I want to thank Lisa in extension. A few people in here, a few people that had to sit with me a couple weeks ago, so sorry about that. If you're new, I'd like to welcome you to Alcoholics Anonymous, to this room. I really do not like to speak, you know, really what I'm supposed to do. I mean, I'm always, always happy to do anything for AA, and it's my job to show up and do what I'm asked to do, and I believe that, and that has served me my whole sobriety. My sobriety
date is March 7th, 1987, and I haven't taken a drink since that date, and I really would like to keep it that way if I can, and I have no illusions that I'm cured, and, you know, that a drink is never going to happen to me. I know people with 34, 35 years that have gone out and drank again, so I believe it. I have a small Friday night meeting that I started in Burbank. It was last night. This woman has 32 years. It's a lot of time in that meeting, and a lot of newcomers, too, and she was just sharing, you know, it's just,
I have today. You have today. We just start over every single day. I mean, I start over every day, and it's what I do that day. You know, if I'm not doing what I'm supposed to be doing, I may not stay sober, and I don't know which thing it is that I do that keeps me sober, so I just keep doing them all, and I don't know if it's keeping my commitments, picking up cups, you know, back when I was washing ashtrays. Like, I don't know which thing it is. Driving to the end of the world to go pick up a newcomer to take them to a meeting, you know, on a Tuesday night. I don't know, so I just
try to keep doing all of those, and I feel like the last couple of months, I just have had a lot of, I've had this renewed thing in my sobriety, and, you know, if you've been around or you're new, I mean, I think I go through periods where it's a little not as shiny and glossy and awesome and amazing as it is at other times, and I feel like I'm kind of coming out of one of those times, and the last couple of months, I've just had these reminders of really what this is all about, and I, a couple of months ago, I was
my husband's ex-wife needed to go to meetings. She got the rest of the drunk driving and gone to jail, and she, you know, we are not friendly, but I just looked like I can take you to a meeting if you want, because I wanted to get her to good meetings, and so we spent a week every single night going to meetings together, and it was just this glimpse into my world that she had never seen, and it was so good for me to see it and to work with someone so new, but I look at it, and she's kind of in and out, not really going, and I'm kind of
a court carl, but I can look at it and see I know her. I know her life. It's very small, and I know that if she, just like Rich was saying, if she just get in the middle and just do what she's asked to do and show up, she'd have this amazing life. You can't not have that if you're doing it. There's no way. It's just, I don't know what it'll look like, but it won't look like it did. It has to be in the middle, and I really believe half measures avail me nothing, not half measures avail me half. I believe if I don't get
in the middle and do it all, I kind of just don't get the deal, and so that was one thing, and then I had, a couple weeks ago, I had to speak at the Pacific Group meeting in Quincy Night, and I only say that because it was, that was the big thing for me in my sobriety. No way could I ever do that. I'm not capable of that. I mean, anybody who knows that meeting, it's a very big meeting. I got sober in that meeting, and it, you know, it's circuit speakers. It's conference speakers. It's big-time speakers. It's not me. I am a part of the variety, kind of a boring drunk,
and it was just, I just didn't think I could do it. That was the monkey on my back. It was, I was as afraid to do that at 31 years of sobriety as you were to come up here tonight. It was as scary for me then as when I was brand new to Read Chapter 5. I just could not do it, and I tried really hard to not do it. I begged my sponsor. I talked to Terry. I, and I've gotten out of it before because I'm manipulative, and I have a sharp tongue, and I'm really bossy, and I've got a little bit of time, so people tend to listen to me,
and thank God that the secretary of that meeting did not work them to me, and because it forced me to face that fear and walk through it, and I'm not, because it's a self-help group, because AA is, for me, this is not a self-help program. That is not what Alcoholics Anonymous is, and I had to do that so I would stay sober, not so I could practice buying one grape at the grocery store to overcome my fear. I had to do that to stay sober. I have to walk through those fears because those fears will make me drink again, and I know it.
That is how I drank. I drank over everything I was afraid to do. I'm not a trier. I don't like to, I don't like to do anything where I could fall down or look bad, so I just bow out and don't do anything at all. That is who I am. Charlie Carney, you know, my buddy Charlie Siegel say, I want the feeling of a job well done never having done anything at all. I just want to put on the suit and hold the briefcase and say I've done it, so that was really hard for me, but after that, I went home that night afraid that everyone's memories would be erased.
