Finding Home: John's Journey from Hidden Identity to Sobriety

- Thank you for that announcement, that introduction.

Ben, thank you for inviting me tonight.

It's an honor and a privilege.

And welcome to the newcomers.

I'm John C. and I'm an alcoholic.

I don't go by John C. anymore

because as I moved to Palm Springs,

I went into a meeting

and I started announcing myself as John C.

And a guy walked up to me after the meeting one day

and he says, "That's a very unusual name you have."

And I said, "John?"

He said, "Oh, I thought your name was Chauncey."

(all laughing)

So I thought about Bruce calling me Josie and the Pussycats

for many years.

I got sober September 3rd, 2013.

I went to a brief outpatient for 10 days,

had no intention of going into AA,

and my doctor suggested that I go to a few AA meetings.

And I said, "Well, I've had one sobriety.

I'll go into that in a minute."

I had a sobriety in the past.

I went to AA and it didn't work and I didn't like it.

And he says, "Well, do it for me."

So I went to one meeting and it didn't,

it just didn't work for me, that one.

But then the second meeting I went to was Quality of Life.

- Quality of Life.

- Your old location.

I came in through Sherman Way.

So I came in through the back way

and worked my way down into the meeting hall

and someone put out their hand and welcomed me, James.

(all laughing)

Yeah, and I will never forget that.

Put out his hand and said, "I'm James, who are you?"

And other people in the meeting were very welcoming.

And it was just, I mean, I just knew I was home

and I didn't know what a home group was.

Now I do, and a home group's very important,

but I knew that I was home.

So how did I get here?

Let's go back a very long time.

When I was a small child,

I think about four or five or six years old,

I was very uncomfortable in my own skin.

I just, there was just something wrong.

I didn't feel like I belonged in that family.

I felt out of place.

It just didn't feel right.

A few years later, I realized,

I was about seven or eight years old, that I was gay.

And that was, to me, the start of a big secret

that I couldn't tell anybody.

I couldn't talk about it.

I had to hide my feelings.

And it was a secret that I felt like

I had to take to my grave because nobody would understand

and I just don't even want to deal with this.

So I had a very uncomfortable childhood,

I think largely because of that.

Now, my family was a normal family.

My mother grew up in an alcoholic family

and her father was a raging alcoholic

who left on the weekends and got drunk

and came back and went to work on Monday morning.

And they had kind of an absent father

and they'd have to go bail him out from jail once in a while.

So when my mother married my father,

they were going to have a non-alcoholic household.

So when I grew up, I didn't know that people drank.

Drinking was something, there were two bars in town

and drinking was something that normal people didn't drink.

I was told that that's something that very few people did

and it was bad and we just didn't go there.

That's just, we didn't associate with people like that.

So that actually made it easier when I started to drink

that I was under the radar.

They weren't looking for it.

But anyway, so when I was about 14 years old,

one of my best friends discovered

that I had never had a drink.

And he said, "Oh, we've got to fix that."

So I remember this evening vividly in my mind,

four of us went to a drive-in theater

which had stalls between the cars

and it was an x-rated drive-in theater.

That's why they had the stalls.

So you could also go there and drink.

So we went there in a '59 Chevy Biscayne

and the four of us took a bottle of Seagram 7

and some Coca-Cola and I had the night of my life.

I had the most wonderful night and I got very, very drunk.

I threw up, I had a great time.

I went home, I went to bed, I got away with it.

And I said, "I've got to do this every weekend.

"This is just marvelous."

And I also, then I felt like I fit in.

I fit in with my friends that I was drinking with.

It was just, that made a lot of my anxiety go away.

As long as I could look forward to that weekend

and have that experience and just let it all out,

I felt like I would be fine.

So fast forward a few years, I go off to college.

I've never been called mature for my age.

So I go to college, I'm expected to go graduate,

go out and get a job like everybody else in the world.

And yet I'm just, I'm a nervous wreck.

And so I basically,

I had a couple of really bad quarters in college

and then I started drinking with the guys on the hall.

