From Chaotic Childhood to Long‑Term Sobriety: Katzi's Journey

- Hi guys, it's Katzi Davis, alcoholic.

Mindful of the time.

I just forgot my story.

Okay, my sobriety date is August 5th, 2011,

which right in and of itself is an absolute miracle.

I can just tell you that right now.

And after I'm done talking, you'll agree with me, I promise.

I was raised on the East coast in New York

by a mother who was a total normie.

She still is.

She's a nice Jewish girl from Brooklyn.

She's got seven older brothers and an older sister.

And she's always been like in charge of everything

and runs the show and takes care of her family.

And she's a sober woman.

She is an absolutely sober woman.

She married a 18 years older than her divorced alcoholic,

Cuban, who we thought was Cuban, but that's another story.

23andMe is an amazing thing.

Who drank like a fish

and did all kinds of other outside issues

and ran a pot business out of our apartment in Manhattan

and had friends coming over to share

in the large mounds of cocaine

that he would leave in the middle of the table.

And from the time I was a very young child,

all I knew is that when I went to my mom's family,

it was really quiet and everybody was really nice,

but they just played in the yard.

And then they went to bed by eight o'clock

and there were a hundred rules

and all the kids followed the rules

and it just felt very beige and very boring to me.

And then I come home to Manhattan

and go with my father's family.

And there were fights and music and lights and bars

and everything was loud and colorful

and going on all the time and it was dangerous.

And it was scary as a child, but I loved it.

I loved the chaos of it.

I loved being treated like a grownup from the age of like seven

because I had to monitor what was going on

because I was the only sober person in the room

most of the time.

My mother, I will say this,

my mother, my dad would never have allowed her

to not partake in what he was doing.

So she did do some of the party favors

with him at that time,

but that just wasn't her real desire.

And the second she got out of there, it stopped.

But there was a time when I was definitely

the most sober person in the room, almost all the time.

And my cousins who were teenagers

were already partaking of everything

and I could not wait for my turn.

As far as I was concerned, alcohol was my birthright.

I could not wait to get to that bar.

It looked exciting and fun.

My dad had this big bottle of Johnny Walker Red,

I think it was, on a swivel.

It was on a big old wooden swivel.

And I just wanted to pour some of that for myself so bad

and everything else that was there.

And I would make the drinks for everybody

and I would taste them as I went along.

And everything tasted kind of icky,

but I didn't care because I knew I wanted it.

Everybody was having a good time

and I wanted to be part of that party.

But the other side of that is being a child of an alcoholic

means you want to kind of be in control all the time.

So for the longest time,

what I didn't do is what my older cousins did,

which was delve really quickly into heavy drugs

because I didn't ever want to not know

what was going on in the room.

It was too dangerous to not be aware

of my surroundings all the time.

So I was sort of a careful-butting alcoholic

as a young child.

But by the time I got, my mom and dad divorced,

understandably, when I was like 11.

And by the time I got to Los Angeles with my mom,

I was seeking the party,

but not really knowing where to look yet in LA.

And what I did know is that every opportunity I had to drink

I knew how much was available to me.

I knew how much was there for everybody in the room

and if I thought it was gonna be enough or not.

And I was constantly aware of who was pouring what when.

And I learned from a very young age

to help out in the kitchen, help the hostess.

Even if I went to parties with my parents,

I would offer to go help the lady of the house

in the kitchen 'cause then I could sneak all the drinks

as I was cleaning them out.

And it was just, I loved everything

about the way alcohol made me feel.

I really, really did.

And I hated myself so much.

I had so many terrible things running through my head

all the time, a constant cacophony of what's wrong with you.

And if anybody knew the real you, they wouldn't like you.

And stop doing that and stop making that face

and they're seeing you now

and what do you think you're doing?

I mean, it would just never shut up.

And alcohol shut it up.

It shut it down.

When I got to high school,

by the time I got to high school parties

and all I had to do was get there early enough

to get in that kitchen and get to the alcohol first

or bring it myself or preload.

I learned to do that really early on.

And as long as I had at least a couple of drinks with me

by the time I walked through that door,

by the time people started walking through the door,

I was gonna be okay because I didn't care anymore.

Now I don't care what you think of me

or whether you notice that look on my face, who cares?

And I'm calm, finally, just a little bit calm in my head.