But after a few days, I had survived, and I felt like this monkey was off my back, and there was nothing that could scare me that much until the next thing comes along that scares me that much, but that's how I learned, so that was that. And then the third thing that just really had come up was I sponsored this woman, and she is going through a really hard thing right now, and she's a nurse, and she's a long-time nurse. She's been in and out of AA. She's had long-time sobriety and not long-time sobriety, and she was caught shooting narcotics.
That she had stolen from work, at work, and had to leave, and they fired her, and she's wrestling with some stuff regarding that and self-reporting to the board, and I see that, and I have, I feel just, I know that that's the thing that she's the most afraid of, and that's the thing that will take her out, and I know that, and I thought about that and thought, you know, in my sobriety, my life before I got sober was just all over the place. It was so
that way. I was in, I was up, I was down, I was trying this. I mean, I was just a wreck. When I came into AA, I, my life, my life's been crazy, you know, at times, and not at other times, but my path has been straight. I just have always done what my sponsor has done. I've all, you know, may have hated it. I may have done it ungracefully, ungraciously. I may have shaken my fist at my sponsor, but I did it, and I've always been willing to do whatever I've been asked to do, and consequently, my life has kind of gone straight.
There's lots of things that have been hard in there, but I don't have that faith, right, and I look at her and think she'll never stay sober if she can't face that little thing and just walk through it, and that's where faith comes in for me, and anyway, so I looked at that, and I thought, you know, I feel like I was like this train, and my, the wheel of the train was just a little bit off the track recently. Honestly, that Wednesday night thing, I just feel like showing up and having to do that, it just put the wheel back on the track, and now it's lined up again, and I'm kind of smooth on the track, and all my wheels are on the track right now.
And you just go in and out of that in sobriety, and for me, the trick has been to keep coming to meetings, keep talking to my sponsor, keep admitting it, and keep trying. Nobody's perfect. My God, anybody who's done this perfectly, if anyone tells you they've done this perfectly, I don't believe them. I mean, I should not believe them, because no one can live like that. We're just, we're not saints. We're just humans.
So anyway, I was trying to find the directions to find the email to this meeting, and I saw that the last time I've spoken here was 2012, so I must have really knocked the roof off last time I spoke, so it's been six years. I'm trying to redeem myself a little.
I got, first, okay, I'm from Louisville, Kentucky. I am the youngest of six kids, and of an Irish Catholic family, and I, my dad was a really bad alcoholic, and he was not abusive at all. I didn't grow up in an abusive.
My dad was just a really bad drunk, and he got drunk at all the worst times, and he was, you know, he was this Irish, he was a life insurance salesman, and my dad was kind of bigger than life. He was just this character. He wore a toupee, he would tip the toupee, he drove a limousine, you know, I tell everybody about the limousine, because this was, you know, I mean, I'm 57, this was a long, and I'm 31 years older, so it was a long, long time ago.
He drove a limousine with, like, partition windows, and jump seats, and flagstaffs on the car, he had all these flags made.
He would fly on the car for anything, you know, for your wedding, for the Kentucky flag, the crest of Louisville, the Irish flag, the Olympic flag, the American flag, and he had his business card made into a flag, which was a leprechaun jumping through a harp, and, you know, a leprechaun light post.
My uncle was a, my uncle, his brother was a monk in the Abbey of Gethsemane in Kentucky. We had a lifestyle statute of the Blessed Virgin Mary in our home. We would say the rosary every night after dinner, with our arms extended.
And, um, it was just this crazy, strange house, and my dad drank a lot, and he embarrassed me a lot, and, you know, I just felt, I was dark-complected, I had this funny name, you know, Jobe's not my real name, but it's been my nickname all my life, so it's a stupid name, and I had this raspy voice, it smelled like, you know, it sounded like I drank a lot of whiskey and smoked cigarettes when I was, like, 10.
I just, I don't know, I just, my perception of myself, I mean, from just always.
Other than I was, I thought I was 6 feet tall, I thought I wore a size 10 shoe, like, my picture of myself was just not who I was. I just, I was so off, my perception of me is so wrong, and so screwed up.
So, um, that house was crazy, and my dad was on and off antabuse my whole childhood, he was in and out of the mental institutions, he would drink on antabuse a lot, and get deathly, deathly ill.