And it'd be like on the weekends

and then it was every night.

And then once in a while,

I would have a couple of sips of bourbon

before I went to class in the morning.

So it's interesting because,

drugs are also a part of my story

and there's a little marijuana involved in college

'cause I was in college in the 70s

and it all helped medicate me

and make me feel a little more normal.

And I noticed, I used to brag about it.

My first year I didn't party much.

And then after that, I partied all the time

and my grades went up.

So a few years later, I graduate from college

and I think, okay, enough of this partying stuff,

I'm gonna go out, I'm gonna work,

I'm gonna be successful, I'm gonna have a career.

I went to school and studied architecture,

I love architecture.

So I put a lot of effort into my career,

but there's a lot of anxiety

and I'm still not a really mature person for my age.

And so I would medicate as often as I could every night,

every other night, several times a week,

definitely on all weekend

and it would make the anxiety go away.

So Cookie, I could really relate to what you were saying

in your 10 minute share about that feeling in your gut

and you don't have to get drunk,

you just have to take a drink or two

and then the anxiety sort of melts away.

I really related to that.

So I'm not addicted to alcohol at that point

in my early career.

I'm usually a daily drinker every other day or every few days

and a couple of days a week, I go out and I go to the bars

and I get really drunk and then I go home

and I don't go out to get drunk,

but I go out and I end up getting drunk and it's fun.

And then I get up in the morning and I can barely function,

but I pull myself together and I go to work,

go through the day and then the anxiety comes back,

next night I'm doing the same thing.

I'm trying to medicate so that I don't have these feelings.

I like secrets.

So most of this, I kept secret from my family.

My mother would not want to know

that her son was drinking a lot.

My parents approved of social drinking,

but I was never a social drinker.

I mean, the first drunk that I had was hardly social.

That was a get drunk event.

So social drinking for me is go to a cocktail party,

have a half a glass of wine and put it down

and don't finish it.

And I've never been that kind of a drinker.

So anyway, so my drinking got a little out of control.

I guess I was, see, it's put a year on it.

It's about 1989.

I lost a few jobs.

I was living in Atlanta.

I was not dependable.

I didn't show up to work all the time

when I showed up to work.

I didn't have a very good attitude

and I got laid off from several jobs within a year.

And basically I knew that I needed to change something

and I did a geographic.

So I moved to Los Angeles with my partner

and decided to start over, got a good job,

decided I wasn't going to drink.

I wasn't going to do anything.

I was just going to white knuckle it.

And it didn't go very well.

I was really having a meltdown at work

and I pick up the phone at work one day

and call the employee assistance program

because I felt like I was going to do something.

I was going to get fired again

and I had nowhere else to go.

I had to make this job work.

So this is the start of my first sobriety,

which did not turn out very well.

So the employee assistance program got me into therapy.

The therapist was a huge fan of AA

and she got me to go to AA meetings

and I did some therapy and I went to AA meetings

and I got a sponsor and my (indistinct)

tried to get me to work the steps.

And I remember trying to work the first three steps

and I just couldn't, the first step,

I just could not comprehend what it meant.

Now, looking back on that,

I realized that I knew my life was unmanageable

and by that, I mean, all I wanted to do

was to get my career back.

I didn't care about changing anything.

I didn't wanna change anything.

I thought everything was just fine.

I just needed my career back.

And the part about being powerless over alcohol,

totally lost on me.

I was not powerless over anything.

I am the power, I have the power.

So I feel sorry for that first sponsor.

He did his best with me, tried to get me to do 90 and 90

and I don't have time for that.

I have a job, I have a career

and I've got to make that work.

So anyway, I was able to cobble together a year

and they gave me a cake.

My sponsor gave me some flowers, it was all fun.

And then I sort of wandered away.

And by wander away, I mean, my sponsor left town

and he was seriously ill and he ended up dying

and I didn't get another sponsor

and I just didn't go to any more meetings.

I think I maybe went once a month for a while

and I said, nah, I don't eat this.

So I got three very dry years.