And trying to find that initial calm that alcohol gave me

is what I chased into madness

for the next 27 years of my life.

So I went to an Alcoholics Anonymous meeting

when I was like 17 or 18 years old.

I think I was just trying to befriend a girl at school

who was popular and she was going

and she asked me to come support her.

And it was at the Ohio Avenue meeting hall,

which was right across the street

from where my mom had just moved in.

We just moved in with my stepdad right there.

So I was a block and a half from my home.

So I always knew that was AA.

And from that experience for the next 20 years or so,

27 years, I would go in and out of AA like a vagrant.

I would just show up from time to time to get the heat off

or when I thought maybe I'd gone a little too far

or to hear, I wanted somebody to teach me how to drink

like a lady, for one thing.

I needed desperately for someone to teach me

how to exist with alcohol

without having it totally destroy everything around me.

And I loved anything that sped me up.

So I did a lot of that too.

Going into my 20s and 30s, I found myself a mate

who had a worse problem with cocaine

than I did with alcohol, at least that's what it looked like.

And that was great because that gave me an excuse.

You drink too if you're with this man.

Of course I'm drinking, look what he's bringing home

and the mess he's making of our lives.

And it was really, and we had a child together

and that was kind of the biggest wake up call of all for me

although it didn't stop me for,

my son was 11 when I got sober, so it takes a while.

But I definitely recognize that neither one of us

were capable of being good supportive parents.

And my son was diagnosed autistic

when he was three and a half years old.

And from that point on, it was like,

I don't know how to do this.

And the more overwhelmed I became, the more I drank.

And what had started out, in all through,

it's a progressive disease, right?

And we all, we start out in one way, it's problems and fun,

fun and then fun with problems and then just problems.

But for me, it was like the fun really ran out so early on

and I just didn't recognize it, I refused to believe it.

And I kept trying to make it my social life.

And it was just, it's real, I just drink to go out

and to have fun and this is what people do

and we drink to go dancing and we drink to go to bars

and this is how we entertain ourselves.

But the truth is, I was not capable of going out anywhere

unless there was a plan of alcohol included in that night.

I wasn't saying yes to any plan you had

that didn't involve a bar or a store or a liquor store

'cause that was just a waste of time to me.

And I needed it, I needed it desperately.

In the beginning, the alcohol,

it really quickly became my medicine.

First it was my social lubricant, then it became my medicine

and once it became my medicine,

the need for it was so intense, I absolutely could not stop.

And I saw myself like blowing up my life a few times.

I had really good jobs or I'd get into school

and then I'd just drink it away, I'd stop going

or I'd become really unreliable and I'd quit that job

because I don't wanna get fired.

So I always quit right before they were gonna fire me.

And so my resume looked great,

it was just me making moves, it looked like,

but it was really me, you know, giving up on myself again.

And at the last job I worked at,

I was so, I was doing a lot of crystal meth

and I was drinking constantly

and I would go into my car at my lunch hour

and disappear for like two hours

as I'd pass out in the car and not even realize it.

By the time I got back upstairs,

everybody's like, "Everybody's been looking for you,

"where have you been?"

And so I had to quit that job

because it was clear I was getting this close.

And you know, that was in 2007, I believe.

And my mother had her own business

and she had asked her assistant who was one of us

and 18 years sober at the time,

had tried to help me get sober a couple of times.

Since I'd moved, I had moved up to San Francisco in my 20s

and I moved back down here

when I was getting divorced in my 30s.

And because I knew I couldn't raise my kid on my own,

there was no way, so I had to be near my family.

And my mom, I came to work for her

and I was just such a mess at that point.

And her assistant recognized it in me.

She had taken me to the Marina Center a few times

a couple of years before I started working there

and she'd come to my house

and we'd gotten all the wine bottles out of my house

and she'd help me clean everything up

and okay, this time I'm gonna get sober, sure thing.

And I just couldn't do it.

I never heard the magic and I don't know how I missed it,

but so many times I went to a meeting

and I just didn't hear it.

I wasn't listening for it.

I was only listening for the reasons

why I didn't need to stay and why I was different from you

and why I wasn't, you know, I just knew in my gut

that this wasn't gonna work for me

because I'd been to AA before, why would it?

But I also knew as time was going by

that I was making my life

and my surroundings worse and worse.