And, you know, growing up with an alcoholic is just, for me, it's just a different level of, you know, I just never tried.
I don't trust it, I'm always smelling him, I want him to be, I don't want him to come home drunk, and he comes home drunk, I just hated it.
And, um, there was a lot of craziness in our house. My oldest brother was, uh, the best and the brightest of our family, but by the time he was 17, he was a heroin addict, and by the time he was 23, he was dead.
He had hung himself from a dumbwaiter in a house, you know, he just, it was crazy.
And I was 12, and he was 23, and there had been a lot of craziness in our house before he had killed himself.
He was, he was on and off, um, uh, PCP.
PCP, so he would come, and it would be cycling, and he would just lose it, and he would destroy our house, and break all the furniture, and he wanted to rob banks, and he just, he had guns, and one time he came over on Christmas Eve, and my dad was really drunk, and my brother was really drunk and high, and he had a gun, and my sister and I were laying downstairs in our bedroom, and they're on the landing of the stairs, just fighting.
My dad's telling him to shoot him, and, you know, just kill me, and we're laying there waiting to hear the shot that's going to go off, and the next morning, we had to go, my mom woke us up, we had to go out in the snow and find a gun.
Before any of the neighbors found a gun, um, you know, no one died that night, but that was kind of what I had grown up in, and I grew up in this Catholic, you know, upper middle class Catholic neighborhood, and we were that family that everyone talked about, and we were the ones that had that kind of beat up cars in the front.
My dad had financial troubles off and on, and we were the ones with the drug addict in the house.
My brothers all ran away from school, you know, they ran away at 15 and 16 to Chicago, and one brother went to join the Danish Merchant Marine when he was 16 years old.
But it's just insane, and we had holes in our walls, everybody had a temper, we were all Irish, we were all kicking holes in the wall, and it was crazy.
And I started to drink because of my brother, and of watching what he went through with drugs, and, you know, he shot heroin, and it just, I have, like, this physical aversion to being that kind of stuff.
I just, I never did drugs, I just, I smoked, I mean, I did a little bit of cocaine, you know, right toward the end of my drinking, only to drink longer, but very little.
I just, drinking really got me there.
I never said I wasn't going to drink, even though I'd see what my dad went through, but I said I was never going to do drugs after what I saw what my brother went through.
And so when he died, I started drinking that summer, and I was 12 years old, and, you know, it's not that easy to get floated all the time when you're 12 years old, at least where I grew up.
So we would drink on the weekends, we would have these camp outs and spin the bottles in people's basements, and just however we needed to to get drunk.
And that just continued for me from 12 on.
So I got into high school, and my dad got so...
I got sober when I was 15 years old, and that was my first introduction to Alcoholics Anonymous that I knew of.
And he had been in and out of AA a couple of times, maybe years before, and like I said, his big thing was the middle institution.
He had, we had a family psychiatrist that treated my dad, my sister, my mom, and, you know, my dad and my sister were in the middle institution at the same time, several times.
You know, they'd have to go up and down separate elevators and crazy.
Every light switch in our house had the thing made, it was a little cover that my dad had made.
The middle institution, we had all these hash trays that were swirling paint stuff, you know, and they were so normal.
I just thought, I'd never even thought of it.
Every light switch had those Our Lady of Peace light covers.
And my dad got sober when I was 15, and so he was my first example of Alcoholics Anonymous.
When my brother died, my dad never drew a sober breath.
There was kegs of beer at the funeral home.
It was a very, there was a lot of stigma around my brother's death because we're Catholic and it was a suicide.
It was, you know, everybody was bringing drugs to the funeral.
The funeral home, the funeral in my brother's casket, because it had been a hanging, and my mother insisted on an open casket, you know, it was just, it was so twisted.
And my dad was just completely wasted through the whole thing.
And so when he got sober, I, my memory is my dad did so much work around in Alcoholics Anonymous over that funeral and over my brother's death.
And he would have newcomers in our house and they'd be going through the big book.
And that, what I looked for when my dad got sober was, was my dad going to change?
Although he embarrassed me, he was a funny guy.
And he had a lot of personality and I loved my family.
My family was quirky and messed up, but I loved that my dad had so much personality and I was afraid he was going to be boring and vanilla and like a woman, you know, and I watch it for that.
And my dad probably got a better personality.
My dad was still the same guy, but he was sober and he embraced AA.
