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Source: Bob G – Speaker Talk at Madison – Date Unknown.mp3 File: bob-g-speaker-talk-at-madison-date-unknown.mp3 Duration: 00:52:15
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We welcome you non-members of Alcoholics Anonymous and members at our open meeting here this evening. We'll have some announcement made a little bit later, but it's, to me, it's a privilege to be able to be up here to introduce to you one of the finer fellows that I've met in AA. We don't have enough guys like Bob. He's dedicated, spends a lot of time talking with that other fellow. So, to me, we'd like to give you Bob from Janesville, please.
Thank you, Ray. Someone just asked me a little while ago what I was going to talk about tonight, and I said, I forgot what it was I did say, but I imagine I'll wind up talking about myself. This is usually the case. AA is the only place that I know of where you can go to a meeting when you're asked to speak and stand up and talk about yourself for a half an hour, 45 minutes, and people usually sit there and listen.
I'm sure this would not be true in most other places. My qualification to be the speaker here tonight at the meeting, of course, is simply the truth about myself, and that is that I am an alcoholic and that today, by the grace of God, I'm sober. I've come to regard sobriety as certainly a lot more than simply abstaining from alcohol. Prior to coming into AA, when someone said the word sober, to me this meant just not drinking.
It meant that for some time after I was in this program, too. I didn't fully understand, especially at first, that sobriety is truly a way of life, or at least the cornerstone of the way of life. This way of life, of course, is described in our 12 steps that we have to follow in the AA program. I think that the greatest appeal that AA had for me when I went to my first meeting was the fact that the people who spoke to me, and they were very friendly and very outspoken, spoke to me from their own experiences, and there was no theory and no advice given to me of the type that I had been used to receiving up until this time.
I'm sure you know how it is, those of you who drank, perhaps drank the way I did, you always had advice from someone. I used to get advice from nearly everyone I knew, especially bartenders, and from my family, and a few words of advice from my employers about my drinking, such as, if it bothers you so much, why don't you just quit, or why don't you just drink beer, or why don't you just drink after 6 o'clock, or something like that.
I tried all those things, and of course these people meant very well by giving this advice, but none of it ever worked for me, and of course I must add that I really didn't want it to work at that time. But when I came to AA, and the first AA meeting I attended stands out so well in my memory, it really wasn't that long ago, but I was sober, I was dry and alert anyway, much better off than I had been a few days before.
And I quickly came to understand that these people who spoke to me had certainly had plenty of experience in what they were speaking about. They were talking about their own drinking, and this was an attempt on their part, I'm sure, to make the program sound attractive to me. And of course I felt that some of these people had been following me around for the past year or so, or reading my mail or my mind anyway, because no one could speak like they did without having experienced it.
I don't want to stand here tonight and give a blow-by-blow description of my drinking. I can't remember a lot of it, and I'm sure that that wouldn't serve too much purpose. But I do intend to speak to you from my own experience tonight, because this program, the way I see it, is based upon the sharing of experience, one with the other. And I think it always does some good when one AA shares his experiences with another or with a group of people in AA.
And I have experienced also that when I do this, it helps me. It helps me in a spiritual manner to share my experience for what it's worth to anyone here.
[00:05:04]
I don't plan to give anyone any advice. I'm certainly not an expert on alcoholism. They say in order to be an expert on a subject, you must be at least 500 miles away from home, and I'm not quite that far away tonight. I can be checked out pretty quick. I only know about alcoholism as I have experienced it and as I've seen it work in others and people whom I've met over the years since I've been in this program.
About my drinking, I started drinking when I was 16, and I stopped when I was 28. I was 28 years old when I came into AA. During this 12-year period, I finished my high school education, of course, and went on to college. I was fortunate to do that. I started on a career in work, and I served my time in the military service, was married, and began with my wife to raise a family. All of these very important things were going on during this very important 12 years that I was drinking.
