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Source: DICOBE-00388 – Yvonne N – GEORGIA STATE CONV – 1980-10-17.mp3 File: dicobe-00388-yvonne-n-georgia-state-conv-1980-10-17.mp3 Duration: 01:24:16
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Hi, y'all. My name is Yvonne. I'm an alcoholic, and I am from Edmond, Oklahoma. And I don't know whether any of you are aware or not, but probably on television this summer, you saw that Oklahoma participated in, I guess, one of the longest droughts that the country has ever known, at least back until 1936. And we are used to weather there. We have had 30 days, constant temperature of 110 and 111 with absolutely no moisture. And I want to tell you that it's really wonderful to come here to Sauna City. I would open by allowing some identification. I said that I am an alcoholic, and I would like to say that I have a dual problem, because I also am an attorney. And that's not a disease, that's an occupational disease in alcoholism. I'd like to mind my manners and thank the committee who asked me to come. It is indeed a privilege and a pleasure. My husband and I went to Atlanta City, or I guess it was just Atlanta, and then we came on down here yesterday, and we have truly enjoyed your Southern hospitality. I really sometimes, when I come to these conferences, can't say, you know, why I'm here. And there have been times in my sobriety that I have wondered with a lucid thought at an AA meeting, why am I in this AA meeting, and why am I an alcoholic? And when I first came to AA, that seemed to be a prevalent thought, because I couldn't understand, why me? Of all of the people, why was I the one who was an alcoholic?
And there have been a lot of debates and a lot of arguments and a lot of statistics. Sometimes they say that it's heredity, and sometimes they say that it's environment. And so as qualification, I might say that I come from a family of alcoholics. My mother is an alcoholic. I have three uncles that are alcoholics. Two, rather, one died as an alcoholic. I have an aunt that is a practicing alcoholic, and I had a great uncle that was an alcoholic. As far as my other heredity is concerned, I come from the line of descendants of being Irish and Cherokee Indian, and if that won't do it, I don't know what will.
And as far as my environment is concerned, I was raised in the Bible Belt and went to the Baptist Church, and that's a cinch right there. I said a minute ago that I was an attorney, and I always try to tell one lawyer joke, because a lot of people don't understand the courtesy that one attorney extends to another. There was a doctor and an attorney and an athlete who were marooned on an island, and the island was surrounded by shark-infested waters. And so the three had to come to a decision as to who was going to swim for help. And so the doctor decided that he would swim.
And then on second thought, he reconsidered, and he thought, well, maybe if I go, there might be a problem in my absence, and these two other men will have to have my medical experience, so I think I'll stay. And so the athlete decided that he would swim. And then he thought, well, no, that isn't wise, because if I go, my athletic prowess is much greater than these other two fellows, and it may be that they might need me to help them swim to safety.
And so, of course, the obvious last choice was the attorney. And as he walked out on the beach, all he could see was just wall-to-wall fins of sharks. But he stepped into the water, and suddenly the fins just parted, and the man just swam right straight through the fins, and in a couple of hours he returned in a boat. And so the athlete and the doctor were absolutely amazed when he came to rescue them, and they said, what in the world happened, that you could swim through all those sharks and that they parted? Why did that happen? And he said, oh, that's just professional courtesy.
I am suffering from a disease of alcoholism, which I term as permanent, irrevocable, irreversible, and potentially fatal. If I had done the things that I was supposed to do, I could stand here this evening and I could tell you that I had 21 years' sobriety, but I do not.
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Because I went to my first AA meeting in 1959, and when I went there, I didn't like what
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I heard. You might say that I tried it and I didn't like it. There's the story about the old-timer that was sitting on the porch in a resort, and a young fellow came up to him and he says to this old man, he says, would you like to go for a walk? And the old man says, no, I tried that and I didn't like it. And he says, well, would you like to go for a swim? He says, no, I tried that and I didn't like it. He says, would you like to go play pool? He says, no, tried that and didn't like it. He says, how about dominoes?
And the old man says, no, I tried that and didn't like it. However, my son's going to be along in a little while and maybe he'll go with you. And the young fellow says, I came to AA, I didn't want any part of you all. My sobriety date is February 11, 1969, and so next February I will have enjoyed 12 years of sobriety, and by that I mean 12 years of abstinence from any mood-changing chemical, including drugs, those funny cigarettes, and alcohol. And some of you here have been sober a lot longer than I have. But I'll tell you something, for me to have been sober 11 1⁄2 years is a complete and total miracle.
And some of you have been sober much less than I have. And sometimes I think when we first come into AA we get the idea that if we have a couple of months or even a year or a year and a half, we look around and we look at the old-timers, to us who have even five years or ten or fifteen or twenty, and they seem so serene and so calm. And it seems as though they have everything in order, and that their life is filled with discipline, and that there is absolute and total serenity in their everyday living. Well, I kind of liken that to a duck paddling on a pond. Though the old-timers may look unruffled and serene, on the surface they're just paddling like hell underneath to make it. And I had no idea when I came to you people that I would even enjoy 30-day sobriety. Of course, I'm not saying to you right now that the days that I endure sometimes are totally content and totally serene. Because sometimes I have daily living problems, and that happens to be the kind of disease that I have. And some days I can walk on water, and some days I'm just about, if I'm so dry, I'm just a fire hazard. And I'm just hanging in, just trying to make it. I guess really there's only one paragraph in the big book that allows me to come this evening and talk to you all. And it's something that I don't want to ever forget. To me, I think it's the only paragraph that allows me to even go to any AA meeting sometimes.
And that paragraph says, do not be discouraged. No one among us has maintained anything like perfect adherence to these principles. We are not saints. We only grow along the spiritual lines and it's a gradual thing. And I have to remember that any time I start to get the idea that I am about to graduate from this program, that I am in real trouble. I go to meetings and I resent those people who have longer sobriety than I do, because I think it's my turn to be the local guru in my meeting. And I listen to those people, and it seems as though the words of wisdom just fall from their lips. And sometimes I become very sanctified.
You know, I wanted to be canonized when I came to this program after three days. And there are times now, you know, when I feel like that I should at least be given sainthood. And I'm reminded that it's wonderful to live in heaven with saints, but it's hell to live with them here on earth. And so with the length of time that I have, I realized that I am in the most dangerous time of my sobriety. On the count of back in my local clubhouse,
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within the last two months, there have been two people who had thirteen years and eleven years who had to go out and research and lay some more track. Now those people are object lessons to me. And by their actions, I don't have to do those things anymore. It's very necessary that I keep my memory green as to what it was like and what happened. It is imperative that I remember what my last few months of drinking were like, because I have a lot more to lose now than I did when I first came in. When I first came to Alcoholics Anonymous, I had absolutely nothing. Absolutely nothing. And I think that when we are sober even three months or six months, I think the quality of sobriety and the bottom line of the things that we will lose if we go out and have to return again to drinking, it becomes greater and greater and greater as time goes by.
