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Source: Cora B. – Action, Patience and Recovery – Vicksburg (June 24, 1962).mp3 File: cora-b-action-patience-and-recovery-vicksburg-1962-06-24.mp3 Duration: 00:48:32
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That They May Solve a Common Problem and Help Others to Recover from Alcoholism. The Only Requirement for Membership is a Desire to Stop Drinking. There Are No Dues or Fees for AA Membership. We Are Self-Supporting Through Our Own Contributions. AA Is Not Allied with Any Sect, Denomination, Politics, or Institution. It Does Not Wish to Engage in Any Controversy, Neither Endorses Nor Opposes Any Causes.
Our Primary Purpose is to Stay Sober and Help Other Alcoholics to Achieve Sobriety. The Only Authority We Have is a Loving God as He May Express Himself in Our Group Conscience. I'm Dick C.. I'm an Alcoholic. I Got That Way by Drinking Too Much Liquor Over Too Long a Period of Time. It wasn't hard for me. The Chairman said he was full-blown ahead of me, he said a full-blown alcoholic, so I've been full, I've flown, I've been blown, and everything else.
I would like, for the benefit of any visitors that we may have, to say that alcoholism is a disease, an illness. A lot of times we have a lot of different interpretations in AA of what alcoholism is, what an alcoholic is, anybody with both feet firmly planted in midair, and I've been there too. So, but alcoholism is, to me, can be compared to the diabetic. The diabetic has no control over being a diabetic. He has too much sugar.
As long as he leaves his sugar off and takes his insulin, he'll be all right. Alcoholism is the same. As long as we leave off the liquor, we'll have it arrested, but there is no cure. We can live normal, peaceful, happy lives and be able to sleep at night, have peace of mind. This program will surely do wonders for us. It's no respect to persons. We have ministers of all faiths, doctors, lawyers, and every type of people in the world in AA, even a couple of railroad men.
I've been told, to keep this thing kind of short, so I'll tell you, as a chairman, I'll tell you about the old colored minister who had an old colored boy die and the board of laymen, whatever you want to call them, came to him and said, you're going to have to bury old Sambo. He said, no, I ain't going to bury that nigger. He said, he led a wicked life and never did come to my church at all. I'm not going to bury him. He said, well, you're going to bury him and we're going to fire you.
He said, well, you put it like that, I guess I will, but I don't have to preach. He said, yeah, you've got to preach. If you don't preach, we're going to kick you out of here. Well, he said, I don't have to preach no long sermon. He said, no, just so you preach. So they brought the old nigger in, they started the funeral, and the preacher got up there and said, oh, Lord, I hope he's where I know he ain't. Amen.
That's probably the world's shortest sermon. They keep this thing simple, and they usually bring me along to show everybody how simple this program is. I was like the old boy in the asylum, and the tour of doctors was going through the asylum and making a tour of the state institution, and this fellow had his ear up to the wall listening, you know, and the doctor looked at him and he said, come here, doc, come here.
And the doc went over and he said, put your ear to that wall and see what you hear. And the doctor put his ear up there and he said, I don't hear anything. He's been like that all day. Keeping this thing simple and one day at a time will work, and this is a wonderful program. As I said, there's no respecter of people, and this pretty lady by me here is afflicted with a disease, but she [unclear] arrested, so I'll now ask Cora to take over.
Thank you. Good morning, everyone. As many AA meetings as I've spoken at, I think this is the very first time I ever began one by saying good morning, everyone. So if I fall flat on my face today, I'm going to blame it on the fact that I consider that I'm absolutely no good in the morning anyway. Before I get started, I would like to thank the Vicksburg group, the convention committee, and all of you for giving me the opportunity to participate in your 15th anniversary convention.
And I'd also like to thank you for giving me the opportunity to come home. It's true that I live in New York, have lived there for 16 years, that I found AA there,
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that I love the place, and I think of it now as my town. But it's also true that I was born and grew up here in Mississippi, as did many generations of my family before me. And so this really is my country, and you really are my people, and I'm glad to be home. I'm here today, as every AA speaker is, to tell you my story. But much more than that, I hope that I will be able to express in any way at all the real depth of my gratitude to AA for making it possible for me even to begin to lead the kind of life that I had really always wanted to live.