I stopped, I think, at what most people would consider an early age. I've heard people make the remark that in only 12 years, perhaps you couldn't drink as much as I did, someone who has drank perhaps for many years more than that. I've come to the conclusion, and I think I really know this for sure, that it really doesn't matter what you drank or how long you drank. It's the effect that it has upon one's life that counts. Believe me, by the time I got to AA at age 28, my life was truly unmanageable.
I got up one morning and put my feet on the floor and didn't know what to do next, honestly. I was alone in the house. My wife and two little daughters had vacated the premises about a week prior. I was completely out of money, and I thought to myself that I've got to do something, and I didn't know what to do. I had been drinking heavily for an extended period, and the thought occurred to me that what I should do is go back to church. I hadn't darkened the door of a church for about four years, unless of course someone died or got married.
So I thought I would seek help from the church. I thought about it all day, and the mailman I knew was coming in the middle of the morning, and I should have had a check come in the mail. If I had received that check, I probably would have had a sudden change of opinion and feeling as to what I should have done. But the mailman came and left and didn't leave the check, and of course I thought he was an awful guy that morning. So I continued to think about it during the day, and not having anything to drink, I did make up my mind that I was definitely going to try to do something.
And I was prompted, I'm sure, by feelings such as this, well what will the neighbors think, and here my family's gone, and I haven't worked for a while, and my boss is probably wondering where I am. He lives about a hundred miles away. And I had just been out of sight for a while and out of circulation, and I was prompted by a feeling of what these other people thought of me, more than I was by a desire to stop drinking.
I must admit that. I wanted to get things straightened out, I wanted to get these people off my back, and then I thought, well later we'll see what happens. So that night I went over to this church that was near where we were living at that time, about two blocks away, and I rang the doorbell. It was an evening in the fall, and it was a Friday night, just about like tonight, about the same temperature as I recall.
And I knocked on the door, and this gentleman came to the door, and he wasn't dressed like a clergyman, but I assumed that he was, and I told him that I wanted to talk to a priest. And he looked me up and down, and he said, well I'm one, come on in. So inside we went, and we sat down in this little study he had there in his home, and he said, well what seems to be the trouble? And I began to tell him about my wife, and about my boss, and about the way the world was treating me, and he listened to this for about five or six minutes.
And then he interrupted, and he asked me if I drank. He said, do you drink? And I said, well yes, I do. As if to say, doesn't everybody? And he said, well do you ever get drunk? And I said, well yeah, once in a while.
[00:10:11]
You mean on weekends? And I said, yeah, on weekends. And of course by this time I was wishing that I had not even stopped to begin with, because I never took kindly to people asking questions about my drinking. I figured that was my affair. So he said, well I'll tell you, I wouldn't walk across the street for a barrel of the stuff myself, but he said, I know that all people don't feel that way. And he said, I could get you back in the church, and you could take the pledge, and he said, maybe you're one of the kind of fellows that usually takes it for life, I don't know.
But all of this wouldn't do any good, because alcoholism, if this is your problem, I know goes deeper than that. And he asked me if I would like to speak to a man about this. And he said, I know a man who is just a little older than you are, and who's had a similar experience. And perhaps if you were to talk to him, it may do you some good. And I agreed right away, because I thought, now's my chance to get out of here. And he picked up the phone, and he called up a fellow, and within a few minutes he was there. I thought later he must have been waiting out in the garage or something on the extension.
So in he came, and he sat down, and this priest left the room. And he began to talk to me about himself, and about his own drinking experiences. And it really hit home. This was the first time that I had ever openly discussed, and I was doing the listening, I shouldn't say discussed, but I listened to a man talk to me, who felt the same way I did, or at least who had experienced it. He experienced the same things I did. And I figured that he really knows what he's talking about. And I thought, he's probably the smartest guy in the world, being able to read my mind like this.
And he said a few things. One thing I recall very well, he asked me if I had ever had the experience of getting very nervous, or jumping up whenever the telephone rang. And the telephone had rung that afternoon, of course, and I could never remember where I'd been the night before. And I almost jumped out of the window, and we lived on the second floor that very afternoon. And things like this. So I was drawn to this man because he spoke from experience. And he asked me if I would be interested in investigating this a little further. And then he came right out and asked me if I would be interested in attending an AA meeting.