By the time I came here this time, I had four years solid

from 2007 to 2011 of not drawing a sober breath.

I sat down on my couch, there was no more bars,

there was no more social life, there were no more drugs

because you have to go to other people to get drugs

and I didn't wanna deal with anybody else.

You know, the best thing about alcohol

was I could walk into any store in the city

and get what I needed and go home

and be left to my own devices.

Nobody was gonna comment on it,

nobody was gonna step on it and make it not right.

You know, I didn't have to worry about any of that.

So I'm sort of grateful that that happened inside my brain

around the time that fentanyl showed up

because God only knows.

But I absolutely did not know how to exist

without alcohol.

And at that point, I really was at the place

where it wasn't working anymore,

but I couldn't live without it.

And I didn't have any place in between to sit myself.

I was just stuck in this never ending rotation

of bottles of booze and going to work with a bottle

like this full of sake

that I was going to my desk with every day

because it didn't have tannins in it like white wine,

but it didn't get me drunk as fast as vodka,

which is what I needed, what I wanted,

but I couldn't risk overshooting the mark that badly

every time I went to work.

So sake, I was able to sort of keep it down,

keep it quiet, keep a mellow buzz going

until I could get home and drink the way I wanna drink.

And I was poisoning myself too.

And my mom asked me to go to a therapist

for like the 20th time.

I've been to every kind of therapy known to man.

I've gone to art therapy, a psychic therapist.

I have no idea what that was supposed to be.

I went to doctors who were just pill pushers,

who would just give me their sample cards all the time.

And everything, every kind of therapy

because I was constantly trying to find out

what was wrong with me.

And therapists I loved because they would tell me

why it was my father's fault, then my mother's fault,

then everybody else's fault.

And I never had to take responsibility for anything.

I just had to take that little pill

and listen to and keep coming back the next week.

And the problem was with my last therapist,

she could tell what was going on with me.

She could see the yellow behind my eyes

and how pale my skin was and how bloated my stomach was

from my liver being blown up.

And she said, "I'd like to put you in an antidepressant,

"but I can't until you cut down on your drinking."

I'm like, "I've only been here a couple of times.

"I've never even mentioned alcohol.

"What is she talking about?"

I said, "What are you talking about?"

She said, "Well, we could start with that water bottle."

And I just said, "You think I think it's full of water."

Now, my normal response to being caught like this

is the best defense is a good offense.

I get angry, I get in your face and I get out of there

and you never hear from me again.

And this, I always consider my first surrender

because for the first time, instead of saying,

"F you and I'm out of here and who do you think

"you're talking to?"

And leaving, I swallowed it and I said,

"What do you think I should do?"

And she said, "Well, my brother's in a 12-step program

"that seems to work for him."

And I'm like, "Oh, I've got it."

And she said, "Yeah, but let's..."

I said, "I tell you what, let's get you

"to a gastroenterologist first and figure out

"what's wrong with you because you don't look so good."

So she sent me to a doctor and the doctor told me

that my liver enzymes were through the roof

and my liver was twice its normal size

and I had burned a hole in the lining of my esophagus,

which is why it hurts so much to drink.

And to eat and to anything and that, you know,

I was going to head into cirrhosis if I didn't stop it.

So that was terrifying.

And then she hooked me up with a place called

Las Encinas out in Pasadena and it's a detox and a rehab.

And I agreed to go out there and I drove out there

with a bottle of wine in my car and got drunk

on the way there and when I got there,

they put me through their whole intake process

and everything else and they sat me down and said,

"Okay, we've got a bed ready for you, you know,

"come down the hall."

And I said, "Oh, no, no, no, no.

"I'm just here to check you guys out.

"I was just coming to audit it.

"I have to arrange babysitting for my son

"and I have to do this and talk to my boss

"and blah, blah, blah."

My boss is my mother.

And they said, "Well, okay, but you're gonna have to go

"through this whole process again.

"We have to start from scratch next time."

Said, "Okay, that's fine."

And I left and I went home and I'm like, "I can't, I can't."

But a few days later, my son took one of my water bottles

and he did this before he took the sip.

And I knew that meant he'd gotten my bottle before.

And that kind of broke my heart.

And I can tell you about my very,

very capable autistic son is that when he was younger,

you know, he didn't know how to interact

with the children very much.