Because during the years that I drank, I became the kind of woman that I never wanted to be. Destructive, noisy, irrational, unpredictable. Almost five years ago, I attended my first AA meeting. The nine years that had preceded that day, perhaps the most significant day of my life, were years during which I really had extended myself in every conceivable way, looking for answers, looking for ways and means by which I might gain some measure of control over my life and myself.
Never would I have believed that the day would come when I would be able to look back upon those years and accept the fact that, for me at least, they were the necessary preparation for the kind of life that I'm finding here in AA. The painful experience of those years was something that simply had to happen to me. If I was ever to be broken of my willfulness and my pride and my blindness, sufficiently to be able to engage in a real self-confrontation, a confrontation which ultimately showed me what I really was, a lost soul in need of the grace of God and the help of my fellow man.
And so I really was one of the people who had to lose his life, or at least what I thought of his life, in order to find it. I had to learn, and the process continues because I still have to remind myself of it every single day, that I not only do not, but that I cannot control anything or anyone, not even myself, by my efforts alone. I need help. Thanks to the ever-available help of AA and the ever-present grace of God, I still know this, even though I often act as though I don't.
And even though this knowledge was born of considerable pain and suffering, I now consider that this is the greatest insight, the greatest gift that I've ever had, because it places my reliance where it always should have been, in the hands of a power greater than myself, a power that I call God. Now, I had always thought that I drank because my life was unmanageable. And it was only after a considerable exposure to AA, and while I was in the process of this self-confrontation that I spoke of, that I realized that my life was unmanageable, and it often is now, because I was unmanageable, and I often still am.
Now, fortunately for me, at the same time that I had to face this discouraging prospect, I also realized that here in AA, there was a way by which my life and I could become more and more manageable, as I could become more and more willing to turn my life and my will over to the care of God, as I understand Him, as I could become more and more willing to get out of the driver's seat, to take my hands off, in other words, to let go and to let God.
Now, the way to which I refer is, of course, the steady and repeated practice of the Twelve Suggested Steps, and in my own personal case, the simultaneous practice of my religion. Now, my progress along these lines has been and continues to be very slow indeed, because in spite of all my years of psychoanalysis, I had never before come face to face
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with the really deep-seated nature of my pride, my willfulness, and my seeming inability to accept certain things that I can't change. Now, these are serious character defects, so serious that they have produced in me a personality which has always been largely self-defeating. And trying to cope with this hard core of resistance in myself, these roadblocks which I continue perversely to put in the path of my own progress, trying to cope with this has often thrown me into some downright depressing and discouraging periods in AA, when it seemed to me that all that I could do was to hang on and pray that the malaise would pass.
Ironically, it has been during these times of discouragement, when my very best efforts seem to produce so little in the way of results or even progress, that I have learned some of the most important lessons that AA has taught me. When I first came to AA, I was told that there were two big words, two key words, in the success of working this program. And these words were action and patience. Now, by nature, I am essentially a doer, and so the word action was a boon to me.
Here was something that I understood. Here was something that I could use. And so, in a manner of speaking, I put my car into high gear, and I threw myself wholeheartedly into all the wonderful activities that AA makes possible for us. I became an active and participating member of my own group in New York and throughout the metropolitan area. I was a regular visitor on the AA floor at Towns Hospital.
I was a volunteer one day a week at the New York Intergroup Office. My calendar was filled with speaking dates. I never said no to a 12-step call. As a matter of fact, AA became almost my entire life, and I had really never been so happy in my life, because I had been released in a measure that was absolutely new in my experience, from the paralyzing anxiety and the stultifying feeling of uselessness and emptiness that had characterized my drinking years.