And I said, yes. When do you have them? Thinking perhaps next week or next month. And he looked at his watch and he said, it starts in about ten minutes. We can just make it if we hurry. So there we went. Now, alcoholics anonymous didn't mean anything to me. I had heard of it. I had heard comedians make jokes about AA. And I never knew anyone who belonged to AA or had never discussed it with anyone prior to that. I had no idea really what an alcoholic was.
And I didn't know what to think. On the way over there, he told me that I would meet a lot of nice people. And I thought, you know, I always had a very high opinion of myself. And I thought these people would probably be, well, it'll be a combination of rescue mission and Salvation Army and all these things I didn't know anything about anyway. But I was really the bum. I was kind of a dressed up bum that night. And in we went. And there were about 80 or 90 people there. And I shook hands with quite a few of them and they gave me some coffee. And they really made me feel at home.
It happened to be an open meeting on Friday night. And I listened to a speaker, a fairly young man who happened to be a salesman. And that's what I was or was supposed to have been anyway at that time. And I listened to his talk. And again, I was impressed by his knowledge of this experience with drinking. This was really new to me. So after the meeting, we went into a little room and I was sat down by these gentlemen and four or five of them. And we began to talk about AA and they told me what it was all about. And they told me some things then that I've never forgotten.
Things then that I've never forgotten since, one old gentleman who died last year told me
[00:15:05]
that if I would decide that I wanted to stop drinking and only I could decide that for myself, if I really wanted to quit drinking, that I was welcome to AA regardless of my age or my religious affiliation or my sex or what I did for a living, that all I needed to get into this was a desire to stop drinking and he said also that if you do come into this you'll find that you will meet people who will become your dearest and closest friends and I was skeptical, I thought well how about all my drinking buddies and bartenders and all these people who were such very, very close friends of mine, I never heard from any of them that I can recall afterward, of course I moved around to a lot of different bars when I was drinking and I didn't believe that but what he said turned out to be true.
Now I started out in AA and I began to attend meetings and as I say I was drawn to the people in AA and I thought that I belonged here, in fact I was convinced from that night on beyond any question that I was an alcoholic and in my case really it was a relief to find this out. I haven't called many things as you know what we are called at times and to the point I guess where I wasn't sure what I was, I was sure that I was losing my mind by the way I was acting and it was really a relief in some ways to find out that this is what I am, this is the name and of course I didn't like that name, I'm sure a lot of people don't, the fact that I was an alcoholic but I did accept that fact that I am an alcoholic.
I did not have a real strong desire to stop drinking, I wanted to get out of trouble, I wanted to get things back to normal again because after all what would the neighbors think and I wanted to get my life going again so that I could work and everything would be alright. So I started out in AA without a strong desire to stop drinking and for me it didn't work, I fall into what they usually refer to as the 50% who drink again and I went to a few more meetings and I didn't take another drink until someone asked me to have a drink, this is how strong, this is how strong I was in the program, one afternoon a fellow said come on let's go get a drink and I said okay I'll buy and off we went.