He ended up getting Hepatitis C month and chronic bronchitis.
And it was when you can smoke in meetings and he would sit in the front row and there was so much smoke in that room and he didn't care.
He loved Alcoholics Anonymous.
And that is what I saw at 15 and 16.
He died when I was 19.
He was four years sober and I would come home drunk at 15 and 16 and 17 and 18.
And he never said a word to me.
And I don't think I could do that.
I have kids.
I don't think I could do that, but he never said a word.
And he was just this great example.
And I think some of that is, you know, that's what, what our literature says, you know, attraction rather than promotion.
And I just, I saw it.
He wasn't lecturing me.
He wasn't trying to fix me.
He was doing his thing.
And he was a good example to me of Alcoholics Anonymous.
And I saw it and thank God because he made it okay for me to know this was a place I could go.
And what happened is when I was little, I had been, we would, all the kids would go over to this guy's house.
There was an old man in our neighborhood named Mike and he and his wife had a woodworking shop in their basement.
He's a big part of my life because all of us would go over there, the kids in the neighborhood, and we'd use his lathe and we'd make these candlesticks.
And I loved going over to Mike's house.
And we, we did drink.
We'd drink in his basement some.
He didn't know that, but he, he would kick us out every night at like six o'clock and I didn't want to leave.
I didn't want to go home to my house.
My house was crazy, but he would kick us out.
And when my dad got sober, I found out that Mike was sober in AA and he had been sober at that time, maybe 20, I mean, 25 years or, he was like one of the very early members of AA.
And he, he was an amazing example.
I feel like he saved my life on millions of levels.
So he never said anything and he knew what was going on in my house and he'd kick us out.
And he and his wife would go.
She'd go to Al-Anon, he'd go to AA and they'd go every single night.
So when I, you know, when I, my dad came into AA, he helped my dad.
My dad died when I was 19.
I ended up going to, I was supposed to go away to college and I never went.
I flaked on that.
One of the things I like to do is tell you what you want to hear.
Like, yep, I'll be here tonight.
I'll be here tonight to speak.
And then at about three, I'd call and say I have a sore throat or I had a tooth pulled or my eighth eye or whatever.
And I'm not going to come.
And that is how I lived my whole life.
I would tell you anything you wanted to hear.
And then I'd make up a lie to not show up.
And that, you know, I didn't know that that's not a very comfortable way to live.
And that's what I mean by when I came in, it just became very straight.
Like I just, I learned those lessons.
And so I was supposed to go away to college.
I did not stay back.
And I drank a lot.
I hung out in really bad bars in Louisville.
I ended up drinking, there's a bar in Louisville called the Toy Tiger.
It was, you know, this awesome neon sign with the tiger, with the martini glass.
But it was this huge bar.
And it was all these Fort Knox guys.
I mean, there's Fort Knox right outside of Louisville and, you know, they have banana
eating contests and white, you know, a white t-shirt contest and I was slamming shots at
the bar and, you know, it's heavy metal music and Fort Knox guys and, you know, this Catholic
school girl, my bow and my hair and, you know, just, just getting wasted.
And so I ended up getting, say I was my dad died when I was 19.
I got arrested for drunk driving and ended up getting sentenced to alcohol education
classes.
Whatever that is.
I don't even know if that happens anymore, but it was, you know, I got sober in 87.
So I'm thinking this was 85.
I have zero sense of year or time at all.
I swear.
I remember I was born in 62.
That's my biggest milestone.
I can't remember.
But something happened around 85 and I ended up going to jail for this drunk driving.
And I was driving the wrong way, down the wrong street.
I had been scaling the walls of a cemetery that night.
There was corrugated iron at the top of the cemetery walls.
I've got a couple of hands all up.
I'm so sorry.
I'm sorry.
And I went to jail and my boss at the time was an attorney and I worked for an indoor
soccer team in Louisville, a professional soccer team.
And he sent his guy to get me out of jail, but he bailed me out the next day.
It was before drunk driving was as huge as it is now.
So I got this alcohol education, he got it reduced and I had to do these alcohol education
classes.
So I would go to these classes and they talked about adult children of alcoholics.
And I thought, well, that's my problem.
So I decided I was going to go to an ACA meeting.
I remember talking to the teacher of this class and saying, you know, I am an adult
child of an alcoholic.
I need to go to some meetings.