Now, all of this activity was hard work, and I gave it my all. But, as is always the case, I got a great deal more from it than I was able to give. At the same time, though, it was pretty exciting and fascinating work, because the whole experience of being sober day after day, the whole experience of being born again, as it were, was still so new to me and still so incredible. And when, after about a year, I really don't remember exactly how long, when I recovered from this awestruck state, sometimes referred to as the honeymoon period, and forced myself to recall that I was not only a member of AA, I was a member of a family.
I was a member of the church. I was a member of the community. And that AA was supposed to help me to become a functioning and participating member in these areas, too. This is when the real bedrock work had to begin. Because now it became incumbent upon me not merely to be sober, but to learn to live a sober life and to try to practice these principles in all my affairs, a task for which I was ill-equipped and for which I certainly had no proven ability.
Now, this was and is tough, and it requires patience. That other big word that I had heard when I first came into AA, the one that I had forgotten all about, that I had tried to bypass with action, not because I didn't think the word was important, but because I simply didn't understand it. I didn't know how to go about it. It wasn't even a part of my emotional vocabulary. Now, it would be absurd, as well as an out-and-out deception, if I were to claim that I have learned patience with myself, patience with other people, patience with this program, patience with life in general in this short time.
But during these periods of discouragement, when I needed it most and didn't know where
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to find it, I did learn some things that I think may be related to it. I learned that the principles of this program really don't fail us if we only remember to practice them. And if we only remember that the word practice simply means to continue the learning process so that one can improve, not so that one can become letter perfect. And so now I try to compare myself to a child with his music lessons and remember the constant dull hours of practicing scales and finger exercises, with an occasional little melody thrown in for reward to be sure, that the child simply must engage in if his fingers are to become strong and flexible enough and if his understanding is going to have time to grow large enough in order to play the more important and more difficult compositions. The great pianist Paderewski is alleged to have said that if he failed to practice for one day, he knew it. That if he failed to practice for two days, the critics knew it. That if he failed to practice for three days, the whole world knew it. Now I remember in the days when Ted Williams was still playing baseball and was considered to be the greatest hitter of them all, the newspaper writers used to marvel at the fact that the great Ted, who was capable of hitting 400, used to spend more time in the batting cage practicing than the rawest rookie who hadn't yet learned to hit 200 in the major leagues. And so what little I have learned of patience, and believe me it is so little that you could put it in your eye and still see, I learned by simply trying to hang on, by trying to practice these principles regardless of how well or how poorly I might succeed, and even when I failed completely, to keep on practicing one day at a time. I know of course that I will never be able to remove all the character defects which continue to plague me. No matter how hard I work, I will never be able to do this. But I also know now that with the grace of God and with the help of AA, all things are possible for me that are right for me. Now on that day in September, almost five years ago, when all of this began for me, I didn't knowingly seek this act of grace which ultimately saved me. I was incapable of it. I was much too deep in despair, self-pity, self-hatred, to be able to reach out and ask for help for myself. And so God in his infinite mercy reached down and found me. Now I'm not able to give any logical explanation for this. I certainly do not pretend to understand the mysteries of divine providence. I know that I was no more worthy of this blessing than anyone else who may still be lost and in despair. All I know is that it happened to me, and that I'm grateful for it beyond anything in my life. On this day of which I speak at about four o'clock in the afternoon, when I had postponed taking the first drink as long as I possibly could, I had begun to drink as I had on countless other afternoons, and almost with the very first drink I had known as I had known on countless other afternoons, that this was going to be one of those days when there simply was not enough liquor in the world to do for me whatever it was that I seemed so desperately to need to have done. And all of a sudden I was overwhelmed by a sort of sickening shock of recognition of the helplessness and the near hopelessness of my situation. And then really without even a passing thought, let alone a plan, I got up and I walked to the telephone and I called my husband. And for the very first time I said something to him direct about my drinking. I said, I know that I'll be drunk by the time that you get home tonight. Please don't be angry. Please bear with me this one more time, because