Fortunately I didn't drink much and my wife and I had planned to go, this was a Friday, back to the same open meeting and when I came home around supper time she took one look at me and she said you've been drinking, well I just had a couple beers, a couple beers and that's all I did have really, for once I told the truth about that so she called my sponsor and said that so and so is, what do we do now and he said well why don't you come to the meeting anyway so we went and after the meeting was over and there was a big crowd there, I tried to avoid him, he was about the last man on earth that I wanted to see and I did a good job of it until as I recall there were only three or four of us left in the building and we sat down and had a conversation and he said to me that AA had been progressing along here in Saginaw, Michigan, this is where it was, for a number of years and we've done quite well, we have a nice clubhouse here now, we keep getting new people in AA and this place will probably be going long after you and I are both gone and certainly the society of AA will continue for many years after that and it's just possible that we can make it without you, but he said however you may need what we have here, well you know how I took that, I resented it very deeply and my attitude was I'll show him, well I continued to go to the meetings and I began to make a better and stronger attempt to stay sober, I had come to recognize the fact that I really needed sobriety and I began to learn a little more about it from going to these meetings, but I continued to drink off and on for nearly another year and I must say that during this year this was the worst
[00:20:01]
time of my drinking, I did all the things that I hadn't done up until that time, I got into more trouble, my life became totally unmanageable to the point where when I finally went back to AA I was licked and I was willing to surrender to the truth about myself that I'm an alcoholic and that I cannot drink physically, mentally and spiritually, I just do not have any capacity for alcohol and with me it took nearly a year after being introduced to AA to come to that understanding, I know many people realize this at first and of course at that time I wished I had, but such was not the case, I began to be very active in AA, as I said I was willing to do anything that I had to do in order to stay sober and if someone were to ask me what I think is necessary in order to stay sober, the AA way I would say it is a willingness on our part to be strongly willing to do anything necessary in order to maintain 24 hours of sobriety, I was told by the people in AA and I got to know them very well because I went to a meeting every single night of the week, I was either at a meeting or engaged in some sort of AA activity and I did this for a year and a half or two years that I was dry and off of alcohol, I really went to it, often I've thought myself very fortunate that this attitude developed within me, it's only the grace of God that it did, up until this time I had never done anything that would indicate that I would be this active in AA, in fact up until that time I don't think I ever turned down a drink in my life, I refused food when I didn't feel very well, but no matter how sick I was if I could stand up I would always take a drink whenever it was offered to me or whenever I felt like having one, but AA had a great appeal to me and I began to try to practice the program to the best of my ability and this has been going on now for a number of years and in my opinion it's not important how long a person has been sober, but what have I done with the time if I want to look back and of course in AA we don't spend too much time looking back, but I think it all started with a willingness upon my part to do anything, anything that the AAs told me to do in order to stay sober, at that time if they had said we have a 13th step and this step we all go down to the bridge and jump off into the river I would have been the first one in line I think, I did everything I possibly could, at times I thought that I was helping other people and perhaps I did, but I must say that any activity I've ever engaged in in AA I have reaped as much benefits or as many benefits out of it or more than the person that I thought I was trying to help and that incidentally is why I'm here tonight, speaking in AA is not one of the things that I really enjoy doing, but to the best of my knowledge as best I can recall I've never turned down anyone when they said will you speak, when I was first in the program I made a statement once to a group of AAs I said I'll be glad to wash the coffee cups and clean the ashtrays and set up the chairs which I used to do regularly and if anyone wants a ride to the meeting I'll be glad to pick them up, but I'll never stand up and talk especially about myself and about my drinking, and my sponsor said oh yeah the day will come when you will, and the first time I tried it I was so shaky and nervous that I looked like I just got off a drunk, but I did it, there were only a very few people there fortunately for me and then I began to talk whenever I was asked to and I think in carrying the message to other alcoholics we get the opportunity ourselves to grow spiritually.
I was told by the people in AA that this disease and alcoholism is a disease with symptoms and everything that a disease has affects us physically, mentally and spiritually and I came to understand after a while that this was true, I was very very unbalanced mentally
[00:25:05]
I thought with my emotions, I was in an alcoholic hospital once and the doctor one day on the blackboard drew his definition of a person who was truly insane and he drew an outline of a human head and he drew a line across the top so there was about so much of the top of the head above the line and he put an E in there and then below the line he put an I and he said the E stands for emotions and the I stands for intellect and when our emotions dominate our intellect we are truly insane and looking back over my life I had to admit that I truly was insane, I made important decisions in very important things in my life based upon how I felt emotionally.
For example, I was in, as I said in college, I went for four years, four years and at the end of the fourth year I was drinking heavily for the last two months and it didn't go near the place. I was living in a Chinese boarding house off the campus and this suited me fine. Prior to that I had been living on the campus under direct supervision and I thought I can get along without that so I got into this boarding house with three other boys and a whole group of other people who lived all over town.