And he would get inappropriate or get in their face

or try to hold on to people.

So if he wanted to go to the park or be anywhere in public,

I had to be focused on him and pay attention to him

and make sure that I was watching him at all times

so that nothing bad happened with another child.

And so that he could enjoy himself in the park and play.

Well, that was too much for Cassie

because I've got my bottle full of whatever,

sake or 7-Up and vodka or whatever it is

I'm bringing to the park that day.

And I can't be bothered to pay attention to him.

And it's not, it's getting very uncomfortable.

So instead of straightening myself up

and going to the park sober once in a while,

or just not drinking for that hour

and paying attention to my kid,

I just turned my apartment into a playground for him.

I let him draw on the walls.

I let him do whatever he wanted with crayons and stuff.

I bought every CD and DVD known to man,

every kid's show on the planet I had on video or DVD.

And he had a machine in his room

and he had a machine in the living room

and he could watch whatever he wanted, whenever he wanted.

And he could play and draw on the walls.

And I let him turn, I mean,

my carpet got crunchy from all the crayons

'cause I wasn't cleaning up after us very much anymore

at this point either.

And the dining room table was just full of paper

and drawings and stuff everywhere.

And it was the most unhealthy, inappropriate thing

I could possibly have done with this autistic child

was just to like shut down his life completely

outside of school, he did go to school.

And it was, you know, it's my biggest shame

that and I brought him with me once for a drug buy,

which was horrifying.

And when I see myself in those moments,

when I can see myself sitting in that car

waiting for the dealer to come get me my Coke

while my son is in the backseat crying

and the dealer saying, "You gotta come to the house with me,

"you can't do it here."

So I leave my son in the car and go.

I am the stupidest lucky girl on the planet

that no policeman came up

and took my child away from me that night.

He should have been taken away from me.

There were months and months and months

where I had no business being a parent to that child.

And I was only slightly better than his father,

you know, who was living a few hundred miles away anyway.

And when I think about what I was willing to trade

for that little bit of alcohol, it is such a waste.

It is such a waste that I was willing to trade

not just my dignity, not just my common sense,

but my son's safety, his security, his education,

everything so that I could keep drinking

the way I wanted to drink.

And I think that that was enough for me.

I think that that moment of watching him

take a sniff off the bottle before he drank it

was just enough for me.

That really shut me down.

And I went back out to, I told my mom I needed to go.

I needed a rest, I needed something.

And she's like, whatever you need that will get you healthy,

I don't care what it is.

But I didn't mention alcohol.

I didn't tell her it was a detox.

I went out there to Los Encinas again,

this time with like three bottles of sake in my trunk.

And I sat out all night long

and drank just outside their parking lot and waited.

And when I saw the sprinklers come on

and heard the gardeners, I said, well, I guess it's time.

And I drove in and I walked inside

and there was a woman parked next to me.

And when she opened to the trunk of her car,

there were like thousands of those little airport bottles

in her trunk.

And I'm like, oh, okay.

I'm not the only one who came here preloaded.

So, and we both sort of toddled inside

and they just sat me in a corner in a room

and propped me up against a wall

and let me sleep it off for three hours,

which I later found out I was very fortunate

because the other woman got carted off to a hospital.

So they checked me in and I got in

and I spent the next three days mostly on Librium

and not knowing which way was up

and barely able to walk up the stairs

and not paying attention to anything.

And then on that third day,

they lowered my Librium enough for me

to sort of wake up out of the fog.

And I went to an H&I meeting.

I've been to alcoholics,

none was probably 20 times before then,

but I never heard it before.

And this time I heard it.

A gentleman who was dressed in a suit

and he was a former cop and had zero in common with him

talked about drinking against his will.

And that got me because that is what had been happening

to me every day of my life for the last four years.

I'm waking up every morning swearing, swearing,

I am not gonna drink today.

I am not gonna do this day.

I'm gonna put it aside.

I'm gonna give my body a break for a few days,

something, anything, I'm not gonna do it.

And by whatever time that day

that I couldn't take it anymore,

I forgot that Solomon if I made to myself,

I had opened up another bottle and taken another drink.

And I so related to what he was talking about

and the feelings he was talking about.

And there was a girl in this place, her name was Amanda.

And I've never seen her since.

