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Source: Nora S – Richmond VA mid 1960s – Reel 0805-93 – Date Unknown.mp3 File: nora-s-richmond-va-mid-1960s-reel-0805-93-date-unknown.mp3 Duration: 00:27:43
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Well, this is Bob Flowers in Cloud Nine, way up in Richmond, Virginia, in the Old Dominion, USA. Charlie McTee, you old reprobate, I love you. Well, Charlie, I finally got around to answering your tape, and I'm sending you one down now, and at the present time, you asked me to send you a couple tapes from up here. Well, I'm sending you two on this, and I've already cut one on the other track on this tape, and I've got one that's a little bit shorter to go on this side.
So I'm going to put it on first, not knowing exactly how to time it out so it'll run out right, and I'm going to put it on right following me right now, and then at the end of this tape, you can, I'll come back in and talk to you a little bit there. So this is a little girl we had up here at Madison Street Group that spoke to us a couple months ago. I'll put the date and her address and all on a card for you, and incidentally, I'd appreciate it if your best one would drop her a card and let her know you heard her tape, and it'll make her feel good, and she needs a little boosting along, too.
And so I'm going to sign off right now, and I'll put on Nora Sinclitico. The name is pronounced Sinclitico. Nora Sinclitico. Over and out, here comes Nora. My next speaker is a lady about two and a half years ago. I was at a closed meeting in Arlington County, and she walked in, and I immediately recognized her as someone new, and that night she asked many questions, and each time that I saw her, I laughed because she was asking questions, and I've never seen anyone quite as enthusiastic, quite as sincere, and I thought, well, she'll get off of this pink cloud, but she never did, and I had to change my train of thought that it wasn't the pink cloud that she was on. She had found the meat of this program, and I'm truly glad that I can introduce Nora to you tonight. Thank you, George, and congratulations. I don't know of anybody's first anniversary that made me any happier except my own, since this is a selfish program. I'm so happy for George tonight. My name is Nora, and I am an alcoholic, and George may be right about his first estimate of the pink cloud, although perhaps that is too fancy a phrase for it because a pink cloud sounds temporary, passing, not very long-lasting, so in that sense it may not be good, and yet with all of the ups and downs emotionally that I have had since coming into AA, for the most part, it has been the most wonderful, in fact, the only wonderful experience that I've ever had in my whole life. When I came in, however, this first closed meeting that George talked about, I guess I was sober that night, although it took me a month of coming to meetings to finally stop drinking. The reason for this was that I did not believe that I was an alcoholic. I couldn't believe it. I wouldn't accept it. I wouldn't admit it. Oh, I admitted to a couple of drinks now and then, you know, but I had good reason. I was afraid. My life was filled with fear. In fact, the whole story of my life until the time I came into AA was one of fear, fear and guilt. I think those two words sum up all of the years that I lived until I came to AA. I kind of think this is a dirty trick putting me on after Tom, because I've talked on many programs with Tom, and when I go first, he always says something so nice about me when he gets up here, and it makes me feel less nervous, and I was kind of looking forward to that, but the AA friendship is wonderful. When I came to AA, I would hear speakers talk, and they had many and varied experiences, some of them pretty horrible, some of them pretty drastic, and while my life had been full of misery and full of drinking, I couldn't admit to all of it.
I could admit to the misery, but I couldn't admit to the fact that alcohol caused a great deal of it, and I would hear the speakers, and I would say, I don't have any kind of a story at all to tell. Furthermore, the things I do have, I'll never tell anyway, and I was at a meeting, talking at a meeting in Falls Church sometime later, and I kind of summed up my drinking story, if you will, or my life story
[00:05:02]
actually, in a few words, and it's still about the best way to sum up what happened to me. I still felt that my story was very dull, and I still don't think it was dramatic. It was dramatic as far as I was concerned, but not for listening, but this night, I did get up, and I said that I had been drinking for 20 years. I had been addicted to barbiturates for four and a half years. I had a convulsion upon withdrawal from alcohol and barbiturates. I had had nine years of psychiatric treatment, and my life was filled with fears and compulsions that made me unable to live. All of this was true, and after the meeting, a very old lady who was visiting at the group that night came up to me and looked very sympathetic and patted me on the shoulder and said, you poor dear, I don't see how you live through it, and right then and there, I said, hot dog, I've got it made. I need never worry again. My story was horrible to me, and my recovery was miraculous to me.