Alcoholics Anonymous was not a new thing to me. I had known about it since I was twenty-one years old, because my mother had come to you people, and this was back in the olden days. Back when I was convinced that AA meetings were held in garage apartments, clandestine food meetings with secret handshakes and secret knocks, and thank God they only called each other by their first names, because it was so embarrassing and I was so ashamed that my mother had to come to the meetings that you all had. She began drinking when I was around fourteen years old, as far as the problem is concerned. I think she drank some before then, but I don't remember it. And I was raised in a home with an alcoholic, and I used to come home from school when I was fifteen and sixteen and seventeen, and so I've really been on both sides of the fence, because I know what it's like to be a child of an alcoholic.
And back in those days they didn't have Al-Anon and Al-Ateen, and there wasn't any place that we could go to even commence to understand the things that were wrong with her. And we believed that she drank because she wanted to drink, and we thought that she got drunk because she was weak, and if she would only exercise her willpower, that she wouldn't do the things she did and embarrass us. My father and I were humiliated. I was embarrassed to bring kids home from school, because I didn't know what the conditions would be when I got there. And I learned to punch the buttons on the practicing alcoholic, and I learned to manipulate and I learned to control. And whenever she would get drunk and embarrass me, I knew what button to punch the next day for her to begin to feel remorse and guilt.
And I knew how to manage her in order to do the things that I wanted her to do, or to buy me the things that I wanted. Because that's how you have to survive with a practicing alcoholic. If you don't understand them, in a sense it's really just self-survival. And believe me, there was no understanding back in those days. I took my first drink of alcohol when I spent the night with my best friend named Paula Ann, and I was 16 years old. And when I took that drink, it did the same thing to me that alcohol did when I took my last drink. It made me feel I felt like I wanted to feel. And when I drank when I was 16, that first time I got drunk. And there was that thing inside me that said, Yvonne, this makes you feel normal. This is the thing that makes you feel like other people look.
And at that age I learned that alcohol was my friend. And so I drank then at slumber parties and I started a college and I drank on weekends and it was sociable drinking. I don't think particularly I had a drinking problem at that time because I managed to make good grades. And that was very important to me because with the feeling of the lack of self-worth that I had when I was growing up and the inadequacy and the insecurity, the only way that I could ever feel that I fit in with my peers was by excelling. And I knew that if I made straight A's in high school and in college, that I would be equal too. I always had to do better then just to be equal too. And so I hit the books. And that was my forte, to study all of the time and I won a scholarship to college and my mother was still drinking. And I was drinking on weekends. And it wasn't until I was 21 years old that she came to your fellowship and she had some problems and it took her a while to get sober. And it was in and out for a while, but eventually she told me that she had come to AA. And little did I know that all of the time that I was concentrating on the books in high school and college and I was…
Concentrating on the books in high school and college, and I was being an overachiever,
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that I was destined to make straight A's in school and to flunk out of life. Because I knew what alcohol did for me, but by the same token, when my mother had come to Alcoholics Anonymous, I had a great deal of knowledge about what the disease of alcoholism was and I knew with this knowledge that if I could understand the things that it had done to you all, that it wouldn't do that to me, because I would have insurance and I would not follow the same road signs that you did.
And I knew that if you drank in the morning, you were an alcoholic, and I knew that if you were picked up on drunk driving or if you had to go to a hospital or if you had to be detoxed, that you were an alcoholic. And so my entire life was routed around all of the barometers that you people had accomplished. Because if there was anything I wasn't going to be when I grew up, it was like she was. We had the Saturday night fights in our house while she was drinking, and that was a long time before they had television.
And we had the threats of divorce, and we had divorces filed, and we had child custody problems. To me, I knew that that was what I was going to avoid when I got married in my domestic situation, and I knew that I would never be an alcoholic and treat my children like she had treated me. Now, mind you, I didn't understand what was wrong with her. I thought that she drank because she wanted to drink, and I thought she embarrassed me because that was her choice.
By the time I was out of college, alcohol had become a social lubricant with me. It is always easy to start a conversation with an opener that is a bottle opener. It released my inhibitions. It made me gregarious. It made me feel like other people looked. And that's all I wanted to do. I wanted to feel like I belonged in that world out there. In 1955, I had graduated from college, and I had enrolled in Georgetown Law School in Washington, D.C., and it was there that I became addicted to amphetamine.
I started using it in order to stay up and study for finals, and the only problem was that when the finals were over, I just kept using it. And I continued to remain addicted to speed for a period of 14 years. Now, when you're taking that stuff, and you're crazy, and you're up high, you have to come down. And the only way that you can come down is by the use of alcohol. And so I'd take that stuff in the daytime, and then I'd go home at night and I'd drink.
So I think my intake of chemicals was still controlled at that point in time, and my mother was still sober in AA. And I'd come home, and she'd bring all of those crazy people into our home, those old rotten-sninking, puking drunks that hang around our kitchen table. And she'd watch the clock with them, and they'd walk the floor, and she'd say, Can you go just five more minutes? And I hated them, because I figured that I had had enough drinking in my life, and it was wrong for her to impose those AA people upon me.
And then those that had been sober a little while, that apparently had taken a bath, would come in and they would drink coffee, and they would talk about this ridiculous definition of a physical allergy and a mental compulsion to drink. And I didn't believe that. That was stupid. Now, if they wanted to believe that, that was fine. If that kept my mother sober, it was okay with me, because, you see, Alcoholics Anonymous to me was just a convenience, that's all.
It never entered my mind that it was saving and had saved her life, because we didn't understand alcoholism back then in Oklahoma. It was just that she wouldn't be drunk when I came home, or that I could call long-distance, and when she answered the phone and I had a problem and I needed some money, she'd be sober and she could remember to send it to me. But that's all in the world that AA was to me.
It was an inconvenience to have those people constantly imposing and infringing upon our private lives. I remember she brought one old lady in one time who had been a concert pianist, who incidentally later died and never made this program, but my mom had worked with that woman for 10 years,
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and Ann could just never make it. She could just never make it, and she'd stay sober a couple of weeks, and then she'd be back out on the street, and she'd panhandle, or she would beg, or she'd do whatever she had to do in order to get a drink. And she had been raped five or six times, and she always had her head bashed in, and she always had stitches all over her face. And Mother would go down to the charity hospital and get her out and bring her out to the house and try to work with her and haul her to a meeting.