I have no idea if she stayed sober.

I don't know what happened to her,

but she was my guardian angel.

She took up a big book and she said, a soft bound big book.

And she said, well, let's figure out your sobriety date.

When did you get here?

And I was like, I got here on Monday or Sunday

or whatever the hell day it was.

And she said, so, well,

when did you stop taking delivery?

And I said, today, she said, August 5th, it is.

So we wrote that in the book.

And she got me a 12 and 12 and we did the same thing.

It's really put my initials in there.

And she made me circle things in the book

that stood out to me and pay attention to it.

And she said, you hold onto this like a talisman.

It is gonna be your good luck charm.

And I did, I carried that book around me

for 11 years or 10 years until I think I finally,

I left it behind someplace which really broke my heart.

But it kept me that holding onto that

and believing that I needed to keep that date

really, really worked for me.

For some reason, I believed that like,

I couldn't give up that date no matter what.

Like August 5th was gonna be the most important day ever

for me and I just could not,

I could not have any other sobriety date.

So I came, the second thing she did for me

was she introduced me to a girlfriend of hers

who was visiting her.

And she made me give that girl my number

and promised to meet her at a meeting the day I got it.

And I don't know why I said yes, but I did.

And I got out of there after like eight days

because it was all, my insurance ran out

and I didn't have any more money to stay there.

And I had been physically removed from alcohol now,

but I had no idea how to exist in the world of it.

I had no idea what to do.

And all the woman said to me that Amanda introduced me to

was you drank every day, get your ass in a seat every day,

pardon my French, get your butt into a seat every day

and don't drink that, don't drink at night.

That's my best advice to you.

Just go and talk to somebody in the program.

So I left there, I met her at a meeting

at the Marina Center, been there before.

It was a women's meeting.

They were very nice to me.

I don't remember anything that was said

or anything that happened,

but I promised I would come meet them again the next night.

So I came back again the next day and I met them again.

And then the next night, as I said,

I knew what Ohio Avenue meeting hall was.

I always knew it.

And I worked across the street from it.

And I used to walk down the back stairs of my office

with my bottle or my solo cup in my hand

and either drink it and look at everybody

in the parking lot and think suckers and drink down

or think, you know, someday, someday, I'll be there someday.

I just don't know when that's gonna be.

And I, you know, that Monday night,

I walked across the street, I went in the back

'cause I didn't know you had to go in the front.

So I never met the secretary.

And this woman named Mary Ann King

was sitting right up front there

and she held her hand out to me and said,

"Welcome honey, what's your name?"

And she sat me down and she got some of,

she introduced me to a couple of the women

and they got a directory out

and they started circling things in the directory

and handing it to me.

And she had me sitting so that I had a woman

on each side of me and they were holding on to me,

which is a really good thing

because when I found out there was a break,

I was gonna bolt for sure.

But these women held on to me so I couldn't go anywhere.

And I still have that first directory

with those first few members in it.

And I tell you, I believe in talismans, I really do.

Good luck charms have helped keep me sober,

but you know, and good luck people in my life.

What happened after that was a series

of what I now understand are God shots,

but I thought they were just coincidences and happenstance.

I opened up that directory and I found a meeting,

I'm all about convenience,

and I found a meeting that was just up the block for me

and I went there and it was closed, it was dark.

I was like, "Well, I tried, that's it.

"Okay, I did three days in AA, I'm going home now."

And a woman came out from behind one of the pillars

of this, it was a church.

And she said, "Wait, wait, wait,

"are you looking for the AA meeting?"

I said, "Yeah," I said, "But it doesn't seem to be here."

And she said, "No, I know,

"I'm talking to central office right now,

"they're gonna find us another meeting, just hold on.

"She's got to hold them out."

I'm like, "Okay," so she gets off the phone with them,

she's found this meeting, it's just a few blocks away.

She gives me the address, said, "Thanks so much,

"I'll see you there," I start to walk off.

She goes, "Wait, wait, I just moved here from San Diego.

"I have no idea where I am, can I follow you there?"

Okay, so I let her follow me there.

And I end up at this little church on Butler Avenue

called Cardio United Methodist.

And it turned out that they had a women's meeting

every Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday night

at the same church.

And I'm all about convenience and location, right?

And this is still just, it's still within a mile of my house.