So I went to these ACA, an ACA meeting and it was across the river in Indiana.
And I just remember it was snowy and cold and I went, it was small and dreary.
And I think I shared the whole time about my family.
And then I left.
And all I remember is that I had this overwhelming fear.
I had this feeling that that was not my problem.
I did not know exactly what my problem was.
I wasn't there yet.
But it was this first moment of grace where it was just like, that's not your problem.
So I ended up, I had known somebody that had gotten sober in AA and I ended up going to
AA because I had this drunk driving.
And he, all those men that had helped my dad were all there still.
And they had a lot of time.
And those old timers just embraced me.
And they're like, we saved you a seat, Jobe.
We've been saving you a seat, which I resented.
And the first meeting, the first meeting of my dad, I was like, I'm going to go to an ACA.
And the first meeting, the first meeting I went to, they asked me to reach actor five.
And I just thought, absolutely not.
No way.
And I told them no.
And they laughed and said, oh no.
And that was my first lesson in, you don't turn down an AA request.
That's what they told me.
And I, I thought I was, my head was going to come off my body.
I just, as I'm reading, I'm, I'm so self-conscious anyway.
And I'm not as much now, but I thought I could see my cheeks growing.
Like, I'm so distracted.
I'm so distracted.
I'm like, you know, it was horrible and I'll never forget it.
And they didn't care.
Nobody cared.
And it was sort of my first lesson and nobody really caring if something made me uncomfortable.
People had cared that I was uncomfortable my whole life.
My mom always let me stay home from school.
I was a big fake sicker.
You know, I would fake sick for everything.
I fake sick for my first communion.
I fake sick for confirmation.
I fake sick, anything that scared me, I fake sick.
And my mom would always let me get away with it.
She was, you know, she felt so bad for me.
And I got to AA and people didn't care.
I was like, I'm going to go to AA.
And people, they didn't care.
It was like, oh no, you'll read, you'll read.
And I survived.
And it was just that first little lesson, you know, of doing one thing I thought would
kill me.
And I did it and I didn't die.
And so I stayed sober.
I didn't, you know, they were all, actually they sent me to, I didn't think I was an alcoholic
and they sent me to see somebody to take a test.
I don't know what that was all about.
And I passed the test.
They said I was definitely an alcoholic, and I didn't get a sponsor.
I kind of went to meetings.
I didn't get it.
It snowed.
I didn't know if there was a meeting, if it was too cold, if there wasn't a meeting.
And these guys, you know, Mike really, this old man and these buddies, he, they take,
they take me out for coffee and they'd be like, you know, the elevator, you get off
the main floor, Jobe, and you know, you don't have to go all the way to the basement.
And like, you're no more or less an alcoholic if you get off on the fifth door, you don't
have to go all the way down.
I don't know.
That resonated with me for some reason.
So I stayed sober and after 30 days, I drove to Chicago.
You know, I was a, I did a lot of things in blackouts.
I'm a big blackout drinker.
I thought blackouts were really the objective.
I thought if you didn't black out, it really wasn't a very fun night.
I'm a party, bar drinking.
I like bars.
I'm not a home drinker.
I'm not hiding it in my sofa.
I'm not putting it in Tupperware so no one knows.
I go, I go to bars, I get wasted, pick up guys, I end up in places I should not.
I blow a paycheck in a night.
I lose my car.
I'm that girl.
And I, um, so I went to Chicago and I worked for this indoor soccer team, which was a
recipe for disaster.
Cause it was all these guys from Europe and it was horrible.
And so I drove to Chicago and I got, I prayed all the way there that I would not drink.
And, um, I just, if you're new, you know, I used to listen to tapes all the time when
I was new and Sandy B had this tape, dropped the rock and you know, it was a long time
ago and he had this thing in there and I'll never forget it.
He talked about, he goes, there's something to this, not drinking thing.
Like you have to not pick up the first drink and that's important.
It's really important that I do whatever I have to do to not drink.
And that's important.
That's important.
I'm not going to stop.
Take that first drink.
Then I can stay sober.
And you know, I didn't get the first drink as you dropped.
I thought it was the third drink or the fifth drink.
But you're always here.
So I drove to Chicago and prayed.
I wouldn't get drunk.
And that doesn't work.
Just if you're new, you can't pray and not get drunk.
You have to not pray.
And I got drunk and I slept around like I always do.