And I remember telling her, you're going to have to sterilize the dishes that these people use when they come here, Mother, because I am convinced that your AA friends have venereal disease. And I was so condescending and judgmental, and you see, you people were beneath me, totally beneath me. I was in a class all of my own, and I knew that I'd never have to be like you, because I was so smart and understood AA so much that I would keep from doing the things that you had done, and it would be preventive.
At that time, they established the traditions, and I remember the groups at home talking about it, how wonderful they thought they were. And I learned all about the traditions, and I understood why the traditions had to be established. And, again, that was wonderful for you folks. I returned my last year in law school and graduated from the University of Oklahoma and lived at home. And my mother was still very active in Alcoholics Anonymous, and I was getting drunk on weekends and doing the things that kids in law school do.
I graduated in 1959 and went to work for the chief judge of the 10th Circuit Court of Appeals in federal court. And we had gone to Denver to Holcourt, and I got drunk, and I knew that I was in trouble because I had embarrassed him. And so I said to him, I'm going to go to an Alcoholics Anonymous meeting, because I knew I could use you all, and that once I had come to one of your meetings, that it would get the heat off me.
Well, the only thing I didn't know was that he was drunk, too, and he didn't even remember what I had done. And so the whole deal was all in vain, but I did go to a meeting, and I listened to what you people had to say, and I compared myself right out of Alcoholics Anonymous, because I hadn't lost a job, and I hadn't lost a family, and I hadn't been in jail, and I hadn't been in the hospital, and I hadn't done the things that you all had done, and I didn't drink in the morning, and I still had those barometers, all of the signposts stuck up along the way, and I knew that I could not be an alcoholic, because I hadn't done what you had done.
But you see, the thing that I missed was that I did not listen for the emotional identification. I didn't hear what those people were saying when they talked about being afraid and lonely and terrified and insecure and inadequate. I didn't hear that. I had a case of I-nevers. I never did those things that those people did, so I'm not an alcoholic. I think someplace in the big book, you know, if they're ever going to add anything, they ought to add the part that concerns the people who have the I-nevers, I-never, I-never, I-never.
And they ought to add a little footnote, and it ought to say, but you're gonna, because I went out for the next ten years convinced that I was not an alcoholic, and I continued to drink my way into the gates of hell. By 1964, I was married, and I had had three children in three years, and we had moved to California, and we had moved partially in order to get away from my mother, who I thought was spying on me and inhibiting my drinking, and she was.
And so we had settled down in Los Angeles in the valley, and I continued to drink. Now, I never drank in the morning, because I knew that's what you did. Never went to jail, never went to a hospital, never did any of those things. But in 1967, I got drunk again, and I was sick. So I thought, well, I'll go ahead and give AA another call. And so some lady came and picked me up and took me to an AA meeting, and all that I can remember about attending that meeting was that that woman's slip showed about three inches, and she didn't have the class that I had.
And so I decided that I wasn't an alcoholic, and I went back and I drank again for another two years. You have to understand how grateful I am today that I finally made this program, because
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I was one of those people who was impossible. It took me ten years to get here, and I did it with denial, alcoholism as a disease of denial, and with defiance, and with rebellion. Only I didn't do it just for a couple of months and go out and slip. I continued to fight for ten long years, convinced to the very end that I would never be like you, rotten, stinking, puking drunks. I went to a meeting again in 1968.
I had said to my husband, if you would just move me out of the valley and get me to the beach, let me live in Malibu. I think the thing that is bothering me is all of this pressure of living here in Los Angeles, and all of these kids that are so little, and I had quit working and I had sacrificed my profession and career. I says, get me to the beach and let me be a beachcomber, and he did, and he moved me to Malibu, and we had a lovely beach home, and the ocean came up underneath the pilings under our living room, and nothing changed.
I continued to drink just the way that I did in the valley. We moved back into the valley, and by this time we were having financial problems because my husband couldn't work, I couldn't take care of those kids, and so we had been evicted and we had moved to a transient apartment house. And all of the things that they say happen to you emotionally before you get here happened to me. If any of you who are new have come to this convention, it doesn't matter that you haven't been in jail and that you haven't been to a hospital and that you haven't lost a job and that you haven't lost a family, because that's not what getting to AA is about.
Because when I finally got here in 1969, I still hadn't lost a family or a job or been to a jail or been to a drying-out hospital. None of those things had ever happened to me. And so those signposts that were along the road were totally false. I just didn't listen to the emotions that the people in AA were talking about. I had all of this remorse and guilt when I drank and I was unable to cope with living.
And I had learned by now that the only way that I could deal with living was not to deal with living. I had learned that if I had problems and I couldn't solve them or couldn't cope, if I drank they'd go away. But the only thing is that when I drank I created more problems that required sobering up and drinking again to forget the problems that I had created while I was drinking. And then all of the guilt would come about in the mornings when I would wake up and I'd try to remember what I'd done the night before.
And I was a closet drinker. I drank with my blinds drawn. I thought no one knew. But I had all of the remorse. And then I would have to drink in order to get rid of that guilt because the remorse was so profound I couldn't tolerate it. There is a saying in Zen that you cannot wash away blood with blood. And that is exactly what I was trying to do. Because when these things would happen to me and I would drink I would do more things and I would have more guilt and more remorse and I would have to drink in order to get rid of the fears and the feelings of guilt and remorse that were a result of drinking.
And that's the way that I continued to live for the next two years. I had sought psychiatric help and the psychiatrist had been a victim of one of my frauds. I weighed 170 pounds. I want to tell you that we were living in Los Angeles and that I was so fat that if I had turned over I would have been in Cleveland. And it wasn't really that I was too fat. I figure if I had just been two feet taller I would have had a terrific figure.
I had convinced the psychiatrist that I had a complex about obesity. And so he needed to give me diet pills. And then I thought if I could just get skinny I'd be okay and I wouldn't drink so much. And I played the same con games all along. The favorite games of any alcoholic are justify, rationalize, and compensate. And that's all that I did when I was drinking and I guarantee you that if I do that again games in my sobriety, justify, rationalize, and compensate, I will drink again. Because
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that is a part of the disease that I still possess, though I no longer am drinking alcohol. When we were living in this transient apartment house, the children were out of school, there was no place that they could go, and it was in November of 1968, and I think I uttered the first sincere prayer that I had ever said. I was drunk and I said the prayer of all alcoholics. I said, God, if you are there, just help me. And nothing happened. Because I believe in my higher power's wisdom, because the time was not right for me. But I didn't pray from November until the following February. I had asked for God's help in November and did not receive it, and so I turned my back, traditionally, as I had always done. And I continued to accelerate downward with this progressive disease that I had. And during that period of time, I was living my life as though it were a dress rehearsal. Always it was going to be better. Tomorrow was going to be okay. Tomorrow I would get the brass ring on the merry-go-round. There was always the pie in the sky. Everything was going to be different, but nothing changed. I remember saying to my husband one night, I was drunk and sitting in the living room, and I told him that I felt as though I were lying in a grave, and that the entire world was walking by me and was kicking dirt in on my face, and I couldn't get out. And I used to cry and say, I am so afraid, and he would say, who are you afraid of? And I couldn't tell him. And I was afraid to go to sleep at night because I was afraid that I wouldn't wake up in the morning and that I would die in my sleep. And when I woke up in the morning, I was afraid because I could not face the day. Now you see, these were the emotional things that those people were talking about in 1959 that I didn't hear. They were talking about the stark terror and the loneliness and the fear. I could not drive a car. I could not answer the door. I could not answer the telephone. I had a drinking dress that I put on my 170 pounds, and it was a mumu.