So I walk in with her, the woman who's greeting

is the woman who would become my sponsor.

Her name is Debbie Casper, and she's a comedy writer,

and she's one of the funniest, most charming,

lovely women in the world, but she is hard.

In the beginning, especially, she had no time

for any excuses about anything.

She, it was, it was not just 90 and 90,

it was however many you can squeeze into a day, do it.

Said, "If you drank all day long,

"you should be in meetings all day long,

"whatever it takes, I don't care,

"but you do whatever you need to do to stay sober

"for the next 24 hours,

"and I'll talk to you tomorrow morning."

And that's how we started our relationship.

I met so many women in that meeting.

One woman, Millie Greenberg, who I feel like now

she's my guardian angel, I just miss her so.

But she told me to tell my mother, when I said,

"My mother said that Jews aren't alcoholics."

And she said, "Oh, you have her, you give her my number.

"Tell her to call me, I'll explain it to her."

And there was this little triumvirate

of little old ladies in there.

Millie, a woman named Virginia, and one named Miriam,

who still comes to our Sunday morning meeting now.

And those three women just, they boobied me.

They were like grandmas,

and they gave me so much love and affection.

And I met so many women in that meeting

who just completely changed my view

of what Alcoholics Anonymous could be.

They were happy, and they were smart,

and they were some of them very successful,

some of them not so much.

They were all different ages and walks of life,

but they were so calm and peaceful,

and their lives seemed easy.

Like they just knew how to do life.

And that was my biggest problem.

I had always felt like I had no idea how to do life.

Like nobody had given me the handbook.

And being treated like an adult as a very young child,

and being the child of an alcoholic

made me mature really quickly.

And I swear I hit my maturity peak at 12.

Because at 12, I knew how to behave like a grownup.

And by the time I was a grownup,

I had no idea what adulthood was supposed to look like.

I had no idea what I was supposed to be doing.

I didn't know how to do anything

'cause I had arrested my development

from the second I started drinking.

I had, I stopped myself in my tracks.

Debbie got me into the steps right away.

Once we got to three, she took me out to the beach,

and there was gonna be, and she,

I told her from the start it was gonna be

a long haul with me with spirituality,

because my dad, I had been raised by a man

who told me that God is for weak-minded people, I'll say.

He used a different word, starts with P.

But he was, he absolutely thought that anybody

who needs religion or God in their lives is weak,

and you have to be able to do things for yourself.

And anybody who has a problem with alcohol,

they're the problem.

They have to, you have to have willpower.

My father's biggest thing was willpower.

That's what he drummed into me my whole life.

And I just thought I was a failure my whole life

'cause I didn't have the willpower

to stop myself from drinking when I didn't wanna drink.

I didn't have the willpower to say,

I'm just gonna have three and just have three.

I am not capable of it.

The second I taste alcohol, I want more alcohol.

And until that click goes off in my head,

I'm always looking for that click,

that feeling of like, oh, there it is,

that now it's taking over my brain.

And now the alcohol's in my brain,

and now I can just relax and be.

I haven't felt that click properly

probably since I was 19 years old,

but I had been searching for it for 27 years.

And by the time I got here, this time I realized,

you all taught me that the click can come

from working these steps.

The click can come from taking advantage

of the fellowship and the friendships that we find here

and supporting one another.

I found a group of women and we all got sober together.

There were three of us to start,

and all of our birthdays are in the summer of 2011.

And we went to the same women's meetings together.

We would call each other up every day.

Saturdays, we started a little meeting for ourselves

of a step study in the morning.

An old timer came and showed us how to start a meeting,

how to run it.

And we'd go into the room where our 11 o'clock meeting

was gonna be at nine o'clock and have a little step study.

And then we'd go to the 11 o'clock

and then we'd go to coffee with everybody.

And then we'd go to the AA store, to the recovery store,

and shop around in there for a while

because we didn't know what to do with ourselves

until it was time for another meeting.

The weekends were the absolute worst.

I had to keep like that all day long,

every day in the beginning of my sobriety

to keep myself from drinking.

And one of us, she went out after 11 days

and watching her, the devastation on her,

it scared me to death, scared me to death.

I always like to tease her

'cause now I'm 11 days more sober than she is

and she has been a couple days ahead of me.

But we, not 11 days, I'm six days more sober than her.