I changed absolutely nothing.

I never even worked the first step and I felt very thirsty.

I mean, I felt miserable.

I felt like everything, everybody was against me.

The world was against me.

Everything was a struggle, everything was negative

and it just wasn't working very well.

And so I went out, I was at a company social.

I didn't intend to go out.

I intended to just stay dry, but I was at a company social

and I'd just been made associate.

All the associates are sitting around a table.

We're all dressed up very nicely on a Saturday night

and they bring out trays of margaritas

and they set the margaritas down in front of each of us

very conspicuously around the table.

And I had never told anybody that I worked with

that I was an alcoholic or that I did not drink.

And I looked at that and I said, holy cow,

what am I going to do?

I have to drink that.

They're going to ask me questions.

I'm not going to be able to answer them.

It's going to be embarrassing

and I don't want to go through that embarrassment.

So I picked up this margarita and I drank it.

And the world didn't end.

It was actually okay.

I went back to my room that night.

I called my partner back at home and I said,

you won't believe what happened.

I had a drink tonight.

And he says, so?

I said, I feel fine.

So from that point on, I felt entitled to drink again.

And it didn't hit me right away.

I started, you know, I'd have a drink every now and then,

and then we decided to buy another house.

And that was just sell one house and buy another.

And that was very stressful.

And it went on for three months

and I was having double gin and tonics every night.

So, you know, I was really,

every time I got into a little bit of stress,

I was belting down a gin and tonic

and feeling a little better about it.

And so I was out basically for 20 years, all total.

So three years of sobriety, miserable, go out,

stay out for 20 years.

And the last 10 years,

I knew every day of that 10 years that I was an alcoholic.

I said that to myself many times.

My partner said it to me once.

He said, you know,

I think you need to think about

what you're doing with alcohol.

I don't think you're so far gone yet

that you can't change your course.

He says, I'm never gonna say this to you again,

but I'm gonna bring it up once this one time.

And I remember that was 10 years before I got sober.

And I said, thank you very much.

And I thought to myself, I can outlive this, I think,

you know, I can drink.

And, you know, I just,

I didn't think it was going to advance so quickly,

but I knew that I was an alcoholic.

I knew that I wanted alcohol every day.

And there was also some drugs involved.

So the drugs that I would take

would allow me to drink more alcohol

and not feel it as much.

So anyway, so about,

I got sober September 3rd, 2013.

About 2012, I started to realize

that I couldn't go without alcohol for a day.

In fact, I couldn't go without alcohol for a few hours.

I started to notice that in the middle of the night,

I would wake up and I would get up

and I would go downstairs

and I would have four or five glasses of vodka

out of the freezer, nice and cold.

And then I could go back to sleep.

So I thought, well, I didn't realize that I had to have it.

I just wanted to have it.

And I thought to myself, how many lines I had crossed.

And I would just say,

oh, well, there's another line I've crossed.

You know, that's not so bad.

I, you know, it's just what I'm doing, it's okay.

But I was definitely, I had a medical event once

where I had to have some minor outpatient surgery.

And the doctor told me not to drink for 14 days

and I was horrified.

And I had to take penicillin and he said,

don't drink alcohol or it'll mess with the penicillin

and you really need to do this to heal.

So I did what the doctor said.

And I remember that that week was a ordeal.

Every hour of every day, I wanted to drink

and I look forward to the moment when I could drink again.

So I realized when I quit,

it's going to be like this for the rest of my life.

That's what I thought.

It's always going to be like this.

I'm going to, if I quit,

I'm always going to be craving alcohol.

I'm always going to be miserable without it.

But I was so addicted to it and it made me so miserable

that, well, a couple of things happened.

It was that and my father had died a few years earlier

and then my mother died.

My mother died in early 2013.

And when my mother died, my drinking suddenly changed

and I started to have blackouts.

And I would think to myself, that generation is gone.

My generation is next.

I'm not really an adult.

I'm not really mature.

What am I doing?

I'm ashamed of what I'm doing, but I can't control it.