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I hope that it may be the last. And then just out of the blue, I said the words which subsequently changed my life. I said if you will call AA and find out where their meetings are, I'm willing to give it a try. And I went on to say that I'm not even sure that I'm an alcoholic. I know if I am it isn't my fault, but I also know that it most certainly will be my fault if I don't try to find out and do something about it. And I added after all we do know that AA has helped a lot of people and it doesn't cost a thing. So what have I got to lose? And so four nights later, but without taking another drink, I went to my first meeting. And to this day it remains the most difficult thing that I ever had to do in my life, because I was frightened, I was defeated, I was humiliated, I was broken in spirit, or at least that's what I thought at the time. And before very long, I began to lose lots of things. Things that I had been struggling for years to get rid of. Things that had hung upon my shoulders so heavily that I had almost sunk from the weight of them. Things like guilt and shame and anxiety and alienation. And almost at the same time I began to find some things too, things that I had been looking for frantically. How does one give thanks for gifts like these? To me all of this is a miracle. It was a miracle that AA ever occurred to a person like me in the first place, because I was one of the people who was guilty of contempt prior to investigation. It was a miracle to me that the thing that I thought of as a broken spirit turned out only to be a broken will. A will that simply had to break because it had never learned how to bend. It was a miracle to me that for the very first time in my life, and maybe the last, and without making any conscious effort on my part, I was able to suspend opinion and criticism and analysis and judgment, and instead to listen and consequently to learn a little bit. And most of all it was a miracle to me that instead of being filled with a sense of shame, that I rejoiced in all of this and knew somehow that here in AA there was a possibility of finding the things that I had always been looking for. The things that had eluded me throughout a lifetime in spite of having had every opportunity that a person could have. How does one give thanks for gifts like these? In my opinion, and I of course do speak only for myself, I think all of us in AA are miracles. And I think that AA is at base really a spiritual program, but it's also a pretty practical and realistic little outfit as it would have to be dealing with drunks. And so we have a simple program of action and simple steps for putting that action into motion. When I went to my first meeting, as I mentioned before, I was not sure that I was an alcoholic. None of the terrible things had ever happened to me that I thought had to happen in order to qualify you as an alcoholic. I had never been unable to get sober. I had never been a morning drinker or a binge drinker or an around-the-clock drinker. I not only had never been hospitalized for alcoholism, I had never even had to have a doctor to take care of me as a result of drinking, and I certainly had never had any brushes with the law. And I had lost very little also as a result of drinking. I still had my health, my home, my family, most of the friends that I cared anything about, and I still had the price of the next bottle.
But the people at that first meeting told me that one couldn't be a little bit alcoholic any more than one could be a little bit pregnant, that it was all a question of the progression of the condition. And they suggested that the fact that none of these terrible things had ever happened to me probably indicated that I had been an extremely lucky alcoholic and also a very well protected alcoholic, and that all of these terrible things that had never happened to me not only could happen to me, but most undoubtedly would happen to me in the inevitable progression of this disease
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if I continued to drink. And they reminded me that even though I had always been able to get sober, by my own admission I was not able to stay sober for any length of time. And so they suggested that perhaps I should forget about time in the sense of weeks and months and years, and instead to concentrate on just one day and on trying to stay away from one drink for one day. Because they said, you know, that's what this program is really. It's based on a 24-hour plan during which we make a commitment to try with God's help to stay away from one drink for that one day, and then we go to as many meetings as we possibly can. Because it's at these meetings where we learn how to use this program, where we learn how to use the steps, the slogans, how to practice the 12 suggested steps to recovery. We learn how to participate in sharing our experience, strength, and hope with one another.