I don't know if any of you other women ever had a drinking dress, but mine fit tight. It was so big. And I wore this dress day and night, and if I took it off, it'd break. And I never washed it. I could sleep in it. And the deal that I used was that I was going to stay up at night and watch the late, late show on television because I knew that everybody else would go to bed. And I would drink until I passed out, and the next morning I would frantically grab the TV guide and try to find out what movie was on because I knew that I was in a blackout and who was in it because I was afraid that I would be asked. And it seemed to me that there was a plot because for the last three months that I drank in Los Angeles, it seems to me that every six days they played the movie called Wine and Roses. And I would never watch that show, and I would hide the television guide, and I was scared to death that someone was going to see it because I didn't want to face the reality that I could possibly be one of you rotten, stinking Cuban drunks. And I knew that I was crazy, and I had projected myself into an insane asylum. And I could see my kids coming to see me on Sunday afternoon with a pickpick basket. And I knew that's where I'd go. Now, as much as I could, I loved those children with all of my heart.
And yet at the same time, they were the center of my frustration. My career had been thwarted. My ambitions had been abolished. These kids and this responsibility had absolutely destroyed my life. And I had such a resentment towards the role that I had to play. I spent my life washing out diapers in the toilet and mixing Pablum. And I resented everything about my life to the extent that when those little kids would come into the kitchen, I had told
[00:35:01]
my psychiatrist of my fear. I had a fear of sharp objects, and it was a conscious fear. And those kids would come into the kitchen, and I would walk over and shut the drawer that contained the knives because I was afraid that some irresistible impulse would come over me and that I'd try to kill them. Now, I knew that I was crazy, but somehow or another I could never relate this craziness to drinking, because when I drank, everything got okay.
Now, in the beginning, I think I drank basically for four reasons. I drank to fill that void inside me, because when I drank, everything was okay. I drank because the pain of living went away. I drank because all of my life I have had an image of what I wanted to be when I grew up. And when I drank, I became that thing. And I drank because it gave me a feeling of freedom. And I've always wanted to be a free person, ever since I can remember.
But you see, when time passed between November and February, all of those reasons changed. Because when I drank, the void was not filled. And when I drank, I became the thing that I didn't want to be. And the pain remained. And I was no longer free, because I knew somehow, subconsciously, that I was in bondage to the bottle. My entire life was controlled by chemicals. And the reasons for drinking disappeared. I had to stop drinking, because I could not quit. All of my life I had figured that alcohol had been my friend. And it had. On many occasions alcohol had helped me. It had made me feel like a whole woman. It had made me feel acceptable.
And somehow or another, my friend turned on me. Now I don't know about you, but there comes a point of surrender in this program. And I think the point of surrender came when I began to understand that alcohol was not my friend, but it was turning on me. In January of 1969, we had moved from that transient apartment house into a lovely home. It was either feast or famine with us. And this time I insisted that we live in a house that had an Olympic-sized pool. And so my husband moved me there, and we did not have enough money to buy a refrigerator. And with the alcoholic thinking that I possessed, I took all of my wine bottles and washed them out, and poured the kids' milk in the wine bottles and floated them in the swimming pool, so that the milk wouldn't spoil. And to me that was a normal thing to do. Normal. Paul Ann came to see me in January, and we sat around and we had a few drinks, and I had, I guess, more than I had anticipated. And Paul Ann was talking to her cousin, and she said to me, she says, Yvonne, I think you're an alcoholic. And I was absolutely curious. That my friend that I had intermittently seen over the years and always drank with, had the nerve to call me an alcoholic. And yet during that period of time, during that one-month period of time, my thought process, as dull and obtuse as it was, was beginning to become conscious of the fact that my friend had turned on me.
And so on February the 11th of 1969, I was drunk, and I walked into the kitchen, and I had a drink. And though I physically was drunk, I was as lucid mentally as I am tonight. And I poured that drink down the sink. I was alone. My kids were in bed. And I walked over to the phone, and I could not dial because I was physically impaired. But I called the operator and I said, Get me Alcoholics Anonymous. And I was willing to ask for your help. And it was the most difficult thing that I have ever done. For a bunch of, in my opinion of
[00:40:01]
youth, rotten, stinking, puking drunks, I called to come and help a rotten, stinking, puking drunk. Now, that surrender that I made, psychologically, was, though I had considered alcohol, my friend. If you ever try to deprive an alcoholic of anything, there will be no success, because part of the disease of alcoholism is the feeling of deprivation. And so I could not give up drinking as long as I felt I were being deprived of it. And so I was not psychologically in a mental state of giving up a friend. My surrender came when I was ready to get rid of an enemy. That's when I was ready to get sober. And that night three people came from AA and they talked to me and they said those magic words to me. They said, We know. We know. And I tried to explain to them how I felt and how frightened I was. And they said, When do you drink? And I said, I start in the mornings, I guess about nine o'clock. And they says, We'll call. And the next day they talked me through by calling every five minutes.
And they said, If you want to drink, you call us. And I was on that telephone all day. And on that day, I withdrew from both drugs and alcohol alone. And I did it only with the help of AAs. There was no God for me, because I was one of those agnostics when I came. But the AAs kept saying, You just hang in. You just hang in. We'll pick you up tonight and we'll take you to a meeting. And then I'd call them and then they'd call me. And they kept giving me hope. And they told me of their experiences and the things that had happened to them. And they told me of, of the hope for the future, that there was hope for me. And they said the most important thing that I've ever heard. They said, You don't ever have to drink again if you don't want to. And that had never occurred to me. Because you see, I was in a position of having no choice. I drank the last time that I drank for the same reason that I took my first drink. Because I wanted it to change things for me in the way that I fit into the world. For me as an alcoholic, I was someone who hated the world and could not change it. And I hated myself and could not change myself.
