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Source: Unidentified Historical Recording – Fellowship Review Recording 890 – Date Unknown.mp3 File: lawrence-j-reaching-out-gauteng-area-na-convention-2007.mp3 Duration: 00:16:45
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Morning, I'm Lawrence, I'm an addict. One of the reasons we chose the name Reaching Out for this convention was because of a preamble that I'd heard read at another fellowship, and it was my intention that I wanted to read that preamble here. And people said to me that we can't actually do that, you know, because it's bringing other things in. So one of the members of the convention committee, Andrew, agreed to take that preamble and kind of give it a bit of a rewrite so that we can look at it as our own. I think it's very, very, it's one of the most powerful things I've ever heard.
I came to N.A. through the power of the Twelfth Step. Others passed it on to me. They were out there after they'd cleaned up, caring for other addicts like me. I need to never forget that. I wouldn't be here today had they simply continued with their lives, forgetting about those out there still using and suffering, caught in the grip of this disease. I'm immeasurably grateful when I think on this, and with that gratitude I reach out, remembering those who reached out to me. Gratefully, I carry our message. Most importantly, I need to share with the newcomer, to have them in my life. With this, my spirituality begins. Caring for others gives life to my spirit.
The more I'm able to focus on improving the lives of others, the less self-obsessed and self-willed I become. Serenity and inner peace are gifts of this selflessness, amongst the countless others I would never have imagined. Yet another of these gifts is the capacity for self-love and forgiveness. I have learned to forgive myself for being an addict. For all the damage I did to my life, to my physical health, my career and my finances, most importantly for me, I have forgiven myself for all the terrible, unloving and negative things that I have felt about myself. Only after I had accepted the forgiveness that I had offered to myself was I able to truly grow in my recovery.
Sorry, every time I hear that, and reading it, it floors me. Someone reached out to me to help me get into this program. It's a fact. My first exposure to NA was in about 1987. I was in a treatment centre, and when I arrived at the treatment centre, they said to me, you must take out your earrings, you must take off any jewellery you're wearing, and this is what we call drug addict behaviour, and this is what we call drug addict music. And it was straight people who were telling me this, and I knew they didn't understand what the hell was going on in my mind. I'm not blaming them, because I'm sure that these people helped other people who were more willing.
And in that treatment centre, they had an NA book, and I started to read it, and we'd have these kind of half-hearted NA meetings in the treatment centre. And I really loved what I read in that NA book. In the front cover of it, it says, there's been a lot of stuff written about addiction. This book is written about recovery. And that really struck home to me. And for a while there, while I was in that treatment centre, I kind of thought, you know what, maybe I will give some thought to giving up using. But pretty soon after that, my normal reserve came in, in which I said, alcohol is not a drug. Marijuana is not a drug. I can understand that. Mandrax is a drug. Welcanol is a drug. I'm happy to get rid of those. But I ended up leaving, and my life got a hell of a lot worse.
I'd say the next two years of my life were probably one of the two of the worst years of my drug-using history, whatever you want to call it, misery. And then sometime in about 1989, I got a phone call from some addict. And this was the first time that this had happened to me. His name was, or is, Faisal B. And he said to me, he'd heard about me through Sankar. And he'd just come back from the UK himself, and he'd cleaned up in a 12-step rehabilitation centre in the UK, and he'd stayed there for a couple of years, and got involved in the 12 steps. And he said he was trying to get a meeting started in Johannesburg. Would I like to come? And I mean, I was really, like, in a real, real bad, bad place myself.
But something about the fact of just an addict talking to me made a difference. And I started going to those meetings. And initially, we weren't even allowed to call it NA. And I've heard from other people, I mean, I was in such a blur in those days that I don't remember much. Apparently, there was police surveillance at the original meetings.
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But I carried on using, and I basically left that fellowship. I ended up almost dying. I mean, I was really, I was past death. My heart was shooting clots. I had renal failure. My blood was septic, septicemia. When I arrived at the hospital, my temperature was like 44 degrees. That was kind of the end of that phase. And I went into treatment centre and came out. And now there was actually a fully-fledged NA meeting. I think there were about 12 of us at this meeting. It used to be on a Monday night in Hilbra. And that was it. And once again, though, the madness in me said to me that alcohol is not a drug. Marijuana is not a drug. And I carried on using.
And it was like 13 years before I basically was brought to my knees again. A couple of years before I came into this fellowship, my sister came into the fellowship. And she came into treatment, and five days after she came into treatment, I got arrested in the UK for importation of cannabis. And I spent a year in jail in the UK. And I look at it, and this is kind of what I say, I look at it as a high-power thing in a way.
Because my sister's life story begins with my first line of cocaine was given to me by my brother. And I think it was actually so fortuitous that I was out of her life for that first year of her recovery that she got to that first year. I don't know, maybe I would have derailed it, maybe I wouldn't have. Who knows? But I think that there's a possibility. And when I got out of jail, everyone said to me, go into treatment. And I said, are you crazy? I've just spent a year inside. There's no way I'm going to go into treatment. I had to go out and use for another two years and really just fuck everything up. And at a certain point when I was really like, I found another new rock bottom, my sister reached out to me. And I was kind of stuck, mentally stuck in Cape Town. And she said, come, we're going to get you out of this.
And I went into treatment. And initially my idea of going into treatment was that I could just basically clean up, you know, get my head together a little bit and carry on doing what I'd been doing before. But something happened to me when I came into this treatment center. And I think I was in that place for about two days and I went to my first NA meeting. And I think there must have been about at least 40, 50 people at this meeting.