And I came up the next morning in the hotel and I had to drive all the way back to Louisville,
hungover and it's a six hour drive.
And, uh, it was in, I guess it was in the beginning of spring.
So I got sober March 7th.
So I drove back and I ended up going back to meetings and 17 days into my sobriety,
I still didn't get a sponsor.
An opportunity came up right as I got sober, I guess, or right before to move to LA and
work for the soccer team out here with the coach I had slept with who was married and
had a baby.
And I was going to work.
These are the brilliant ideas that you get when you're new.
And I was going to work for them and babysit the baby.
But I look at that now.
It's a crazy plan.
But it saved my life.
And what happened is that team, I don't think they knew it, but because they were going
to move me and I was going to work for the team when I wasn't babysitting the baby, they
moved, they shipped my car and my three pieces of furniture with his stuff, with his wife's
family stuff.
So I got everything shipped out here.
I know.
I mean, I don't think anything through.
I'm like, LA?
I don't know.
I know.
I don't know.
I know.
I don't know anything about California.
What's a job?
A job?
I'll go.
I really wanted to go to Boston.
I didn't want to go to LA.
I had zero interest in California.
I didn't know anything about California.
I flew out here on my 25th birthday.
It was March 25th.
I had 17 days of sobriety.
And everyone in Louisville had said, you can't do this.
Everybody in AA in Louisville.
You can't go.
You can't, you won't stay sober.
You can't make a move like this in your first year.
here to get a year under your belt. Well, A, I didn't have a sponsor. B, I couldn't have cared
less what they said. And I don't even know these people and I'm not going to listen to them.
One person, that old man, Mike, who I'd known since I was a little girl, you know,
we always have these crossroads. And he said, you can go anywhere you want and stay sober. If you
get out there, you get out there, you go to, you call central office, you go here and you will
stay sober if you want to stay sober. And I always share that story because if he hadn't said that,
I think I would have drank because I would have had an excuse because everybody said I was going
to drink. So knowing me, I would have been like, well, they all said I was going to drink. I'll
just drink and get it over with and just get wasted. And I might have died. I mean, I don't,
I do not believe there's a revolving door here. I do not believe we get to go out and come back
in at will. I saw my brother die. I just, I don't suffer with those rose colored glasses that we
just, this is who I am. And I get to be like this always. I don't believe that. So he said,
that to me and I heard him and it took away my excuse because I thought he said, if I want to
stay sober, I can stay sober. And he put it on me and told me what to do. And it was the first time,
you know, for me, a lot of sobriety has been learning that I am responsible for my own
sobriety and I'm a brat. I'm a spoiled jerky brat is who I am by nature. And I'm a victim and I
always want to blame you and my family and my brother and my weird dad. And it's always someone
else's fault. And he just, he put it.
It's squarely on me. Here's the tools. Here's what you can do. If you want to stay sober,
you'll stay sober. And I did. I came out here and I was a train wreck. It was my 25th birthday.
I remember what I was wearing to this day. I looked like, I mean, I was about as un-LA as
you can get. And I, I didn't know what I was doing. I couldn't speak. I smoked two packs of
cigarettes a day. I was drinking so much coffee with sugar. It was crazy. I started looking for
meetings and meeting directories and just hitting up meetings where I could. I didn't, I didn't know
where I was going. And people,
people were kind to me. I would go to these meetings. I went to meetings on Rodeo and Beverly
Hills. I thought I was going to die with those people. I just thought I will never stay sober
if this is AA because they were so fancy. I can't do this. I'm not good enough. I was so inferior
and self-obsessed and hated myself so much. And people were really kind to me and they gave me
their numbers, but I was, I came late. I left early and I wasn't about to make a phone call.
I didn't know how to make a phone call. It just, I couldn't do it.
And it would drop $20 bill in my purse to help me. They'd give me a ride, but they, I don't know,
they didn't. That's all they did. And I ended up through a long, you know, my Catholic guilt,
which has saved my life time and time again. I got no problem with my Catholic guilt. My mother
guilted me into calling Mike England's granddaughter, that old man's granddaughter lived in
LA. I've known her since I was a little girl and I hated her guts. I went to visit Kentucky. She
was bratty and blonde and gymnastic-y and horseback riding and hot smoking.