And the only way that there could be a meeting would be an escape. To drink in order to avoid it. So I went with sincerity to my first AA meeting the following night. And the man who stood at the podium and he said, If you are new, he said, You're afraid. He said, Just like I was afraid. He said, I want you to take your fear and mash it into a great big ball. And he said, I want you to take a hot knife and cut that ball in two. And he said, Half of your fear is already gone because you have walked through the doors of Alcoholics Anonymous. And he said, We're going to help you get rid of the other half. And he said, If you have a reservation and you do not know whether or not you are an alcoholic, there is nothing that I can say to help you. He said, All you can do is stay around long enough to try to identify with the emotional feelings that we are talking about. He said, If you have a reservation and you don't know, he said, you might have to go drink again in order to determine it. And I hope to God that you get back. Thereafter I attended five meetings every night for a period of one and a half years. And I think when I came to you people that I was subterranean. I was not even equal to the poor old sick crazy drunks because I was just so far down and so hopeless that I didn't have any idea of what you were talking about. And I knew so much about AA already, you understand, because I, you know, knew all about the traditions and the steps. But the problem was that those people, those old timers and alcoholics anonymous did not understand how brilliant I really was.
And they said to me, There are a lot of people who are too smart to make this program. to make this program, but there's never anybody that hasn't made it because they're too dumb. They said, you leave your head outside because that's what got you here.
[00:45:02]
They didn't ask me if I were from Yale or jail. They simply said, you sit down and you shut up and you listen. I tried to explain to them that I had a doctorate of jurisprudence degree and that it was only fitting and proper that I should at least get to chair some of the meetings. And then one old man said, you know, there's something else that I know of that has a lot of degrees and that's a rectal thermometer.
Now I didn't find a lot of tenderness and loving and care when I came to you people, you know. They kept saying, we care and we love you. And those people, I thought, were absolutely rude. They talked to me about the lack of humility. They talked to me about ego. And yet, all of the time that they were telling me these things, I was so eager and so desperate to have that thing that they had. I was willing to go to any length and I would go home and I would want to go to those meetings.
And at five o'clock I knew that I was going to be ready to try to drink. And so at three o'clock, I would start getting mentally prepared to have that five o'clock drink. And when five o'clock came, I would set my clock back to three o'clock. So I would get mentally prepared all again for two hours to have that five o'clock drink. And when five o'clock came, it would really be seven o'clock. And then I would go immediately and start getting ready to go to meeting.
And I had to juggle my clock around because I knew that the alarm clock in my head was going to dictate when I should drink. And I would have done anything that they had asked me in order just to stay sober. Because I had reached my first surrender in this program, I was powerless over alcohol and my life was unmanageable. I had a lot of trouble in believing in God. They said, you ask in the morning and give thanks at night.
I said, I don't believe. They said, it doesn't matter. You just do it. And I did. And in about two months, I realized I was still sober. And it was there that the seed of faith began for me. Because it was through this feeling of achievement that I had never had before that I began to believe slowly in this thing that you called a higher power. They told me that alcohol was not my problem. Now that's the rub.
Though everything in my entire life had been associated with alcohol, and though I had thought that alcohol had been my problem, and I had blamed my drinking on people and places and things, and I drank because of people and I drank at people and I drank to remember and to forget and to be happy and to be sad and whatever, everything was related in alcohol. And they said, Alcoholics Anonymous has absolutely nothing to do with alcohol.
If any of you who are here are new and you have come to AA in order to learn how to quit drinking, I recommend that this is not the right place. I say to you, go to a detox center. Alcoholics Anonymous is not concerned with alcohol. What AA is all about is what do we do when we sober up to keep from drinking the next time. I am an expert on sobering up. I've done it all of my life. Everyone here is an expert.
So AA is not about sobering up. Alcoholics Anonymous is about living without drinking. It has nothing to do with drinking. And I came to you people with the body of a 38-year-old woman and the emotions of a child. And those things that you told me to do, I rebelled at, I defied, I cursed, and I stuck my thumb and I beat on my high chair. And yet, slowly over a period of time, I began to have some trust in the older members of AA because the steps I noticed on the walls that were hanging around the club now said, We admitted it.
We came to believe. We made a decision. And it was always the plurality of the group. And those people did not tell me to do things. They did not say, Do as we say. They said, Do as we did. And we had our mouths that we used to get sick with, and all of a sudden we were using them to get well.
[00:50:00]
And so I did what the old-timers told me to do, and I stuck with the winners. And that's very important. There's a saying at home that if you're going to soar with the eagles, you can't run with the turkeys. And that was essential to me. I stayed with those people who apparently were working their program and who were staying sober, and I hung close, as close as the old-timers would allow me to hang.
And they were patient, and they were kind, and they were wise, and they shared. And so over a period of time, I began to, through osmosis, try to obtain the serenity that those people had, because I was willing to go to any lengths to get it. I moved back to Oklahoma in 1971, and my husband and I bought a home in the country, and I remember that the Al-Anons had their own programs out there, and I didn't understand anything about that.
But when those people came to see me that night, those three people in AA, my husband was sitting there, and they said, It is essential that you go to Al-Anon. You will either grow together or you will grow apart on this program. Well, I went to AA, and I did the things that I was required to do, but he didn't go to Al-Anon. And what they said was true. And we moved back to Oklahoma, and I became employable, and I went to work as assistant attorney general, and it became necessary that we obtain a divorce in 1972.
And all of the resentments and the fears and everything that go along with the feeling of inadequacy and insecurity returned to me, and I was totally plagued by them for a number of months, and I lost 20 pounds and couldn't eat, and I felt every feeling that is alien to Alcoholics Anonymous, and I did everything that I was not supposed to do as far as being vindictive or filled with resentment. I had all of those feelings.
There's just one thing I didn't do. I didn't drink. And they said, We don't care how you feel. They said, Lay on the floor and scream and kick, but, Yvonne, you just don't drink. You just don't drink. I don't care how bad it is. I don't care if they're repossessing your house. I don't care if they're taking away your car. I don't care if you're declaring bankruptcy. I don't care if the court is taking away your children, if you're filing for divorce, your husband's getting the kids, your wife's getting the kids.
It doesn't matter. There is one thing in Alcoholics Anonymous that we do not do. We do not drink, and we do not take mood-changing chemicals. And you hang in long enough, and it's going to be okay. And that's what they told me, and I believed them, and I hung in, and it was okay. I didn't understand at that point in time that that was the thing that was necessary for me to do. I didn't want to be a single parent, and yet it was essential for my sobriety, because I don't believe I could have stayed sober continuing the kind of living that I was involved in.
And so I assumed the responsibility for those children, and I began to raise them as a single parent. And it became necessary for me to sit down and to take that fearless and searching moral inventory. I had taken it before, but not really. I think there comes a time in our sobriety, if you're an alcoholic with the same attitude that I was, when I first came in, I was going to skip by as easily as possible.