Now this is simple, uncomplicated action, which is not to say that I found it easy action then or now. I think if I had read this in a book that I would not have believed it. I would have thought it was a vast oversimplification of a highly complicated problem, which of course it is in some ways. But I really did believe what I saw at these meetings, because I really did believe that you had suffered what I had suffered, and that you had been where I was, and that if this had worked for you, perhaps it could even work for me. And so AA became for me a kind of school. And after a lifetime of exposure in the academic community, ironically it was here in AA amongst my own kind, ex-drunks, that I finally began the slow and laborious process, still going on, of learning the things that I had really always wanted to know, which were how to lead a meaningful and purposeful life. And in all of this, I found the incentive from your example, the tools from your experience, and the courage from your unfailing strength and support to begin to face the realities of my own life one day at a time. I wish that I knew how to give thanks for all these gifts, but I don't, and I don't think that I ever will, because I simply can't find the words. But I can, and to the best of my ability at least, I try to give at least partial evidence of my gratitude by love and service to this fellowship and to the people in it, who showed me the difference between despair and hope, between emptiness and fulfillment, between slavery and freedom. Now for years before I came to AA, I really did know that I was in trouble as far as drinking was concerned, but I didn't seem to know what to do about it. I lived with fear. I was terrified by a sort of feeling of knowing emptiness, constant aching loneliness, baffling confusion, but the only way that I knew to quiet the fears and to fill the emptiness was with the contents of a bottle. And I did this time after time, knowing full well that when this little hunk of oblivion that I was seeking wore off, that I would have to return to the same world and all the same problems, and that in addition I would have to cope with the horrors of my remorse. Knowing all this, I still dove in, always hoping that one day things would be different, always hoping that one day I would be able to drink as before. Instead, of course, the occasions for drinking and blacking out became more frequent and the remorse more devastating as time went on. I don't have to describe to any of you who are members what I mean when I refer to remorse. Before I came to AA, I had never met anyone who understood what it was, but you are familiar with that hopeless feeling of guilt and shame and self-loathing that is the inevitable aftermath of the kind of drinking that I did.
For many, many years, drinking
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was really a very occasional thing in my life. I was 26 years old, married, and the mother of two children before I really began to drink with what you could call regularity. And I had a few good years, as most of us do, before the axe fell. But almost from the beginning, I was aware of the fact that there was something different about my drinking. I was thoroughly accustomed to thinking of myself as being somehow different, so this didn't seem particularly unusual to me.
And I really didn't worry about it, as long as I was able to handle it well in fairly large amounts, because the difference lay not so much in my performance while drinking, but in my attitude toward it. Almost from the start, I began to associate absolutely all experiences of fun and relaxation and release from this pressing anxiety with those times that I drank. And then one night, a night like any other night, when I was drinking in my usual manner and in my usual amounts, I got terribly drunk, and I had a blackout.
And I fell down a flight of stone steps and landed on a concrete floor and didn't even remember anything about it the next morning until someone told me. Well I was thoroughly unprepared for this turn of events. At this time, I had never even heard of a blackout, and I assumed that the fact that I didn't remember anything meant that I probably had a concussion as a result of falling on my head. And I was much too ashamed of the cause of this fall to go to a doctor about it.
However, I was already at this time under the care of a psychoanalyst for reasons that had nothing whatever to do with drinking, and so I discussed this strange phenomenon with him. And he really said all the reassuring things that I wanted to hear. He said that this was the kind of thing that could happen to anyone once, or at most occasionally. But fundamentally though, he thought it was symptomatic of the treatment and the phase that I was in at that particular time, and that his suggestion was that perhaps I should try to be careful for a while.
Well, he didn't know, nor did I of course, that I, as of that moment, had already lost the ability to be careful about my drinking, because he didn't know any more than I did of course, that I had already crossed whatever that invisible line is that separates those people who can drink successfully from those people who can't. He didn't know any more than I did that already drinking had become the imperative factor in my life.
I certainly was never drunk every day, but regardless of whether I had a glass in my hand or not from the time of that first drunk on, regardless of whether I was drinking on that particular occasion or not, the question of to drink or not to drink really motivated practically everything that I did. And so began a nine-year battle for control. A nine-year battle to try to get back into the driver's seat.
