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Source: Unidentified Historical Recording – Fellowship Review Recording 916 – Date Unknown.mp3 File: yvette-k-carrying-the-message-nasac-johannesburg-2006.mp3 Duration: 00:14:20
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I'm Yvette and I'm an addict. And I think I might pass out. The last time I shared at a convention, it wasn't a national convention, and I cried the whole way through my share. So I wasn't really able to speak, and it's kind of like my worst fear that that's going to happen to me again. Somehow, when I get to a convention, I remember. I really, really remember where I came from, and I remember what I've been through, and I remember why I'm here. And I mean, that's something that's with me every day. It's not something that I forget about. I don't forget about recovery when I'm not at meetings, but for some reason, when I get here, it's kind of like it overwhelms me, and I can't help it. I feel very, very emotional.
Normally, when I share, I don't plan anything. I kind of think about the topic, and then I just rock up. And I pray, and I ask to be a vessel for my higher power, and I ask to carry the message, and then I just wait for what comes. And for the first time ever, I kind of really thought about my share, and I spoke to quite a few people, and I did some reading, and I kind of made some notes. And they're here in this book, and I don't know if I'm going to use them, but it just feels like this is a very different kind of thing for me.
Our primary purpose in Narcotics Anonymous is to carry the message to the addict that still suffers, so that no addict needs to suffer and die without knowing that there is hope. And kind of for me, it's really, really important, because this is our primary purpose. It is the most important thing that we do in NA as a collective, as a whole. As an individual, my primary purpose is to stay clean, and to get clean, and to stay clean, and to be in recovery through working the steps and doing the basics that I was taught when I got here. And as a part of NA, my primary purpose is to carry the message to the addict that still suffers.
And for me, and what I say is my own opinion, you know. For me, the message that I carry needs to be the message of Narcotics Anonymous, and not the message of Yvette K. from the Western Cape. And sometimes, I was thinking about it today, and sometimes, for me, that's about keeping quiet. Because sometimes I get to a meeting, and I feel crap. And I want to talk about how crap I feel, and how this program is not helping me, and how everything is just obstacles, and I'm just hate and anger and resentment, and I just want to vent, and I just want to be very messy and very dirty, basically.
And that's not the message that I need to carry to a newcomer. And it's at those times in meetings that I keep quiet when the newcomer is there. I don't say those things, because I don't need to say them. I have a sponsor. I have friends. I have step work. I have literature. I can deal with this on my own. And I don't need to kind of put it out there for the message to be misconstrued, if that makes any sense.
So for me, sometimes the message is just about keeping quiet, sitting in my chair, sitting up straight, not talking during the meeting, if I can help it, and just being healthy and clean and alive and putting up my hand at the end of the meeting, you know, to show newcomers that there's hope and that people have done this thing, you know. Because I know when I came into the rooms, I couldn't really hear what was being said, to be honest. I didn't hear for a very, very long time, but I watched people. You know, I was very paranoid and very freaked out, and I used to sit with my hair over my eyes, but I used to just check them out through the corner of one eye.
And I used to watch the people who had clean time, and I used to watch who put up their hand at the end of the meeting. And it's because – and some of them are in this room today – it's because some of them put up their hands in those meetings for me that I realized that if I kept staying clean one day at a time and doing the things that they were all talking about, I could be like them one day. And that's exactly what happened. It really was that simple. And I know it sounds like weird to say that sometimes at meetings I don't speak about what's going on for me because it would be diluting the message, but for me, I kind of see it as just getting out of the way more.
As I kind of stay in recovery for a little bit longer and I kind of, I don't know, maybe learn a bit more, for me, what's really changed is the way that I can shut up, and I can get out of the way of God, and I can let her work through me. And I don't have to – it doesn't have to be about Yvette. It's about something bigger than me, and that's incredible. That's one of the hugest gifts that I've been given. And it doesn't just work for me in these rooms and like in my personal life. That stuff works for me in all aspects of my life. I practice the principles at work. I practice the principles in my friendships. I practice the principles with my family and with the other stuff that I do.
[00:05:22]
And for me, kind of like I believe that we can't carry the message if we're not healthy and we're not working the steps and we're not doing the things that we need to do to keep ourselves healthy, because otherwise what kind of a message would I be carrying if I wasn't looking at my stuff and listening to my sponsor and celebrating my milestones and doing service? There's a guy in N.A. in the Western Cape, and he always says that if you don't do service, your recovery dies with you, and the hope that you have felt in your life doesn't get passed on to a still-suffering addict. And for me, that's – it's really, really amazing.
And for me, a big way of carrying the message is by doing service. And I have kind of done service in various aspects of my life – well, various aspects of the program since I got clean. And I really started doing it because I had nothing else to do. I had no friends. I had no direction. And someone said, why don't you come to a convention committee meeting? And I went, and I kept going, and I did that, and I did a whole bunch of other things. And through that, I met the most incredible people, and I was kind of – I was really, really privileged to be allowed to kind of carry the message.
One of the aspects of service that I kind of do is 12-step calls. And, well, not so long ago, I went on one with a friend from the fellowship, and it was really, really hectic, you know. And we went to this terrible flat in Seapoint with this, like, woman who was – we had to wait for her to finish smoking crack in the bathroom before she'd come out to talk to us. And her five-year-old son was kind of, like, wandering around, and there were animals that were starving, and it was Christmas, and it was just horrible. It was absolutely horrible.