And I wasn't willing, really, to go to winning lengths. I couldn't understand why we had to sit down and tell all these people all of these things, you know, that were in our past, when all of my life I'd tried to hide them and bury them. And all of a sudden it was incumbent upon me to sit down and tell someone. And so my attitude was, well, I'll compartmentalize it. I'll take part of my fifth step here and lay that on someone, and I'll take part of it over here and lay that on someone, because, you see, if you lay it all on one guy, I thought he was going to have an infarction.
And so I was going to divide it up, because it was very important to me that you all approve of me, and I didn't want you to know how bad I really was inside. And so it didn't work. And I had to sit down, three and a half years sober, and I took that inventory. And I learned about myself and who I was and what I was all about and the things that became, that I became aware of were the things that made me, for the first time, really understand and like Yvonne.
[00:55:00]
I learned about my perfectionism. I am still a perfectionist. But I learned about it. I learned that my perfectionism was an unconscious downgrading of others. When I was drinking, I was the kind of drunk who had so much guilt that I scrubbed my kitchen floor four and five times a day. I cleaned my refrigerator with Q-tips until I met a woman who said that she blew the dust out of her keyholes. But you see, if my house is absolutely spotless, then that means that I'm a better housekeeper than you are.
And that was the thing I was trying to do, to get rid of the dirt, you know, kind of like Lady Macbeth. You get rid of the dirt and you get rid of the guilt. And even when I became sober, I still had these ideas of perfectionism on the count of it was always a downgrading and I felt as though I had to win to be secure. If I am absolutely perfect in everything I do, then I'm equal too. I am equal too.
And my perfection is the result of my feeling of the lack of self-worth. I compared myself out of Alcoholics Anonymous and that nearly killed me. Comparison will do the same thing to me today. If I sit around and compare my life with others, I know what's going to happen. I'm going to start feeling self-pity. Because that's all in the world that self-pity is, is the feeling of deprivation, of comparing my life with yours and my life is not as good as yours.
I understand those things intellectually, but that doesn't mean that I don't do them. The difference is now that when I start to do them, I can stop them. Because no one among us has maintained anything like perfect adherence to these principles. I learned about my impatience. I learned that impatience is the tool of a child, because the only time for a child is now. Now. You don't say to a kid, we're going to go to Brahms and get you some ice cream next week.
We say, we're going to go right now and get you an ice cream cone. The time is right now. It is a lack of consideration when I am impatient with other people for their rights. People do not understand that when I get on an elevator and I want to go to the 15th floor that there are idiots who get on, three of them, and they punch six, seven, and eight. I've got those problems now. People in the bank don't understand that when I go in to make a deposit in the bank that it infuriates me and I switch lines back and forth trying to get up to the bank teller and I always find one person in front of me and he always has a month's deposits to make daily.
And I just stand there. I cannot stand to get behind people in the supermarket who have a cart full of groceries. And I shop the lines. Because people don't understand that the time for me is right now. Right now. And that's a character defect I have. I work on it. I work on it. At least I'm aware of those things that are wrong with me. I learned about my ego. I know that my ego is the only thing that stands between man and God.
When I move away from God it's because of my ego. I know that my ego is insatiable and it's just like the heroin addict. I have an insatiable problem. I stand on the corner like a beggar with an empty bowl and I crave alms. And when you walk by and don't drop anything in I feel rejected. Because my ego has to be fed constantly. Because I'm an alcoholic. And it is the nature of my disease. Though I am dry physically and have been for 11 plus years I still have a disease which is composed of an alcoholic mind.
And my alcoholic mind can justify and rationalize and compensate every act that I ever committed and can do the same today. And that alcoholic mind is the thing that I have to live with. And it is only through this program and the working of these steps and this constant inventory that I am aware of the components of the feelings that I have and it is only then that I am able to deal with them. In 1973 I was promoted.
I started to say ascended to the bench. And became part of the state judiciary. And I built a house in the country with my kids. And I built a house in the country with my kids, and we were happy, and I was active in AA, and I had no intention of ever getting involved again with a male.
[01:00:03]
And I had a dog that was a Great Dane that I had purchased and had raised as a protection-type dog, because we lived out there by ourselves. And so there came a time in this dog's life that it became necessary that the dog get married. And there was an attorney who practiced in my court, and he hated me. And as a matter of fact, he drank at me a lot, I understand. And the reason that he didn't like me, and I didn't particularly cotton to him, was on the count of he was slick.
And my attitude was that he was always trying to trick me in court in order to get me to commit reversible error. And if there's anything that anyone who is a member of the judiciary, who is one, infallible, and two, an alcoholic, but they don't want us to be reversed. And so I was very careful whenever this guy would come into court, because I knew that that is what he was going to try to do, because I knew that he was smarter than I was and had been practicing law a lot longer.
In fact, he did. He took one of my cases to the Supreme Court and did reverse me. And so, in the meantime, he had a male Great Dane dog, and my dog needed to get married, and so I called him up and asked him if we could get the dogs together one evening. And so he brought his dog over, and we put my dog in the back seat of my car, and as he was opening the door to get my dog in, a German shepherd jumped in with her.
And I was saying, get the dog out, and he was pulling the German shepherd. It's a wonder that he wasn't really hurt. And we hauled those dogs to the kennels, and those dogs got married, and then we got married. Now, in this deal, he was a widower. I had my three kids, and I was absolutely hung up on responsibility. But in this deal, I got four of his kids. So together we had seven, and the only advantage in having that many is that the odds are that at least one's going to turn out okay.
And I want to tell you, that marriage is nip and tuck. And I want to tell you, that marriage is nip and tuck. Nip and tuck. And the first date that we ever had is we went to the Oklahoma AA State Conference, and I said, listen to this, you know, and he was listening, and I said, it's very imperative that you go to Alamo. Because I'm going to have to absolutely make you understand that AA comes first in my life.
My children do not supersede AA. My marriage does not. My job does not. Because when I got sober, they said to me, AA's got to come first. Because if your sobriety doesn't come first, and you don't stay sober, you're going to lose your kids, you're going to lose your job, your marriage is going to break up. And so I did what those guys said. I have always tried to do what the old-timers have told me.
So I told them that. AA comes first, and you've got to go to Alamo. So we went to those Alamo meetings, and he liked the pretty ladies and all of that, but he'd come home and he would complain that AA was not working for him. Now, I had heard that this man used to drink very heavily, and I had accredited that to the fact that his wife had been very ill with a terminal disease for a long time, and that through this personal tragedy in his life that he did drink heavy.
But when I married him, his association with me was going to make him wonderful. Because I was wonderfully sober. And so as time passed, I would go away to speak on AA conferences, and he supposedly was going to Al-Anon, and I assume would go with the ladies and talk to them and come back, and he had a very difficult time identifying because he had never seen me have a drink. It was hard for him to communicate with other Al-Anons about their drunk spouses.