A nine-year battle to try to hide from myself the knowledge that I had indeed reached the point of no return as far as alcohol was concerned. I simply could not believe that I had been licked by a thing like booze. And I most heartily did believe, and in this I was supported by my doctor and by a great many people who knew me well really, that if I could only find the key that would unlock the door and emancipate the real me, that I would be able to put some order in my life and that in that order drinking would fall into its proper place.
I endowed the search for this elusive will-o'-the-wisp known as the real me with every ounce of energy and imagination and resource that I had, and this was considerable. I searched for it in psychoanalysis. I searched for it in an attempted career. I searched for it in study. I searched for it in worthy causes. I searched for it in domesticity and home life.
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I even searched for it at Ebbets Field in the days when the Dodgers used to be in Brooklyn. And always and inevitably I searched for it in the bottle. And here I really did always find the key. Only the door that this key unlocked was the door to a Pandora's box of destructive, irrational, unpredictable behavior. The chaos and confusion that were created in my life by this attempt to lead two lives as it were, one on a rational, constructive plane and the other on an irrational, destructive plane, finally brought me to the point of despair where nothing seemed worth the candle anymore.
The gap was just too wide. The gap between this person who made attempts at worthwhile living and this creature who was so beset by obsessive and compulsive drinking that she poisoned or kicked over every good thing that she did. This gap seemed to me to be insuperable and I couldn't imagine that there would ever be a bridge wide enough to span it. So I concluded that I was some sort of a freak, a sort of typhoid Mary of the human race.
And it was in this burnt out and defeated frame of mind that I came to my first AA meeting. And before very long I found a key. It didn't open all the doors right away. It still hasn't. It never will. But it began what I hope will be a continuing process of opening little doors when I'm ready for them as time goes on. And I found the key that unlocked the first door when I was able to accept the fact that I was an alcoholic.
When I was able to accept the fact that there was absolutely nothing in the world that I could ever do that would change that. But with the help of AA and the grace of God, I could change the meaning of it and take the destruction out of it by becoming a sober alcoholic one day at a time. Now, every time that I have ever spoken at an open meeting in AA, I have told one story. And I have chosen this story to tell not because it was the worst thing that I ever did when I was drinking, or the most destructive, or the most humiliating, or the thing with the most far-reaching consequences.
I tell this story because it seems to me to capsule better than any other that I can think of. What my life should have been, what by rights might have been expected of me in this life, and what I did with it as a result of alcoholic drinking. My husband is an Episcopal clergyman. He is also the chairman of the Department of Religion at a large metropolitan university. And a couple of years before I came into AA, he asked me if I would have a dinner party for the faculty and the staff members from his department at New York University.
And I gladly consented to do this, of course, and I worked very hard to make this party a success. And at about three o'clock in the afternoon on the day of the party, the guests weren't expected until seven, I was all through my chores and I was tired. And I thought it would be a good idea if I took a little nap before the guests arrived. And then I had one of those brilliant inspirations that seemed to occur to alcoholics.
I thought, maybe if I have a little glass of sherry it will help me to become drowsy. Now I knew that a little glass of sherry did not help me to become drowsy. I knew that it took a little bottle of sherry to help me to become drowsy. I also was one of the alcoholics who knew long before AA that it was the first drink that got me into all the trouble. I still didn't know anything about how one stays away from the first drink.
If I thought at all on this occasion, the only thing that occurred to me would have been something like, oh well, any fool would know enough to be discreet at a time like this.
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And so I took the first drink, and you know the rest. I didn't have the luck to pass out. I didn't have the sense to leave home. I showed up at this party, and I showed up very nearly stumbling drunk, near hysterics as I always was when I drank, muttering a stream of what was fortunately mostly incoherent gibberish. I say fortunately because what I had to say was not really very complimentary to my husband and it was not expressed in the language one normally associates with a clergyman's wife.
Now the people at this party were complete strangers to me. I think I had perhaps met one or two of them before. They were really not what anyone in the world would have called a drinking crowd. Most of these people didn't even smoke. These were the people, as a matter of fact, that I called squares. You talk about arrogance. Here I was, the boss's wife, clergyman's wife, hostess, drunk and disorderly, and I had the nerve to refer to these people who were behaving extremely well under very difficult circumstances, all of my making, I had the nerve to refer to them in what I intended to be uncomplimentary terms.