And somebody I knew, kind of, I was just like acquainted, one of the yo-yo crowd was celebrating three years of sobriety. And I looked at this person and I thought, if they can do it, you know, maybe there is something to this. And I decided to be willing, I decided to actually shut up and listen. I was always great at arguing myself out of anything good and going my own way and kind of thinking I'd won this victory when actually I was losing battle after battle.
When I came into the rooms, I mean, I heard lots of things. And one of the first things I heard, and I think one of the most important things that I heard is that I'm powerless over my addiction and that my life is unmanageable. And what that means to me is that I suffer from an allergic reaction to drugs. It's pretty simple, it's pretty subtle. I don't always succumb to it, but it always happens. If I use, I want more.
I compare it to, I think a really good analogy of it is like somebody is allergic to bees. If you are allergic to bees, you stay away from bees. If you see a hive of bees, you see possible death in that hive for you. The other part of that powerlessness and unmanageability is that when I look at that beehive, I just see honey. Somewhere along the line, my mind blanks out and I can't put two and two together and actually equate that bee with at the very least extreme discomfort and at the very possible death.
And that's what this program is for me, is the reminder that I need to have, that I need to keep on being reminded about that, about the sting, the sting in the tail. I think when we reach out to people, I've read somewhere, also in some recovery literature, what do we do? What do we actually do when we try to reach out to people?
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Well, what I try to do and what I've also heard is tell them that. Tell them about the powerlessness and unmanageability. Because I believe if it's put to an addict, they might not grasp it at the first moment or they might not drop their drugs and say, OK, that's it, I'm never going to use again. But I believe that a seed gets planted in an addict's head. I believe that's what happened to me when I picked up that NA book for the first time in 1987 and when I finally cleaned up in 2004.
That seed was there and it never went away. And somewhere along the line, I think those experiences that I've had before made me a bit more receptive to the program and a bit more aware of what I'm capable of doing to actually fuck up my program. So when I came into these rooms, I felt useless. In that preamble, I said one of the things important is self-forgiveness. I really did. I felt like this horrible leech on life.
I said, really, there was nothing good about me. And the people in the room said, it doesn't matter, we'll love you and then eventually maybe you'll learn to love yourself. And the way that I continue to address my low self-esteem, try to amend the problems of my past and actually learn to move away from that is through service. When I care about somebody else, I stop worrying about myself. There's something I read in one of the NAIPs, it's called the triangle of self-obsession.
And it basically talks about how we get kind of stuck in this triangle in our mind of fear, resentment and anger. And the way out of that, the way for me to get away from that is through service. Service in the fellowship, service to other people, service in any area of my life. Now, on top of that, charity begins at home. So I need to do service for myself too. And that's what they call the paradox of the 12-step.
We keep what we have by giving it away. And the more we give away, the more we have. It's funny, when I was a kid, we used to go to camp and there was some song we used to have to sing in the camp. And it went something like, love is something that if you give it away, you end up having more. It's like a magic penny, hold it tight, you won't have any. Spend it, lend it, give it away, you end up having more. That's exactly the same for me with what service is about.
I mean, when I first came into the rooms, there was one meeting. I left the rooms for 13 years, I come back, there's like 25 meetings. Conventions, I mean, conventions of addicts. Can you believe that addicts could actually put something together like a convention? But it happens. I mean, we've got a phone line. The phone line receives, I don't know the exact figures, 5, 8, 10 calls a day. Sometimes it's from parents, sometimes it's from addicts, sometimes it's from people who are just lonely and bored and want to speak to somebody.
But actual things are going on. We've got meetings in prisons today. There's meetings in Diplov prison, there's meetings in Luokho prison. These are amazing things. We've translated, we've begun the process of starting to translate some of the NA literature into the other languages, the other indigenous African languages. You know, you go to a convention in Europe, like the European convention, and everybody is sitting here like we are, but with headphones on their head.
And you've got a little button in front of you that goes French, Spanish, Portuguese, German, and there's people actually translating. And I guess the idea of it is that we don't want anything to stand in the way of people feeling at home at this convention. That's why I think I get so touched and I find it so beautiful when we start reading the preambles in other languages. And maybe one day we'll get there too. And the way we'll get there is through people doing service.
Sometimes I have a love-hate relationship with service. Sometimes I really love it and other times I really hate it. I must say with this convention, I went through all of those kind of things. I just want to also at this point mention and thank the other people who were involved on this convention committee, because it was a committee and we all worked on this. And that was Madalena and Kate, and Andrew, and Donovan, and Taco, and people gave up their time so
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that this could happen, and I tell you, it was worth every single second that we put into it. And most importantly is you, because if you guys don't come, then we don't have a convention, and initially the bookings were quite slow in the beginning, and I actually got worried at one stage, I thought, well, maybe we're not going to have it, and it actually happened, and the reason it happened is because of you, and so I just want to thank everybody for coming. I think that's pretty much all I've got to say. Service has kept me clean.
Service has made the difference between a person who came in here feeling like the lowest of the low. I still suffer with my low self-esteem and those kind of issues, but without a doubt, I can feel the difference. I'm moving away from that. I work my steps, I work with my sponsor, I go to meetings, and I've got a relationship with my higher power, and no matter what, I don't pick up, and as long as I do those things, my life just gets better and better. Thank you.