We sometimes discuss who's the sickest person ever to come into AA, and I'm always ready to stand and do battle on this one, because I don't want to take a backseat to anyone in the fact that I was pretty sick when I came here. I have met since coming in some who were equally sick, some who were perhaps sicker, sicker perhaps because they didn't make it and may be still sicker now, but I think that our own sickness is the worst sickness.
It's the sickness that we can feel. We can feel the sickness of others, too, by virtue of having gone through it ourselves, but I did come to AA with the notion that my life was unmanageable. There was no question about this to me the minute I saw the first step of the program. My life was unmanageable and had been for years. Powerless over alcohol? No. I didn't think I was, despite the fact that I came here as a direct result of blacking out in the building where I worked, coming to as I was being carried across one of the main streets in Washington with one of my co-workers on one arm and the wife of my boss on the other. I was put into my husband's car, and I kind of came to to look up into the face of the cop on the corner who was a friend of mine, wanting to know what was wrong, and my husband said, nothing, nothing, it's fine, and I passed out, I guess at this point, because I came to some hours later lying on the floor of the car with my head on the seat in the parking lot where I was to have visited my psychiatrist. My husband had locked me in the car while he kept the appointment with the psychiatrist, and they had decided between them that I was too dangerous to be running around loose, that I needed to be hospitalized in order to dry out, but I came to AA, to my first meeting two days after this, and said that I am not powerless over alcohol, and I believed it.
I believed it because I think the mind of the practicing alcoholic, at least my mind and the minds of some others, is so unwilling to accept this diagnosis. I was willing to be neurotic. I had paid the psychiatrist a great deal of money to learn this. I didn't broadcast it all over the place. There were very few people who really knew that I was even visiting a psychiatrist, but it was kind of a respectable disease. It was all right to be neurotic, but you couldn't be an alcoholic and a lady at the same time, and this you can't, not a practicing alcoholic, but I didn't want to be an alcoholic. This was the last thing in the world.
Call me anything. Tom says that he was called so many worse things, and I assume by this that alcoholic probably sounded pretty good to him, but alcoholic sounded like the end of the world to me, and I was unwilling to accept it. So I came to meetings for about eight or nine days. I didn't drink for eight or nine days. I used to say I stayed sober for eight or nine days, but there was no sober thinking.
I did not find a home in AA in the beginning. I didn't come into a room full of what I thought were smiling, happy people. I thought these were squares who were trying to spoil my fun. Now my fun at this time consisted of sitting in a chair with a glass of gin, trying to work up courage to commit suicide, but AA wasn't going to take this away from me. They weren't going to ruin my life. I didn't want to get involved. As I came to meetings, I looked around, and I would pick out to myself people that I thought would go to one meeting a week, and I would say, now they stay sober on one meeting a week, and they keep up the rest of their normal lives. This is what I want to do.
And as long as I continued to want to do this, as long as I was unwilling for AA to take over my life, as long as I was unwilling to jump into AA with both feet,
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in other words, as long as I was unwilling to join AA, then I didn't stop drinking. I stopped drinking only when, as The Grapevine put it so wonderfully a long time ago, about a year ago, and I can't forget these words because it was the way I felt about it, The Grapevine says that no real alcoholic stops drinking until the pains of drinking become worse than the pains of reality. And this was exactly what happened to me. Because after this eight days of coming to meetings and not drinking, my fears were just as great as they had ever been. I was unable to live with or without alcohol by this time, and I couldn't stand it. I thought AA doesn't work.