And I couldn't speak during the whole 12-step call. I just sat there, you know, because I just – I was just so overwhelmed, and I was so completely – I just didn't know what to do. And luckily, I was with someone who was very experienced with 12-step calls, and she kind of spoke and spoke and spoke, and it was amazing what I thought. She thought she was amazing. And we left, and I said, geez, I'm so sorry that I couldn't speak. You know, I just didn't know – I didn't know what to say. And she said, that's okay, because you just sat there, and you were clean, and you were healthy, and you didn't have to say anything. You know, you just kind of carried the message, and that was a huge lesson for me.
And that whole – you know, the 12-step experience is such a lesson. For me, I have, obviously, very strong codependency tendencies. I have very strong control issues. So I want to fix her life. I want to feed the cat. I want to feed the child. I want to clean the house. I want to give them all Christmas presents. I want to take her to meetings and make her stay there, you know what I mean, until she gets the message and gets clean, and her life is a miracle.
And that's not the way it's going to work. So, yeah, I had to learn the difference between carrying the message and carrying the addict. And for me, that's really, really hard. And a big thing for me is that I can't do it on my own, because me, Yvette, gets very caught up in what goes on in here, and I get very confused about what the truth is and what is the next best thing to do. And for me, that's why it's so important to kind of always have people that you can bounce things off and to be constantly, you know, never alone in that kind of situation.
A way that I carry the message in my own life is through sponsorship. The first person who asked me to sponsor them, I was like, what do you mean? I don't know anything. And the more kind of days of clean time I have, the less I feel like I know anything about this program. But I kind of can talk about what happened for me, you know, and that's about all I can. But like theories and that kind of stuff, I just say, you know, you need to read the literature for that. You need to always go back to the literature, because that is where it is in black and white. And I can kind of paraphrase it. I can give you the Yvette version, but I can't give you exactly what it is, but it's there if you need it.
And to make sure that I keep carrying a message that is true, I have a sponsor. And she helps me with my sponsees, and she helps me with my behavior, and she helps me work the steps. And that's how I make sure that the message that I carry is one that will aid a still suffering addict and not help them.
[00:10:25]
In Cape Town, we have a women's group. We started it like two years ago. And I wasn't there when it started, but I joined it a couple of weeks afterwards, and I made it my home group. And it's been through various stages, but basically a couple of months ago, we got to the point where it was just like two or three of us. And the service positions were kind of never rotated, and you just did service for year after year there, because there was nobody to rotate to. And it kind of got to a point where we had to question whether the meeting was really working or not, because there was nothing going on.
And what we found when we kind of did an inventory of our behavior was that we'd use the meeting as a place, and this is my opinion, we'd use the meeting as a place to talk about our stuff, and we'd stop talking about recovery. We'd use the meeting as a place to talk about how hard it is to be women. We talked about our partners, our husbands, our children, our jobs. I talk a lot about my jobs. Our parents, our cars. I mean, we just, you know what I mean? And it became like worse than group therapy, because at least in group therapy, there's some sort of control. And we just kind of spilt all the stuff, and at first it really, really worked. We had a place where we could kind of share all of the stuff, but a couple of months down the line, we didn't want to go to the meeting anymore, nor did no one else, and we weren't attracting any newcomers.
And so we sat down and we really, really looked at it, and we realized that we hadn't been talking about recovery, you know? We'd been talking about, we'd been bitching and moaning about the stuff that was going on, and we can do that at home over coffee, you know? We really don't need to do that in a meeting. And the reason why we're in a meeting is to carry a message. So we kind of went back to the literature, and we put just like a really, really strong emphasis on the traditions, you know? And it was hard, because there were only three of us, you know? And it was like, do we really want to do this? You know, we have really busy lives. There are other meetings we can go to. Why don't we just let it go?
But somehow, we decided that we weren't going to let it go, and we kind of kept on fighting, and it really was a fight. It wasn't an easy thing. And so we made this huge change, and for a while, nothing changed. We went to the meeting, and it was two of us, and we kind of like looked at each other and read the traditions and, you know, did the best that we could do. And then a couple of weeks ago, we had three newcomers come into the meeting, and two of them are still coming back, and they're clean, and they're going to other meetings, and that was really, really amazing. And it was kind of like the change that we needed to have, you know what I mean? And it was all about carrying the message.
And when that kind of emphasis shifted in the meeting, then everything changed, and it became a place where we wanted to go because we got that meeting feeling. We got that like reaching out feeling, and where other people started to want to go again. And I mean, we don't know what's going to happen with it. It's touch and go. But it was just an amazing lesson for me because we always need to remember that, A, our business meetings need to start off by inviting our higher powers to join us because otherwise we're not working in God's will. We're not like operating under a group conscience, and we needed to remember that the traditions are the most important thing for running a meeting, you know, not like who's friends with who and who's having a hard time and that kind of stuff.
So that was really, really amazing. Thank you for letting me share. I feel very, very privileged and honored, and I feel a lot better than I did when I first stood up here. So thank you.