Now we had drinking friends with whom I might have, and often did, get away with stunts like this. It was of course inconsiderate and bad mannered of me in any circumstances, but in these circumstances it really was unspeakable. The day after this party my remorse was something spectacular. But I was so locked up in this little alcoholic trap. I was so involved with my own agony that I wasn't even able to tell this poor man that I had disgraced and humiliated that I was sorry.
I thought he ought to know that I was sorry. I couldn't tell him. I thought he ought to know that no one would behave this way if she were in control of herself. I don't know whether he knew that or not. I do know that after that party that he certainly knew that I no longer drank because I had large and unresolved personality problems. He knew that I drank now because drinking had become my number one problem.
Now in my life and circumstances you might conclude that a performance like the one I've just described might constitute a bottom, but I didn't draw any such conclusion. I just wasn't ready to stop drinking yet. I did decide that something had to be done about the drinking and I was more successful with it than I had any right to be, but I don't recommend it to anyone who hasn't already tried it because I learned some new things about loneliness.
I had thought that I knew what it was to be lonely and the fact that I had a fine husband and two wonderful children and what should have been an interesting life, the fact that I had these things and still felt as though I would die of loneliness only convinced me that I was a freak and reinforced my feelings of inadequacy, but after this party the loneliness became a really morbid thing because I had decided that I would try to be extremely careful of any drinking at all that I did when other people were around.
Before long I, who had been and am now a gregarious kind of person, no longer cared very much about being with people. I no longer wanted to make plans to do things with the children in the evenings or over the weekends. I no longer even cared whether my husband sat and talked with me in the evening after they'd gone to bed. I just wanted them all to get the hell out and leave me alone to drink in peace.
Only of course there wasn't any peace because there isn't any peace in solitary confinement and I was a prisoner all right. I was a lost soul in chains. Even though my chains may have been of the crepe paper variety, it's my opinion that these are the very most difficult ones to break. And Now Thanks to AA, I'm No Longer a Prisoner, I Have a Choice, I Can Take One Drink with
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All Its Consequences, Or I Can Do It the AA Way and Stay Away from One Drink for One Day. I no longer feel like a lost soul, because regardless of how often I may fail in the performance of my life, at long last it does have some shape, it does have some sense of direction, I do feel some meaning, I do feel some purpose in it. And now when I go through one of my low spells, and I suppose all of us have them, and I sometimes think, oh, what's the use, what's any different really, except that I'm sober.
And then I stop and I think, except that you're sober. And I remember that when I came into AA, sobriety was the only thing in the world that I even hoped to find here, everything else, and there's been so much. I found out that I was able to hold a job, that I was able to make deep and important friendships, that I was able to be happy in my family life and to enjoy the well-being of my husband and my children.
I discovered a new joy in the practice of my religion. All of this, so much, that my cup almost runs over, all of this was gravy, all I was looking for was sobriety. And if I want to remember what it was like when I didn't have it, all I have to do is to remember those last two terrible years before I came into AA. When I drank alone late at night, after everybody was in bed, when I felt that I was alone in the world and that nobody cared, and I remember that even then I used to think that surely there must be some purpose in this, surely it must be leading some way, surely I must be looking for something that's missing from my life.
And I know now that even in my drunken confusion I was right about that. I was looking for something, and I found it. I was looking for AA. I was looking for God as I understand him. And now whenever I stand up here and look out at a room full of people like you and realize that all through that terrible time you were here, I see what a wasteland my pride and my willfulness and my blindness had made of my life.
I thank God I found you when I did, and I pray that he will give me day by day a grateful and a humble heart. Now I'm not proud of this story that I've just told you. I spent years trying to forget it and others like it. But I know now that I must never forget, lest I forget to be grateful to God for helping me to find AA, lest I forget to be grateful to AA for helping me to find my life. Thank you.