There were bricklayers and one fellow that was picked up by the law, he was a wanted man for a number of years and it was really not the highest class place but there's where I lived. I stayed inside this place and drank for two months and all I had to do was go write the examinations and pass and perhaps get a degree and I said to heck with it after all those two months of drinking and went home. I resented the authority at the school and I didn't like anybody, I didn't like myself too much at that time, but I thought that I was smarter than the whole bunch and I just went home and that was it and after four years of college I wound up back at the trade I had learned best during these summer times as an ice man.
I was an ice man in my hometown and I was probably one of the few ice men working at that time with a college education. I had a strong back and a weak mind and an affinity for drinking and living the way the ice men lived at that time. That really sounds silly but there was no supervision, there was a bar across the street and in fact one year I had 17 bars on my ice route and I was about 19 or 20 years old.
I used to stop there and start out at 6 o'clock in the morning with this load of ice and I drank with the porters and I drank with anyone who happened to be around, the early morning drinkers and I was a very heavy whiskey drinker even before I was 21 which was the legal age to drink. But this is how I had it figured, after all this time and effort and money and it wasn't all my money, it was a sacrifice on the part of my parents to see that the bills were paid at school and I wound up after all this as an ice man.
Now this is an insane thing to do. At first when they talked about insanity and AA I thought they were referring to all the screwy things we did when we were drinking and I had plenty of those that I could remember and a few more that I couldn't remember which is probably just as well. But I really came to understand after being in this hospital what it was to be insane because when I wasn't drinking between these drunks I looked fairly normal I guess and I would walk around and no one would suspect that there was really too much wrong with me.
But I was the type of person who was dominated by his emotions and in order to get straightened out mentally it took a lot of AA meetings on my part. I think, in fact I've never heard it said about anyone else, I was a case about which a good friend of mine who became a good friend later said, I don't think that guy is going to make it. And I've always said if you think that this program is tough or if you think you're not going to be able to make it, it is unlikely that anyone in AA will ever say well this is one of the few that won't make it.
But they said that about me and if I can finally get turned around.
[00:30:00]
where the program is meaningful and becomes a part of my life, I'm sure, that just about anyone can. It was a triumph in my life, or a turning point, I think, when I was willing to accept this truth about myself, that I cannot drink, and willing to surrender my will to this basic truth. And from then on, a man in AA told me that it was important to pray. And I had said prayers in my life, and in recent years, before I came into AA, I had said prayers such as, get me out of this one, and I'll never get into it again.
But he said, it's not necessary to say a lot of prayers, just so you mean it. And he told me that when he got up in the morning, it was his habit over many years to, the first thing, ask God for help to stay sober, and the last thing before he went to sleep at night, to thank him for a day of sobriety. The next morning, I started that. And I've never missed. I wake up in the morning, and it's a habit that's developed over the years.
I say to myself, dear God, I'm an alcoholic, help me stay sober today. And at night, before I go to sleep, again, it's a habit, I say, thank you, Lord, for another day of sobriety. And he told me, he said, if you do that, and you really mean it, it's very unlikely that you'll think you need a few drinks during the day if you do this. And he was right. From the day I started doing that, as it turned out, I haven't had a drink since.
I had believed, as I said, that religion would help me, and I wanted to go back to church to get straightened out. I've come to change my opinion on that. I think it's important that if a person wants to, that they practice a religion. I've gone back to the religion that I was raised in. But I was always taught, and the way I understood God, that he could do anything. And if alcoholism was a disease, he could, if he wanted to, cure it, just like that, or in anyone else.
But it was pointed out to me that being drunk, even for an alcoholic, is an unnatural state. And to get into a position of sobriety, where it becomes a part of your life, and depends upon daily progress of a spiritual nature, that this is something above the natural thing. It takes something in the natural realm. Or in other words, God, as I understand him, wants me to take the natural means at my disposal in order to arrest this disease that I have.
In other words, if you have a toothache, it's good to say a prayer, but it's also good to go to the dentist, because the dentist is there, this is the natural thing to do. And I came to believe that my drunkenness, and the way I was living in this completely unmanageable life, was unnatural. And if I were ever going to make anything out of it, the only natural means at my disposal were the 12 steps of the AA program, and all the people in it.