Anyway, but we did it.

We still have lunch together a couple of times a year,

the three of us, now it's four of us.

And we still celebrate our birthdays together every year.

And we're best buds.

And when we were trying to get in shape,

we started doing walking and reporting our steps

to each other like we could do anything

as long as there was more than one of us to do it

as far as I was concerned.

It's my favorite thing about this and it's a we program.

And I started to tell you that I had trouble

with spirituality and my sponsor took me down to the ocean.

I'm sure it's not an original thought,

but she showed me, she said like the waves,

aren't they a power greater than yourself?

Can't you see that something works

that's stronger than you?

And she said, the best analogy she gave me was,

she said, it's like when you get caught in an undertow,

if you fight and fight the waves, you're gonna drown.

You're gonna get turned upside down and pull down.

But if you let go and just relax,

you'll often float to the surface.

And I could really see that,

like I could physically imagine myself letting go

and letting God in that way.

And being able to say, I'm not in charge of this

and willpower has nothing to do with it.

And the strongest I can be is when I don't try

to control everything.

My strength comes from when I do let go.

That was such a miracle to me because it was fighting.

I had been fighting all my life trying to figure out

how am I gonna do this?

How am I gonna control this?

And I can't, that's the whole point, we can't.

And we have to take responsibility for our actions.

And the only thing that we can change

is our perception and our responses.

And that was a revelation to me

and not trying to put the blame on my parents

or men or my child or anything else.

And just seeing squarely where it lands at my feet

and that I have to be responsible for my own actions.

It made such a difference.

It makes such a difference in my life today

to just follow these simple steps

and do what we're shown here.

I have been so blessed in AA.

I mean, Damon and I met in the rooms

of Alcoholics Anonymous, Boy Meets Girl on AA Campus.

And it's been really, really wonderful.

And it's been such a great journey to have a partner

who's also sober.

But even if all we had gotten,

either one of us was just our sobriety,

and that would have been enough.

It's like, it's silly, it's Passover.

So I want to say it's Diane,

but nobody knows what the heck I'm talking about.

You know, it's like if I had just gotten sober,

it would have been enough.

If I had just learned to let go of all that self-hatred,

it would have been more than enough.

Being able to help other people is a miracle.

The spirituality is in the service, for sure.

When I first got sober,

I got dragged to a few H&I meetings.

And my sponsor made me say yes to everything.

They said, "We don't say no to AA requests."

So I said yes to everything.

And a friend needed her panel taken over

at a recovery house downtown.

And I did that for six months,

starting at six months sober on.

And, you know, I've always been involved in H&I

in some way or another.

These last couple of years, I have not done my program,

the way I used to.

And I have to be honest,

I can feel the difference in my gut.

And I know it's time to make a new commitment to my program

and to put actions behind my words.

Because just speaking for a podium

is not enough in service to my sobriety.

I need to be of service, truly.

Otherwise, if I don't give it away, I cannot keep it.

And I do have a couple of sponsors who are,

one is very, very self-reliant

and the other only calls me when everything's on fire.

That's okay, I recognize that behavior in myself too.

And my sponsor would tell you

that I don't use the phone enough either.

But I have the benefit of she lives in my building.

So she gets stuck seeing me even if it's in the elevator.

And, you know, the best thing I can say about sobriety

is that, or about my life in AA now,

is that it's so peaceful.

I lay my head down and I go to sleep for the most part.

I had insomnia at the age of four.

I used to stay up all night at nine.

No kidding, replaying over and over in my head

something I had done or said in kindergarten

when I was five.

I mean, my brain could find something to focus on

and just not shut up till the sun came up.

And that I go home at night and lay my head down

and go to sleep is a miracle.

That I wake up in the morning

and the first thought in my head is not alcohol

is an absolute miracle.

I am well aware of how easily I could lose all of this.

All I need to do is have one moment of the efforts

or I got this.

There are no three more dangerous words

in the English language for an alcoholic of my type

than I got this.

Whenever I think I know what's going on

and I've got everything under control

is when everything breaks apart inside in front of me

in two seconds flat.

And I have too much now to be willing

to give any of it away.

I'm so grateful for AA and for the life I've found here.

And I hope I've said anything that's been useful to you.

If not, you'll get a great speaker next week, I'm sure.

But thank you guys.