It doesn't work because I'm not an alcoholic. My problem is deeper than this. So I drank again. I drank in tremendous fear. And for the first time, I was aware, I guess even in eight days AA can get a message through, because for the first time, I was aware after one double martini that I took in such fear of a real personality change. Because I forced myself into this little restaurant. I ordered a double martini. I was only going to have one, but it tasted so good, then I ordered another.
But by the time I got that first drink down, I had changed from frightened, a frightened mess into someone very belligerent. I got on the telephone. I started to call the girl who was my sponsor. It's the girl this tape is going to, incidentally. And I don't know what I was going to tell her, probably to drop dead, who needs you. I don't know. I didn't get her. Her line was either busy or she didn't answer. I don't remember. But this was the first time that I was aware of my change of personality from alcohol.
I continued to drink for three weeks, and this is when the pains of drinking, for me, became recognizably unbearable. They had been unbearable before, but I was able, with my rationalization, to attribute my problem to fear, to neurosis, to compulsions, to phobias, to all of these things. And I drank because I was afraid. I can remember during this three weeks of drinking, still going to meetings, that I heard much of the morning drink, and, of course, I'd been taking two pills every morning for years.
Every time my feet hit the floor in the morning, I'd down two pills. And when I gave up the pills, about six weeks prior to coming into AA, I substituted alcohol, of course. And I heard of this morning drink from the platform, and I said to my husband, he's about the only one who'd really listen to me at this point, because every AA I talked to had an argument for me, they wouldn't, you know, they'd listen, but then they'd tell me their side of the story.
I said to my husband, well, yeah, sure, I take a drink in the morning, but I do it for a different reason. I do it because I'm afraid. And I thought this made me different. I think we all come into AA feeling that we are different, and I think we are. We come here from different paths, we come under different circumstances, we come with different problems, but if we use alcohol to escape those problems, then in this we are not different.
I'm convinced that what happened to me was a lifetime of fear and guilt, and later on, this mixed with alcohol, and this became the alcoholic. This, I think, for me, caused the explosion that made me an alcoholic. I don't know. When I came to AA, I said if I'm an alcoholic at all, which I doubt, I've been one for six weeks, and I believed it. Now, I don't know. We hear about, perhaps we were born alcoholics, perhaps we became alcoholics when we took the first drink. I don't know.
If it's crossing this invisible line, I'm getting a clearer picture of perhaps when it happened to me, but if it has anything to do with presenting a really set-up personality and introducing it to alcohol, then I was a born alcoholic, because my memories of fear and guilt go back, way back, into my earliest memories, and one of them, which is perhaps insignificant, and yet it indicates that I've lived all of my life with guilt and fear, I was in, I think, the fourth grade in school, and after school, I was crawling around on their locker room floor looking for my mittens, and the teacher came in and found me there and helped me to find the mittens and sent me home, and the next day, there was a report to the class that some money had been stolen.
There was a report to the class that some money had been found missing from the locker room.
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No one accused me, no one looked at me, the teacher didn't single me out, but in my mind, I knew that she was accusing me. This was guilt, and I lived and slept with this guilt until the day I came to AA. This guilt and many, many, many others. I think that there are certain types of guilt that are beneficial. If we are conscious of doing something wrong and there is a resultant guilt as a result, well, that's obvious.
If there is resultant guilt from having done something that we know to be wrong, this is a good kind of guilt. This is the kind of guilt that will make us correct it. But the guilt that I'm talking about, and I had plenty of that kind too, plenty of the real guilt, plenty of reason to really feel guilty because I had been wrong. But the guilt that really bugged me was the nameless guilt that I couldn't associate with anything.
This was relieved by alcohol and this was relieved by barbiturates. And it was the same with my fear. I discovered recently in trying to sum up AA into one word, and this is impossible, of course, because tomorrow I could use another word, but the word I've been thinking about recently in connection with what AA means in one word is freedom. Because all of my life prior to AA, I sought freedom in many ways.