And this is what's happened. I don't say, or make the claim that I live exactly the way the 12 steps suggest, but I will say, in all honesty and sincerity, that I try. And I used to be, and still to a great extent, what they call a perfectionist. I'm a rather phony perfectionist, I must say. I was always the type of person, if I couldn't do it the best, I didn't want to have anything to do with it.
After all, what would people think of me? But I found out that if you fail in AA, in any way, you don't act like the man who's walking down the street and stumbles. You don't sit on the sidewalk and say, why did this have to happen to me? Get up and you brush off your pants and you keep walking. And this is the way that I look at the 12 steps. I don't think that anyone in one human lifetime could live to the fullest extent as described in these 12 steps.
But I do believe that we're responsible, as long as we're sober, responsible to ourselves to make an honest and sincere effort to do so. And in all the people I've known in AA, and in my own case, I must say that it pays off. And the big payoff, of course, is 24 hours of sobriety. After I was in AA for a while and going to all these AA meetings, I did come to believe that the AA program would work for me.
[00:35:00]
I never understood what they meant when they came to believe that a power greater than ourselves could restore us to sanity. But after going to all these meetings, and I met hundreds of people in AA, I went everywhere, I found that I spent more time with my own thoughts than I did with anyone else. And from the inside, I began to believe, I began to see these other people for what they really were, living examples of what can be done.
And of course, I had the same experiences that they had, in many cases, when I was drinking. And slowly but surely, I began to get some faith that this, too, could happen to me. And I'm sure that this is one of the most important things that people in AA have to offer a new man. They're living examples of what can be done with a life if you have a desire to stop drinking. And I did come to believe that AA would work for me.
When they told me early in the program that it could altogether be possible, that the day would come when I wouldn't even want to drink, or I would feel that I have no need for it, I didn't believe it. That's how far gone I was. I believed that I could go for, perhaps, an extended period, and in my case, that would be about 30 days, without drinking. But I could never understand in my mind how I could ever live without at least wanting to drink occasionally.
This just didn't fit in my mentality. I'm truly an alcoholic, and I was really far gone. But the day came when suddenly I became aware of the fact that I just don't have to drink. No matter where I go or what I try to do in my work or in my relationship with other people, I don't have to worry about what they think of me. I don't have to worry about any of this sort of thing that I used to worry about before.
And above all, I don't have to drink today. From then on, I've never had a desire to take a drink. I've told this to people, and they say, well, if you don't have a desire to drink anymore, why do you keep going to AA meetings? You're cured. That's it. You're done. You made the grade. Well, aside from the reasons that we all know, I've seen a few people who have graduated and the old sheepskin never really gets up on the wall.
Usually gets hocked for some more booze. But I know that in my way of thinking that these emotions could take over again. And if I were to start drinking again tonight or tomorrow, it would be for the very same reasons that I drank before I came to AA. I never found out, since I've been in AA, why I'm an alcoholic. And tonight, really, I couldn't care less. I don't care if I ever find out. I'm not trying to find out.
But I did find out, to a great extent, what it was that made me want to drink so much. It was, as they say, an escape. I came to rely on it to the point where I could no longer manage my life. And I know, with this trick brain I have, that if I disassociated myself from an active life in AA, this could happen to me again. If I got away from the people and the conversation and the spirit in AA, and if I made myself unavailable in AA, that my thinking could change.
When I was drafted into the Army, there was a friend of mine. We went to school together and grew up together, and he was a great, enormous guy. He wound up as a professional football player. When we took the physical, I passed, and he flunked. And I always thought that was strange. But he flunked because he had a trick knee. And I've often thought I should have told them about my trick brain. Maybe they'd have let me stay home, too.
But I've come to know that much about myself, that I could easily get away, I could easily regard myself as being on parade instead of really on parole from that last spring, and I could get myself into a position in a very short time where I think I'd be better off with a few drinks, even though it has been a long time, what I consider a long time since I've had any desire to drink. But the important thing, as I was going along at this time, this faith was being built in me by the example of the other people in AA.
