomorrow, right?

But the high, the buzz, you know,

that feeling was heavily weighted on the scale.

Now it's the opposite way where I go,

I know what this is all about.

I know what it's all about, you know, scoring, using,

waiting, waiting, waiting, you know, all this stuff.

But the consequences are more heavily weighted

the other direction.

Thank you very much.

I don't want that.

When I got sober and I was using like now,

I appreciate how young I was.

I was only 20, but you know what?

I had this world of regret on how much time I spent wasted.

I felt like, oh my God, I am such a loser.

I've been going to college for six years

and I still don't have a frigging degree.

Why?

Because I was always loaded, you know?

Well, I got sober when I swim,

but for the first two years I didn't do anything, right?

I mean, I went and I remember going to the college counselor

and they said, well, you need like 127 units

to kind of graduate and you actually have 140,

but it's only, it's some in this subject,

some in this subject, some in this subject,

you're not like all concentrated in one subject.

Like, why didn't you come to us sooner?

Why didn't you come to the college counselor sooner?

I was like, what?

I was supposed to do that, right?

So I talked about a little bit

about the scale of consequences.

I talked about recovery,

being on the path to recovery versus relapse.

I want to just touch on suicide a little bit

because I have this direct experience with suicide

and I want to tell you that I'd be lying

if I ever said that I didn't feel suicidal.

I would be lying, so I'm not going to say that.

What I am going to say is that from my direct experience,

I feel like that suicide is a very selfish

and vindictive and cowardly thing to do.

And it hurts those people that love you the most.

Let me tell you about some of the things I've been through

in recovery, five minutes.

Okay, let me tell you about some of the things

I've been through in recovery.

So I wanted to buy a house, I bought a house.

I want to finish college, I finished college.

I want to fall in love, I fell in love, you know?

But also I've been fired in recovery.

I've begun bankrupt in recovery.

Now I'm going through this whole issue with my husband

where he went off his psych meds

and I feel like a little bit embarrassed.

Like, oh my God, I've got a husband

that not only has a drug problem,

but maybe a psych issue also, right?

And truth be known, alcoholism is a psych issue, right?

So I got that same issue, right?

I'm just treating it

with the 12 steps of Alcoholics Anonymous.

I never, I didn't get married till I was 38 years old.

I didn't have a baby till I was 42 years old, you know?

So really like a lot of my dreams have come true

in Alcoholics Anonymous.

Like my life has gotten better and better and better.

Like I don't think to myself,

oh, the best years of my life are behind me.

No, I think that like it renews my heart and my spirit

and my soul to think what else is next, you know?

What's coming up next, you know?

That really it's like the world is my oyster.

I can have anything I'm willing to work for, you know?

That car, that was on my dream board

for like four years before I got it, you know?

But then I got it and then I kind of smashed it

into my other car by accident.

Yeah, that was embarrassing.

That I follow and I trust.

I'm a realtor, so like, I'm gonna say like six years ago,

when six years ago, about five or six years ago,

I was doing an open house.

And in the meantime, my father had been in and out

and in and out and in and out of the hospital.

And my brother and I had gone up north

to Northern California to visit him several times.

And I'm here doing the open house

and I'm thinking to myself after three people came in

in like three hours, I'm thinking to myself,

what the hell am I doing, you know?

And I got in my car and I drove up to the hospital

and I got there about midnight and his wife was there.

And I sat down and I held my father's hand

and you could hear the respirator

and the, you know, kind of thing.

And I read prayers to my dad and then I fell asleep

and I woke up at six in the morning

and I didn't hear that sound anymore.

And I was sitting there holding my dad's hand, you know?

And it was just like little things,

like when I think to myself, go now, go now, you know?

Don't wait, tell that person, tell that person how you feel.

You know, right now, since I'm having this challenging time,

I swear it's just a blessing when, you know,

a friend says, oh, come watch your daughter.

Come on, drop her off.

No big deal, no big deal, come on, drop her off.

I mean, it's like, that's such a big appreciation

because I had to hire someone just so I could work, you know?

Anyways, I wanna just say that I think, you know,

with recovery, it's like I'm fully present.

I'm fully present for the good feelings and the bad.

And you know, I think sometimes, you know, for me,

like the feelings are a little overrated

because I want the good feelings

and I don't want the bad feelings, right?

But I'm just gonna lean into God

and I'm gonna keep moving my feet.

In the meantime, I'm not gonna drink

and I'm not gonna use no matter what today.

And thank you guys for being here on this path with me.

(indistinct chatter)

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