I sought it in restlessness, in joining the service during World War II, not out of patriotism, but in an effort to get away, to escape, to be free. I wasn't free, of course, because I brought myself with me. I used barbiturates later to free myself of problems. I would have a problem and take a pill and sit for 10 minutes and the problem would be gone. And then in a half an hour the problem would be back or another one and I would need a drink.
And I would take a drink and the problem would be gone. And this was over and over and over until my consumption of barbiturates and my consumption of alcohol turned around and kicked me in the teeth and there was no longer any freedom. There was no more freedom in the bottle for me, either a bottle of pills or a bottle of alcohol, and there was no way for me to live. So finally after this three weeks of drinking, which seemed really to telescope on me, I've often intended since I have gotten sober to go back and get a calendar of that October of 1959 and look up the dates of things that happened because so many things happened.
We took a trip to Boston. Our home is outside of Boston and my husband had a bad eye infection at the time and ostensibly he took me up there so that he could go to the Massachusetts Eye and Ear Hospital to check on this. He has told me later that it was to get me away to see if this wouldn't help. During this time also I resigned my job while still drinking. So many, many things seemed to happen to me.
I kind of blamed AA for this. If they hadn't insisted that I had a problem with drinking, I might not be having it, and I kind of felt this way for a while. On this quitting of the job business, this was the only wise, drunken decision I ever made, and of course I didn't make it. I think now that had I not quit that job, I was ten days sober incidentally when I finally left it, I would have been fired had my drinking kept up.
I know this. Despite the fact that I had been there for thirteen and a half years, up to a point they were very fond of me. I think they were still fond of me. It was a small office, but they could no longer tolerate my staggering around, bumping into furniture, passing out in the office, taking two-hour lunches and then two-hour naps after lunch, getting back at four o'clock. This was all right to a point, but I began to abuse it.
And I still couldn't see when I first came that alcohol had any direct connection with this. But I did quit this job, and we hear much in AA of the material things that we may sometimes get as a result of sobriety. They're not promised to us, but what is promised to us is that if we stay sober, we will be able to do things that we were unable to do before. Well, this has worked kind of in reverse for me, and it's wonderful.
I've been sober, as George said, about two and a half years now, and I haven't gone back to work yet. And I love it. I'm finding freedom, this freedom again, for the first time in my life. And when I had an anniversary up in Arlington, my first anniversary as a matter of fact, I asked my husband if he had any message for AA. And he said yes, he did, but he would like to pass it on through me. He didn't want to get up and talk.
He said his message was that AA was wonderful.
[00:20:02]
He thought the people were fine. It had changed his life as much as it had changed mine. But he wondered when they were going to suggest I go back to work. And don't anybody suggest it, because I'm not ready. I've been sick. The benefits of AA, as Tom said, he could go on all night, and so could I, to anyone who would listen. I can talk long and loud and mean every word of the wonderful things that I have found in AA.
And everything I know tonight, everything I know about living, everything I know about moving myself out of problems, with the help of the God I have come to understand, all of this I have learned in AA, for I knew nothing about living before I came here. AA has enabled me to understand, to apply the things that I hear. It has given me freedom that I have never known. I don't mean to imply that it has given me total freedom from problems.
And when I speak about problems, I've been very fortunate in that few of my problems have been external. My circumstances have been fairly good. All of my problems have been self-inflicted, if you will, caused by disease, if you will. Nevertheless, they've all been within me, either by my illness or my self-will, which is part of my illness. And these are the problems that I still am left with. But while AA has not lifted all of these problems, it has given me a way out.
It has given me an answer. It has given me a road to follow. It has given me a promise at the end of that road, that if I do certain things, I will find the answer to my problem. Or at least in finding my way through the answer, I will find some sort of contentment. And when I come out of it, there will be that much growth. Because we don't grow in good times. I find that it's very easy to pray and say, God, it's been a good week, give me some more.