And I came to believe that I, too, can be one of a bunch, and this can work for me. Maybe I felt like a banana. I don't know.
[00:40:00]
But I felt that I had a real strong faith that this, too, can happen to me. And of course, as we know in this program, this doesn't seem to be enough. There are 10 more steps. And don't worry, I'm not going to stand here and talk about all the other 10 of them. The chairman told me to start talking at 8.30 and stop promptly at midnight, so I won't have that much time. But I've often thought about how we build a foundation in this program, and I think this is important.
And again, if I say you, I mean me. I'm speaking only for myself. I surely can't speak for anyone else. I have enough trouble keeping track of my own activities. But I believe when we come into this program and we admit and accept and surrender our wills to the truth about ourselves, that we are powerless. A man who is powerless needs some kind of power. A man who is shoeless needs shoes, especially in the wintertime.
And by seeing the example of other people, we begin, at least, to believe in something else besides whiskey and this getting away from it all with a few drinks. We begin to believe that this might work for us. If we go to enough meetings, it'll get you. They say if you don't get AA but you keep going, it'll get you. And that's what happened. That's what happened to me. It rubbed off. And through the example of the other people, I began to believe that this could work for me.
And then there's the big question, are we going to take it or not? Are we going to make a decision to go this route with our lives or are we not? And I've talked to a lot of people and heard a lot of people talk about this period in AA of six months to a year sobriety where we're kind of wavering and we don't know whether we're going to go ahead or go out and get a few drinks or what we're going to do for sure.
And the AA say keep coming to the meetings and it'll work itself out. If I had to express an opinion based upon my own experience, I think this is the time when we're trying to decide, as we do in the third step, whether we are going to go ahead with this way of life all the way or not. Making a decision, I think, requires some maturity of mind and some determination. When we make a decision, we get a benefit.
We get a plan of action or we get a course to follow. And we also lose a few things. We lose all the other alternatives. And people whom I've known who are good at making decisions, as soon as they do it, they forget about all the others and they devote everything, all their energy to this decision that they've made. And, of course, at times they stop and think, well, maybe I should have done it the other way.
But in my history, in my own personal life, every time I decided to do something, I get halfway through it and then I'd stop and have a few drinks, I guess, I don't know, that's what I was doing most of at that time, and nothing ever got done and I was never consistent with anything. And, of course, another word for inconsistent is neurosis or an inconsistent person is said to be a neurotic person, the way I understand it, and this is what, this was a good description of me.
I never followed through with anything. I don't know, I wasn't mature enough or what, but I would make a decision and not follow it. And so it was in AA. As I said earlier, I liked the program, I liked the people in it, I knew I belonged there. Boy, this was it for me. There was no other place. And I'm sure they wouldn't have had me in any other place at that time either. But I couldn't firmly make up my mind, I kept thinking, well, what will others think of me and will I be able to do my work and what will happen?
And incidentally I was fired from my job about 90 days after I was sober and I thought that was a raw deal. I didn't go out and get drunk, thank God for that, but I just couldn't seem to get going with it. And I wasn't aware of this at the time, but in looking back, I think that what I was trying to do was to decide whether I was going to take this way of life and whatever would come its way. And when we decide on this way of life, I'm sure that life doesn't become a bed of roses and not for all of us anyway, and it didn't for me.
It took over two years before I could find a steady job again. I really… and it wasn't very funny. Some of the things that happened are a little humorous now, but boy, at that time it wasn't
[00:45:03]
funny when you're, I felt very sorry for myself. I thought, here I am with a family to support, and I'm willing to work, and no one will hire me. And of course, when they checked my references, this killed the whole deal right then and there. They were told that this fella belongs to the if and but club. He's a pretty good man if he stays sober, but he'll probably get drunk just when you want to depend on him for something.