And I just hated her so much. She was so LA. And she was sober a year. And Mike said I had to call
her. And my mom shamed me into it and said she was embarrassed that every time she saw Mike,
he asked. And I had, I was bumping around LA for maybe 25 days. I was pathetic. I was freaking
on some of the soccer guys, girlfriend's couches. It was ridiculous. I'd left that coach. That didn't
work out. It was just, it was a mess. And so Leslie came and got me. I called her and she
came and got me and she became my first sponsor, which is just,
just a twist of fate because I hated her so much, but she came and she was so different and she was
a year sober and she was doing everything. And she wasn't the girl I remember. And I,
I didn't know what else to do. So I asked her to sponsor me and she was really a mean sponsor.
She would get, you go to six meetings a week, you get a commitment at every single meeting.
You get one night off to do laundry. You call me every single morning and I'm not your friend. I'm
not here to be your friend. And you get on your knees every night and every morning and thank God
for your friend. I'm not here to be your friend. I'm not here to be your friend. I'm not here to be
your friend. I'm not here to be your friend. I'm not here to be your friend. I'm not here to be your
sobriety and ask God to help you. She was pretty hardcore. And for me, you know, I liked that I had
a sponsor that only had a year and I'm a big believer in that. I, I, I don't think that for
me, I sponsor, I sponsor people obviously, but I think that if somebody has a year or eight months,
I mean, I don't believe there's a requirement to have 30 years or 25 years or 10 years to sponsor.
And for me, somebody with a year was perfect. And she hooked me up with her friends who took me in
because they were, and everybody was doing it.
But I was the newcomer and they all had a year. And so they all took me in. And so it was this
like group of women that were helping me and they were taking me to showing me where to go and
helping me at meetings. And I got commitments at my meetings and, you know, commitments. I took
them so seriously because I didn't know anything about treatment centers. I didn't have any
insurance. I didn't have a job. I had a hundred dollars when I got out of here and my mom had
said, don't come home. So it was really all I had. And I was afraid if I did the commitment wrong,
you would fire me. You would, you know, tell me to go home. I would,
just fry and smoke and drink coffee and eat lots of chocolate. And there was a book, Living Sober.
I don't know if you have it on your literature table, but that book talks about, you know,
things to do to stay sober. It's this really practical book. And I got it and read it about
things to do to stay sober. And they were really practical and deep down in my core.
And I'm a really practical person, I guess. I'm really drawn to that. I'm not, I've never been
one who's drawn to really ethereal, you know, that's probably why I don't come across very
spiritual. I just, I don't know. I don't know. I don't know. I don't know. I don't know. I don't
know. It's like, I'm just not, I don't get it. It's over my head. Tell me what to do. My sponsor
said, wash your face every night. Okay. I get that. Take the earrings off. One of the things I
used to do was sleep in big, giant earrings and I ripped all my earlobes, you know, from that.
And I'd pass out. I couldn't take contact lenses out of my eyes when I was drinking. That was too
hard for me. Birth control, forget it. Like trying to keep up with that wheel and the date.
These are the little things I could not do. And so those were the things I did. I rewarded myself
by washing my face every single night, no matter what. I don't care how tired I was. And I did it.
I've done it every night for 31 years. I would always take my earrings out. I will always make
my bed in the morning. Those are the things I wasn't capable of. Contacts, really good with
contacts now. But, and lastly, just, she just set me on that path. And, you know, I, you know,
I learned like in the Pacific group, you know, there's the guard, got to be there at 930. There
was, there's moods. And when there's a mood on a Sunday and you're helping another member of the
group, you know what that is. And you show up at somebody's house at a pre-designated time and
you're going to go help them move. And my first move was supposed to be there at nine. I showed
up at like 915 and everybody left and I cried and they were like, okay, nine is nine. Like we're
leaving at nine and no one cared. And those were the things that I believe shaped me. That's where
I learned to be an adult and not because I'm going to be a better person or any of those things.
Cause all that nickel and dime stuff I did is what made me want to drink. It's what made me hate it.
I hate myself. It was never the huge stuff I did. It was the nickel and dime stuff I did. You know,
not showing up when I say I'm going to show up, not showing up for my dad when he was sick in the
hospital, just the stupidest stuff. And I learned how to show up on time and do what I say I'm going
to do. And my sponsor was Marianne W for many, many years after I had Leslie, I don't know,
after a year, which was stupid because she was giving me all the right directions. You know,
so much of a year, you just got to make these changes. And then I ended up with my actual
over 20 years. And Marianne taught me, you know, she used to keep this thing with her at all times.