But every time I'd get ready to go to an AA conference, we'd always have a terrible argument. And to me, my impression of that situation was he does not want me to go to AA conferences. He does not want me to put AA first. And I was told in AA that you never say no and that you do the things that you're asked and you are called and you're asked to speak and you go and you speak. And that's the way it is. That's the law. That's the law.
And every time I'd get ready to leave, he'd always start a big fight. And I thought, he resents my participation in AA. And so in the AA conferences that come up, he'd always want to argue, and I would go ahead and ignore this and go on, and it'd take a little bit of time for restitution when I'd come back home. But this particular Friday, we were supposed to leave. My child was going to be an Al-Ateen speaker in Arkansas.
And I had overslept like 10 minutes or something, and I got up and he started an argument, and I just became raucously indignant.
[01:05:02]
And I had really had it. And what I didn't know was that this guy was a periodic alcoholic. I don't understand periodics any more than I understand social drinkers. I think if you've got a problem, you drink right now, for God's sake. And you don't put that off. You don't save up, you get it on. Well, this guy was saving up his periods until I was going to an AA conference, and then he was doing his number, and then I was coming back, and I never knew he was drunk.
And what he was really doing, and I didn't understand this, was he was really grateful that the AAs were asking me to go and speak places. And he was trying to find out who the chairman were so that he could bring up these invitations, and he was trying to offer to pay my way just to get me out of town. So that when I was gone, he could drink and I could come back and everything was all right. But on this particular weekend, on the trip to Arkansas, the deal was that I guess he felt one coming on, you know, like a Jekyll and Hyde deal, drinking that stuff.
And he knew it was coming on, and he didn't want to go to Arkansas because it was going to be a horrible, sober weekend. And so he wanted to start this argument. Because, you see, when he started an argument with me and I left, that was the fuel that he needed because that justified his drunk. And I didn't understand that periodics did that. I didn't ever need any justification to get drunk. Yeah, I just got drunk.
And he had to justify getting drunk at me. And so he said, if I had known that you were going to be in that bed this long, I would have gone down to the office and I would have worked. And I said, go to the office and work. And I gathered up my children and we went off to Arkansas. And on the way, I don't know what I did emotionally. I guess I released him. But I know that I prayed and I said, God, why is it that I am unable to sustain any kind of an emotional relationship with anyone over a period of time?
Why is it that I have failed in this regard? To me, he does not want me to participate in Alcoholics Anonymous, and without it, I know I'll die. So there is nothing that I can do. I've got to have AA and AA Muskin first. And if necessary, I will have to sacrifice him. I cannot continue to live the way that I am living. I had heard Al-Anon ladies talk about this, and I never did cotton to Al-Anon. I never liked those women.
Because I figured that they could work our program and still drink. And so emotionally, I just felt a void. But I had listened. You listen to what the Al-Anons say. They're slick. And they talked about this relationship. So I said, God, you take him. You just take him. And do with him what you will. And I came back from Arkansas, and I walked into my bedroom, and I was not the least bit upset. And my children walked in with me, and we walked in and opened the closet, and his clothes were gone.
And I went into the bed, and there was a drunken, scrawled note that said that he was at the farm and that he loved me and that he just could not go on this way. And would I call him? And I knew he was drunk, and I called him, and he really was. Now let me tell you what God did to him. He was trying to move his clothes out of the house, and he was driving a sports car, an MGB, and it had a rag top.
And he's going down the road, and he flipped the car, and it rolled over some three or four times and skidded about 40 feet on its top. And he did not have the safety belt in and was thrown out, or he would be dead. And he laid in the ditch, and he came to. His clothes were all along the highway, and I was on the bench at this time. And he came to in the ditch, and he got up, and he ran, and he hid.
And he crawled back to the house. The police found the car, and they were trying to find the body because they knew there had to be a body around there. And so they traced the license tag, and they got our telephone number, and they called the house, and they said, Were you driving the car? He says, Yes. They said, We'll be right up. Well, he knew that he was drunk, so he left. And he hid in the woods.
And so he called his daughter, and she came, and she got him out of the woods, and she took him over to his house at the farm. And he was over there from Friday until Sunday. And so I got home on Sunday, and he was still drinking. And his daughter was smart enough to know that she shouldn't let him have any more cars. And so she took the keys to the pickup truck so that he could not go get any more whiskey.
And it was his plan, without transportation, to drive the tractor down Main Street to the liquor store.
[01:10:00]
Now, you have to understand my attitude towards all of the Al-Anon's had been, I would go to AA meetings, and you see, I was Miss AA in Oklahoma County, the president of AA. And I would say openly, Any woman who would be crazy enough to live with a practicing alcoholic ought to be committed. And I was very condescending towards the Al-Anon ladies because I could not conceive that they would live with men that drank.
And I called him when I got home, and he told me what had happened. He said he hadn't eaten since Thursday, and that he was sick, and that he was starving, and oh, it was terrible. And so I called, I resorted to calling an Al-Anon. I said, What do I do? She says, Do you think he'll convulse? I said, I don't know. I said, He's starving. She says, Have him go beg some food. I said, He hasn't had any coffee.
She says, Then go beg some coffee from the neighbors. I said, But what do I do? And she gave me the hardest advice I've ever heard of. She says, Nothing. Nothing. Alcoholics don't do nothing. Alcoholics get in and straighten the problem out. It is impossible to release a situation when the alcoholic is so brilliant that we know that with our advice we can solve it. And so I did nothing. And so he kept calling me just, you know, all the time.
Still does. Monday morning he called me, and he said he was sick, and he said, I can't go to work. He says, Would you call work for me? And I knew the Al-Anon lady said, You don't ever lie. So I called his office, and I didn't lie. I said, Henry is at the farm, and he's towing out the car, and he's drunk. And so that was the end of it. I had told the truth. He called me up. He says, I think I better go to AA.
Can you have some of your AA friends come at her? I says, No. He says, Well, I says, You call them. He says, Well, I brought my glasses in the back. I says, You tell me the phone numbers, and I'll look them up, but you call the people. And I knew enough to back out and have nothing to do with it. And that night he was starving still. He still hadn't eaten, and I had some soup. I says, You come on by.
You take a bath. You come on by, and I'll give you some soup. And he came on by, and I gave him some soup, and he says, Well, I think I better go to an AA meeting. I says, Suit yourself. He says, Where shall I go? I says, I don't know. And this had to be his decision. And so he had to go to this clubhouse that he had been attending Eleanor in, and walk in that door and sit down. He started going to AA, and because of the conditions under which he arrived, which was that essentially he felt as though I had taken the first step for him, and that he went to AA in order to have a place to sleep, because he knew I could not live with him drinking.