So anyway, I decided that

if I was going to be miserable drinking,

I would also be miserable if I didn't drink.

But given the choice between the two,

maybe I should try not drinking.

And that misery would be okay.

I would get through that.

So I decided to quit.

So I went to my therapist and we tried to plan it.

And then one day I just decided, I'm just gonna quit.

I'm gonna drink up everything in the house.

There'll be nothing left.

And then if I really can't resist,

I'll go out and buy some, but I don't intend to do that.

So that was September 2nd.

That was the last day that I had a drink.

I drank everything up in the house,

except for the most obscure liqueurs under the kitchen sink,

drank up everything that was drinkable and stopped.

And within a few hours I decided I better get in my car

and go to the hospital

because something really crazy was going on.

And I think I was about to have a stroke,

but I didn't get there.

I got to the hospital and they got me on some medication.

And then they got me into this outpatient program.

And I mean, right away,

I was still taking detox medication for alcohol.

And three days later, they take me off of that

and I start this outpatient program.

And the outpatient program was just kind of a medical approach

to why you shouldn't drink, bad things about drinking.

Here's what the nurse has to say about drinking.

Let's try a little mindful meditation.

That'll help calm you a little bit, things like that.

But what I really enjoyed for those 10 days

was being around a group of people

that were in there for various reasons with all addictions.

They were either alcohol or drugs or, you know,

they were all alcohol or drugs.

And what I got from being around that group of people

was I actually got to talk to people

because I had been so isolated.

I worked at home. I drank at home.

I drank around the clock. I didn't talk to anybody.

And so in that 10 days, I got to actually talk to some people.

And that was very good. I enjoyed it.

And at the end of the 10th day, they gave me a marble

and said, "You've graduated. Go home."

I said, "What do I do now?" I said, "Go to AA."

So I actually went to AA, and as I said earlier,

I walked into -- second meeting I went to,

I walked into Quality of Life, QAF.

And, yeah, my friend Brent doesn't know that secret.

When I say Quality of Life, they say, yeah, yeah.

So now you know.

So I looked at what everybody was doing.

They all had sponsors.

There were a group of us in the first year.

Scott had a year.

I looked up to Scott like he had 30 years.

And don't we all? Absolutely.

And so I decided to pick guest sponsor.

So I got Al to be my sponsor. Al was a big guy.

He was very demanding.

He made me take him out and ask him the right way

to be his sponsee.

And he made me promise that I would do everything

that he told me to do. There were no suggestions.

There was, "I'm going to tell you what to do,

and that's what you're going to do."

And that went very well.

Then I got to working with Al

and going to all the Quality of Life meetings.

I got a year.

And Jerry and Katie had a watch for me.

And so the day of the watch, I wrecked my car.

And I thought, oh, well, that's bad timing.

But wow, I'm really not, this is different.

It doesn't bother me as much as it used to.

Now, go back a few years earlier,

and I had a brand new convertible.

And somebody hit my convertible,

and it had to go in the shop.

And I went home and I pouted and I drank for a month.

That's what I had to do.

I mean, literally a month.

I didn't leave the house for a month.

So now here I am, I've got a year.

I wrecked my car. It's okay.

I drove it with a crack grill, and I went to my watch.

The watch was great. We had a good time.

Jerry offered me a beer before midnight.

And I said, "No, thank you, I'll take a rain check."

And so then I go on from there.

And about three years, Al left our group,

and I had another sponsor, Jerry.

But then I was talking to Greg a lot,

and Greg said to me one day at about three years,

I'll never forget this.

He said, "You know, your first year or two,

you're really in a drinking program."

And he said, "John, I think you'll realize

as time goes on that you're really,

once you get past the drinking part of it,

you're really in a thinking program."

And that really stuck with me.

I didn't know exactly what he meant at the time,

but I knew that it sounded pretty important

and I needed to think about it.

So Jerry and I then toured my fifth year.

Jerry and I did work the steps again.

And this time I took a serious look at the character defects

and I made a list of character.

I did some amends.