And it was like, do what you say you're going to do, you know, show up when you say you're going
to show up and treat people with love and kindness, whether they deserve it or not. And those were the
like the simple things I can do those things. I can do those things. If you ask me to do something
huge, I cannot do it. But if you ask me to show up on time, I can do that. That is so small. I can
do that. And those are the things I've learned. And that's how I learned to be a good employee.
You know, I was there early and I,
I worked the whole time and my sponsor wouldn't let me goof off. And then I'd go to my meeting
and I learned all of those things and learned to be a better worker. And, you know, I was no
rocket to startup. I've been married. I've been divorced. I went down in flames. It's 19, 20 years
of sobriety, which I always have to share because it's not fun to have 19 or 20 years of sobriety
and lose everything. And it happened. And I learned that it's not about things or houses or cars,
because you can get, I mean, for me, I got caught up in that.
And it's not that I was an ego freak or this big, you know, I just, it became, you know,
I've got time. I should have a nice car. I should have a house by now. I need to get married. I need
to have a child. I need to do all these things. And it all exploded on me all due to my own actions.
And I left my husband, sold my house, the market crashed and I lost absolutely everything. And I
had to start over in a new career, you know, making an eighth of what I had made and selling
all my jewelry. So I didn't have much, you know, and I had to go sell this jewelry. I was selling
watches for like $50 to get enough to go to the grocery. My sponsor gave me, her husband had
passed away. She gave me a watch and earrings to sell and, you know, they weren't worth much,
but it got me through. And I never felt like I was going to drink through that, but it knocked
me to my knees. I lost three quarters of my friends. They didn't like what had happened to
what I had done. I had left my husband. Nobody was big on that. We were kind of this AA couple.
And it was really, really, really, really hard. And I had to double down on meetings and I had to
dig.
Really deep and realize it's not about what's on the outside. And that was a very powerful lesson
for me that I've taken with me to today. You know, I just took my 18 year old son back to
college. My youngest was 18 and I have two stepkids and these two, a 23 year old and an 18
year old. And my ex-husband was there and I thought, well, I mean, we get along fine. He's
in the Pacific group, but it gets on my nerves. And I thought, oh God, we've just been like five
days together, moving my kid into the tour. And he drove me completely crazy on day one.
He just drove me insane. And I find that my kid going to school back in the DC area,
friends who live back there, I was embarrassed. Then the next day we were supposed to meet for
breakfast and he ends up telling me he's really sick. And I'm like, what do you mean you're sick?
He was kind of sick. He's kind of sickly. And I thought, oh God, do not die. And we showed up at
my kid's thing, my son's thing. And he was really sick, like shaking uncontrollably, dripping with
sweat, head down on this table outside this room where we were supposed to have breakfast with all
my sons.
He's fresh, you know, I'm coming freshman to college and, you know, he was shaking,
couldn't get his driver's license out. And my son was scared and, you know, I'm rubbing his back
and trying to help him and calm him down. And I'm making him look at me. I'm like, look at me,
you cannot die on like a Joe's going into college, like stop it. And we ended up spending the whole
day in the ER and ended up having a kidney stone and something else. But it was, you know, it was
like, I didn't think we could ever do that. I mean, we could not look at each other when we
went through that divorce.
And I had a sponsor and he had a sponsor and they made us walk through that. And it was not pretty.
His dad was sober. It's a long time number of AA. He died a couple of years ago and his father hated
my guts. He never spoke to me again, ever. And Chris and I really like had to walk through stuff
because of the kids. But that event, he minted this new relationship with us. And we could never
have done it if we had not followed sponsor direction and stayed in Alcoholics Anonymous
and tried to work through this program to the best of our ability. And I think that's what we're
doing. And we're trying to do the best of our ability, failing all over the place, but never
stopping trying. And I guess, you know, if you're new, please just never stop coming back. You know,
you need to be in the middle. The fringes will not work. And the life, you heard it here earlier,
your life will change. It will, it will change. I don't know what it'll look like, but it will
change, promise. But you have to walk through it. And when you want to drink or you want to use,
you have the tool and it's up to you and only you to make that phone call or to show up at a meeting.
My feet just moved.
I would just show up when I was supposed to show up. And so thank you all for listening. And thanks
again.