It was necessary for him to have to drink, and May, again, this was in March that this all happened. And I'm proud to say that he has been sober now three and a half years. We have a daughter, the one that found him in the woods, is now in AA. My mom is still in AA. She doesn't go to meetings except when she's asked to speak. She'll be sober 29 years this Christmas, and she's been dry 29 years this Christmas.
It tickles me to death to see these old-timers here who come and who are active and who make 12-step calls, because, man, they really got it together. And I live in a situation, and we still have problems. We've got four AAs in our family, and it's necessary. Three of us go to meetings, and three of us are active, and three of us participate. And it seems like my mom is the one who gives all the rest of us most of the problems.
And the reason is that she's totally forgotten that just being dry is not the answer. Alcoholics Anonymous has absolutely nothing to do with just staying dry, because AA is all about learning how to live. We have to learn how to live, and it is through this program that we have the tools and the equipment. I learned from you people very quickly to believe, to become to believe in this God, this higher power.
The kind of God that I had always understood was the Baptist God, where the preacher stood in the pulpit, and the preacher said about this God, he allowed his son to be truly crucified on the cross. And he said to me, he vomited. To Be Fully Crucified on the Cross, and he said to me, Yvonne, if you do not believe that, you will go to hell. And the God that I believed in was a punitive God, a punishing God. And all I did was plea bargain and beg. And I figured that he kept a record in heaven
[01:15:00]
and he knew exactly what I had done. You see, when you're little, if you have a childish concept of God, when you're little, you understand that when you are good, you are rewarded. If your parents come in and you have done something that pleases them, they buy you the ice cream or the toy. And that's the kind of God I had. I knew that if I had been good, I would be rewarded, and that I had to deserve his love. I didn't understand that this God could love me under any conditions, without any qualifications, and that it was an unconditional love. And that was the kind of God that I learned about when I came to you people.
You showed me a God that did not consider me to be a stepchild anymore. And I came to believe in this God with a faith of undoubting trust. And I had to make another surrender in AA, and that came in the third step. And this surrender involved the same kind of feeling, I think, as when you walk up to a cliff, and there is an abyss, and there is total darkness, and you jump. You just jump. And you know that it's going to be okay. I don't understand God, but I know God. I have come to believe that in Alcoholics Anonymous, that AA will not work unless we work it. I don't think that for those of you who are new, that you can come and fit AA into your lives. I think you have to come and fit your lives into AA in order to remain sober. This program has never failed anyone, ever. It's the people who have failed the program. And the steps will not work unless we work them.
In January of this year, I was going to a women's meeting, and I spoke there, and I flippantly said, if I hadn't come to Alcoholics Anonymous, I probably would have slipped and fallen and hit my head in the bathtub and died. We've all said that. I went home that night to the day in January that Paula Ann said to me, Yvonne, I think you're an alcoholic, 1969. And at that point in time, I came to Alcoholics Anonymous, and Paula Ann did not, and she picked up my cross, my burden, and she carried it all of this time. And just last January, I received a telephone call, and they told me on that day that Paula Ann had gotten drunk and had slipped and fallen in the bathtub and that she was dead, that she had hit her head.
Now, you see, Paula Ann's mother was an alcoholic, like my mother was. And Paula Ann's mother died an alcoholic death. And Paula Ann's father had a heart attack, and he was in the bathroom. And his, her mother was so drunk, passed out on the bed, that she couldn't get to the bathroom to help her father. And he laid there and died. My mother came to Alcoholics Anonymous, and my father had a heart attack in the middle of the night, and she rushed him to the hospital. And he's still alive, and my mom's still sober, and I'm still alive, and I'm sober. And so that is what I know that Alcoholics Anonymous has done in two parallel lives. She was divorced, she had three children, she had this, the same life that I did, the same life. But the difference is in you people. I have come to believe in this freedom, and all of the new people who come in are always talking about they have to have their freedom and do their own thing. It's not that kind of freedom that we know in AA. It's not doing your own thing and continuing to do the things that you have done in the past when you're drinking. The freedom in AA that we are talking about is, is not that we can do what we want to do. The freedom in AA is that we don't have to do the things that we used to have to do.
That's the difference. Some people come into this program and they say, well, the big book only covers alcohol. It doesn't cover funny cigarettes, and it doesn't cover tranquilizers. It doesn't cover other things. I am here to tell you that those are the people who are constitutionally incapable of being honest with themselves. That the big book talks about sobriety. Sobriety means chemically free. I have never seen anyone yet who has ever messed around with that stuff, who has ever been able to stay sober over any period of time. Alcoholics Anonymous,
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though in a sense to me it is inconsistent because it gave me an identity, yet I am anonymous. I had to die almost in order to live. I had to reject everyone in order to be accepted. I had to be intolerant in order to be tolerated. I had to abuse in order to abstain. And I am just the beneficiary of all of these wonderful things. What is it that we have in AA? We take people who are sensitive, who are so sensitive that they cannot stand to live in this society, and who are so sensitive that they have to drink in order to block out the pain. And yet they come into AA and with that same sensitivity, it is reversed, and we use it with compassion and understanding, and it becomes our aid. It becomes our advantage and not our detriment. These crazy drunks who have the imagination that drives them crazy, the fears and the nightmares and all of the things and the blackouts that go with drinking, and yet we come to AA and with our imagination and with our feeling we come to believe and establish a concrete contact with a higher power. And those of us who come to AA who have the ability to laugh at ourselves, where normal people would cringe if they said and told the same things that they had done, but to us we have vented this laughter and rid ourselves of this guilt, of all of the guilt that we have had. And with this laughter we have established a communication and a fellowship, and sharing and loving. Alcoholics Anonymous has been my life. Our kids are terrific. Not in jail yet. We have four grandchildren. Of course we have our ups and downs. We have daily problems in living. We went through a bout with my child and marijuana. We have the same problems that all parents have, but we have an answer. And that answer is in AA. And if anything should ever happen to any of the other six of our children, though we have one daughter in AA, at least they know where the answer is for them too, because they have seen it work in our lives. And they have seen their parents turn from drunks into citizens and human beings who have a purpose. The reason that AA works is the same as, I assume, an explanation trying to explain to a blind man what the color white is like. You would say to that blind man, it is like snow. And the blind man would think it must be cold and it must be wet. And that's the way it is with us in AA. We try to explain AA to other people and they don't understand. Because the difference is that they have to experience it. They have to understand and know and feel. And that's why we have this fellowship. And it will never be destroyed from without. It is something that we must fight for and preserve. I want to thank all of you for asking me to come tonight. And just remember that anything is possible in this program if you believe. Thank you.