I'd like more of this. This is a very easy prayer to make. It's not quite so easy to pray when we don't want to pray. And one of the things, one of the most important things I have found that I must pray for is willingness. I'm not always willing. That is, I don't always become willing as soon as I should, perhaps. But I find that attention to praying for willingness, even if it's only like when we talked about drinking, I want to want to be sober.
This was enough for a beginning. And I find that it's enough with willingness, as long as I persevere in this prayer. To me, AA is kind of a paradox, because I must have physical sobriety in order to get any of the other things that I'm looking for. And I'm looking for plenty in this program, because it promises me plenty. It takes time, but the promise is there. But I must have physical sobriety in order to get any of these other things.
I'm not talking of material things. I'm talking of methods of growth, virtues, graces, gifts of character, these sort of things. There are many, many things I ask for. And I must ask for them, because of myself I don't have them. I never had them before, and I have no reason to believe that of myself I can have them now. But I can get them if I'm willing to ask for them. And some of the things that I have to ask for all of the time, each day, are willingness, willingness to do the right thing, willingness to give up character defects.
This is not easy all the time. Perseverance. I began, the day I got sober, to ask for perseverance and sobriety for one day. And I've continued to do that ever since. And I have gotten perseverance each day as I have asked for it. And I must continue to ask for perseverance in following the AA program, in following it even in times of discouragement. Discouragement is a real enemy. Discouragement sometimes makes me want to give up, because it's too hard.
And I have said many times sober, I can't do it, I can't, I can't. And this, if I continue to pray, and if I continue to persevere in prayer, this I can't usually changes to, well, maybe I can. And then when I come out of it, it's knowledge that I don't have to drink. It's only through times of difficulty that I find out that I don't have to drink. Because I don't have to drink when it's good. I never had to before, although I did anyway, really.
But now I'm, I find in hard times, in times of emotional stress, in times of thinking I'll never get rid of this character defect, I find through these problems that these are the times that prove to me that I don't have to drink, that I can grow, and that I need never take another drink or another pill again
[00:25:01]
if I don't want to. And I ask for gratitude. And this very often comes easy in good times. Just as to all of us, it's easy to say thank you. And yet even in bad times, God has given me the grace to be able to be grateful. And the gift of gratitude is so wonderful in itself. I think we can be just grateful for our gratitude, and this is so wonderful. It's such a full feeling that we get. And humility I know very little about.
It's one of the words we use. It's one of the words that's so important. I'm coming to know a little bit that humility has to do with accepting myself as a human being. This I was unwilling to do. If I couldn't be a saint right away, then I might as well go back to being what I was. And I didn't want to fool around with the growing process that would get me to this sainthood. No one has signed my papers yet, incidentally.
But I'm finding out, I think, for me, for all of us, but this is the way I feel about it, that humility has to do with accepting myself as I am, a human being who of myself can do very little. I couldn't get sober by myself. I can't be good by myself. I can't grow by myself. I need the grace that this God I have come to understand is willing to send me if I will ask for it. And although I can't do it of myself, I must take the first action of at least being willing and attempting to do the best I can.
And in return for this very small amount of willingness, he gives me all that's necessary to make me, again, willing to try. And this is so wonderful. And the paradox of the whole thing, I know what I'm talking about, I don't know whether anybody else does, but the paradox of the whole thing to me is that without these things that I ask for, perseverance and gratitude and courage and humility and serenity and thousands and thousands of things of this type, without these, without trying for them, I can't stay sober.
I wouldn't stay sober for very long if I didn't strive for these things. And yet, I must be sober in order to want them. And to me, AA makes me understand this. It makes it worthwhile. It makes it a real challenge. And most days, I'm like George, and I can't wait to get up to see what's ahead. Thank you. Thank you, Nora.