Jerry helped me do some amends

I didn't do the first time around, so I felt a little better.

So I didn't have a lot of guilt going on,

but I did have this list of character defects,

and I started working on some of them.

And some of them, I just, I didn't want to work on them.

There were some that I put on the back burner,

so I'll deal with those later.

So at about seven years, I find myself,

we're in the middle of COVID and I take the opportunity

to move to Palm Springs and start over

with a different group and so I found a clubhouse out there.

And then I started to think, how happy are you really?

How are you doing in your sobriety?

You're not drinking, but just can it be better?

So I started to look at ways that I could get some more tools

and I talked to people to try to figure out

what other people were doing.

And it was a combination of things.

Number one, I wanted to work

on some of those character defects,

because some of them I could put up with them,

but they really made me feel bad about myself

and they were things that I could really work on.

And there was some sexual inventory in there

and I'm not going to go into that,

but there were some things that I just,

they still gave me shame.

At seven years, I still had some shame

and I still wasn't always being honest with my sponsor.

So I decided, okay, we'll work on that.

Now at about eight years, I found myself in pain one day

and ended up in the hospital.

And the hospital diagnosed very quickly

that I had bone cancer and that was a big surprise.

And having bone cancer was one of the biggest fears

I've ever had in my life.

Having cancer was one of the biggest fears

that I've ever had in my life.

And there I was faced with it.

And I remember laying there in great pain

after getting that diagnosis

and thinking about it for about an hour.

And it's something that I learned in the program

told me to work the steps and say the serenity prayer

and just put one foot in front of the other

and think positive thoughts rather than negative thoughts.

And I just moved forward and it didn't look good at first.

My brother flew out to help take care of me.

And after two days with me, he said, you're different.

You're not responding to this

the way I thought you would at all.

And I said, well, I don't know quite how to explain it,

but it's not the end of the world.

It's just another health problem.

And I started to think of the fact that alcoholism

is a life-threatening illness

and I've been dealing with it by working the program.

And this is just another life-threatening program,

the life-threatening thing that I need to deal with.

And it's just one day at a time.

And I am truly amazed

that I was able to look at it that way,

but I thank the program, what I've learned in the program,

what the support and the advice I've gotten from my sponsors

have really helped me to get through things like that.

And I gotta say worst things have happened to me in sobriety

than ever happened to me when I was drinking and using,

but it's my perception is totally different.

It's just the total 180 degree turn

and it's little things that I've learned along the way.

And you study the steps for years

and then all of a sudden one day when you need them,

they come to you and you can apply them

and it helps you get through the day.

And all you need to do is get through this day.

You don't know what tomorrow is.

And I know that I'm not gonna drink

because I didn't drink yesterday and I didn't drink today.

And tomorrow I'm gonna do the same thing that I did today.

And I think that's going to keep me from drinking.

Now, my goal though is to be a little better every day,

be a little better tomorrow than I am today.

And that means working on those character defects.

It means doing a lot of service.

I do as much service as I can handle

without totally overloading myself.

And yet I give myself some free time

because I need some free time.

I mean, I think we all deserve to pay ourselves

a little time once in a while,

but we also need to give back to others.

We need to be out there.

We need to give a good example

to other people in the program.

And I do what I can.

So I've only got a few minutes left

and I wanted to leave you with one thing

that's very inspirational to me.

As Bill sees it, page one, the very first page.

Take me a minute to get to it.

This is how I see my sobriety.

Page one, personality change.

It has often been said of AA

that we are interested only in alcoholism.

That is not true.

We have to get over drinking in order to stay alive.

But anyone who knows the alcoholic personality

by firsthand contact knows that no true alkie

ever stops drinking permanently

without undergoing a profound personality change.

We thought conditions drove us to drink.

And when we tried to correct these conditions

and found that we couldn't do so to our entire satisfaction,

our drinking went out of hand and we became alcoholics.

It never occurred to us that we needed to change ourselves

to meet conditions, whatever they were.

I think that describes where I'm trying to be today.

And thanks, it's good to see all of you again.