So during this time, it was extremely difficult for me, and I'm sure I'm not the only one who suffered through this. And as it turned out, by the grace of God and the help of the other people in AA, I did decide, I can't remember when it happened, and I don't remember saying this to myself, but it worked out this way over a period of time, that I had decided to turn my life and my will over to the care of God as I understand him.
I decided to take this way of life, and that's it. I went to an AA retreat once, and a fella who gave that retreat talked for about 20 minutes on that subject, about a general accepting the surrender of a defeated army. And those who were defeated, all the generals were lined up there, the defeated people, and they wondered what would happen to them. They could be sold into slavery or have their tongues cut out and their customs and their nation would be destroyed.
And so they were very anxious, and they asked the conquering general, well, what are your terms? And he was giving them a pretty good drubbing up until this time, and he said to them, if you want peace, stop fighting and lay down your arms, then I'll tell you my terms. And they had no alternative. This they had to do. And in the long run, after they rebuilt themselves, they were better off than they were before.
And I suppose I was in the same position as those who were defeated. I wondered, well, what will happen to me? I couldn't seem to get a job. I couldn't seem to do the things that I wanted to do and knew that I should be doing. And I had no alternative. I was licked. And then things began to change and go around the other way. And I often at that time wondered, well, what will happen to me if I go this route?
As I say, I wasn't aware of this type of thinking. But when I look back, this is the way I was thinking. And I wanted to know what would happen in the future, and nobody knows that. And if I had been told that if I took this way of life, there would be a change, and some of it would be real good and some would be not so good, and that my family and I would have to move away from our home and go live in some small town that I barely ever heard of in Wisconsin.
Well, that doesn't sound very appealing, and that's what happened to me, and I'm really glad that it did. We sure like it here. And all of this put together, if I had been told all the things that were going to happen to me prior to accepting this program completely, I probably never would have done it. I would have started drinking again, I'm sure, or gone the other way. So I think when we get to this point in the program, it's based upon the faith that we get from observing the other people in AA that we must make a decision.
If there's any musts in the program, they say there aren't any. I'm sure there are a few, though. If we must do anything, we must decide, well, I'm going to take this for what it is, and no matter what happens to me and all I have, I'm going to be sober in AA, at least for today. And, of course, from then on we build. There's a lot of other remarks one could make about staying sober the AA way, and I'm sure I could tell you more about my own experiences.
I hope so far that what I've said has been of some value to somebody. As I said earlier, it has been of value to me. I said I wouldn't give any advice, but before I sit down, I'll offer one piece of advice. I ask anyone who is new to the program not to compare their experiences with mine. I was told this many times. I would go to an AA meeting, and afterward my sponsor would say, well, what did you think of that?
And I'd say, boy, I was never like that guy.
[00:50:00]
I didn't even drink that brand, and he'd say, well, that doesn't make any difference. It's the effect that counts, but he said, don't compare your experiences. And I'll tell you what happened. During this one year that I was, as they say, kicking the gong around, I went to an AA meeting once, and I heard a man talk about how he had never lost a job from drinking. And I said, I mean, he said about all the jobs he had lost.
He lost quite a few. And I said to myself, I'm not like that. I never lost a job from drinking. And only a few months later, I got fired. I heard a lot of people remark about the alcoholic hospitals they'd been in and out of over a period of years. And I thought to myself, well, I've been pretty bad, but I've never been hospitalized for drinking. And within a month, I was in a hospital, and I wasn't in there because I had a cold.
It was an alcoholic hospital. All they treated were drunks. And then I heard a fellow say once at a closed meeting how he stepped out to buy a newspaper, and the next thing he remembered, he was in Arkansas a few days later. And that also happened to me. I stopped once to have a few drinks, and one thing led to another. And the next day, I was 1,500 miles away from home. And I had $12 in my pocket, as I remember, when I started out.
So I learned the hard way. About this time, I quit comparing. If someone said something that I had never done, forget it. I've always put a lot of stock in the advice that some speakers give before they speak. They say, please don't compare your experiences with mine, because it won't do you any good. It might do you some harm. I think I should have said that before I started out tonight. It's been my pleasure to be here.
I sure thank you for your attention.