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Source: Judy L – BOX OF CHOCOLATES – 2025-03-20.m4a File: judy-l-box-of-chocolates-2025-03-20.mp3 Duration: 00:50:19
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is AA, and this whole thing that we do. And I'm so excited to hear her tonight and to share our experience with her because we're a really cool bunch of people. Julie, Judy. Thank you so much, Ramona. Would you tell me how long I'm supposed to speak or when I'm supposed to shut up? 50 minutes, about five to the hour. Okay, great. So hello, everybody. I'm Judy and I'm an alcoholic. And I am coming to you from Italy tonight.
I'm in beautiful little Chiaveri, Italy off of the Eastern Riviera, I can't even say it, where we've been as an enormous pleasure for the past three months. We leave in 10 days. And I say that because it's part of this amazing adventure in life that's happened to us over a period of time. So I'll tell you a little bit about that. I am a native of Illinois who moved to Colorado in the 70s with a pile of kids in the Volkswagen van.
And it seemed like everybody was migrating in the 70s in a Volkswagen van with a pot full of children. And one of those was me. And it was actually a little too late to save a marriage that wasn't working. But after about a year or so, maybe two, it fell apart. Moving didn't save it. And we were fortunate enough not to do what we thought at the time might save the marriage, which was another baby. It's amazing how often one thinks these thoughts that are so off the wall when you look at them later.
My sobriety date is August 17th of 1982. And it certainly wasn't the beginning of what we'd call a sanity date, but it is the one where I didn't take another drink. And I'll share with you a little of that journey because it's been a long and interesting and ever-changing one. I hope to be able to tell you some of that tonight. I always pray first and think, well, if this bombs, at least I can blame the higher power.
And if I turn it over to God and it doesn't work, it's not entirely my fault. So I'll give you that one. But when I got sober, I followed a friend into the program who had had a life change. We never talked about this. She didn't 12-step me as so many people have been 12-step. She was the only person I know in Alcoholics Anonymous. And I was at this point, a divorced woman with four little kids and a fifth, a niece, who was living with us.
And living with us in chaos and kind of a messy, dirty little life. And I'm a bar drinker. By nature, I'm one of those people. I wanted lights and music and boys and drama and all the stuff that was going on. And I was a daily drinker. I did not know about alcoholism. Turns out I've had a couple of relatives who were alcoholics and I didn't know about them either. But I don't know where alcoholism comes from.
I only know one thing today about alcoholism and that's that you have to drink to get here. Whether you started it that way or whether you were born that way is of no importance to me any more than I know where it is that I originally got the gene for breast cancer. But I did that too. And I don't look back and say maybe, there was an article I read this week that said maybe it was the flame retardant pajamas from when I was a kid.
At some point, it doesn't make any difference. I drank my way into Alcoholics Anonymous and came to you when life was really falling apart. It was falling apart in every way that I knew of, which was economically, spiritually, socially, physically. I had fallen apart and I wasn't a kid of 20 years old. I had slowly become this person who was dependent on a daily drinking, daily bar drinking.
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And I'd leave work about 11 o'clock. I had that kind of a job. And I'd leave work about 11 o'clock and I'd be there as they were opening up my favorite place. They'd be with their hand in the lock, opening up the front door and I'd be the next person in. And I'd be there for one drink. And I'd say that every time, I'm only gonna come here for one drink. I'm only gonna have one and I gotta get back to work.
I got these kids to support. And at two in the morning, I'd be begging another person to come stay with my kids or asking my eldest child to take care of her brothers. And that's the way it went. And so I wasn't working, working, working. I had a job. I had a little job that I wasn't showing up for. So I didn't have any income because it was on commission. And I didn't have any kids that liked me much.
And I wasn't a very good example. And we all weren't doing very well. And my friend was somebody who was having a lot of coffees at night with friends that she had met in this thing called Alcoholics Anonymous. And her life was going really well. And she was getting, she said, I don't know sometimes at night, I think about the problems I'm having during the day. And before I wake up in the morning, I can actually see the answers.
It's like I could see them on the wall, she said. I can visualize answers. And I thought, wait a minute, my life has fallen to pieces. I'm on social services. I'm getting food stamps with my kids. My house is in bankruptcy or was being taken over by the bank. I didn't have a penny. I couldn't barely feed my kids. And she's getting messages on her walls. The only thing I could figure out that was different between her and me was that she was going to Alcoholics Anonymous and something about that made a difference.
Something about that was different. She was alive, she was happy, she was awake, and she was showing up for life and life was happening for her. And every part of my life just felt shabby. So that's where I came to you guys. I did not think that I was an alcoholic, by the way. I did not even consider the fact that I was an alcoholic. That's what happened to other people. And so I came to you and drank for a couple of years.
And before I got sober, I came to you. I didn't have a slip because I never got here. I don't think today too many of us really have a slip. I think many of us haven't quite gotten here yet. And I think there's a real difference between working a program and having a slip and being somebody who isn't working a program, doesn't have a sponsor, doesn't understand steps, traditions, or concepts, or anything like that, doesn't show up to a home group.
When they go out and drink, that's not a slip. That's just, they haven't gotten here. They haven't started. And so that was me for about a year, year and a half. And then one day, some of you've heard this before. One day, a couple of folks came in, a guy who just recently died, by the way. And I was coming to a little clubhouse where we were all kind of hanging on each other. We were all dating each other.
It was very lively. It was full of he-in and she-in. And we were having a very good time pretending to be working a program of Alcoholics Anonymous. And it was so much fun that I was there every day. And this guy came and he said, I'd never shared, by the way. I knew somehow I had nothing to share. And it wasn't my place. And this guy who sat in, he looked really serious. He was very serious. And he said, this is an open meeting.
So some of you were here from maybe OA or Al-Anon or Gamblers Anonymous or any of the other groups that are 12-step groups. And because we're an open meeting, we're welcome, you're welcome to take from us your experience, our experience, our strength and our hope. That's what we hope to give you. That's what an open meeting is for. We can share those things with you, but make no mistake. He said, you must, if you wish to recover, go to the place where it treats the thing that you have.
And around here, we treat alcoholism.
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And that means that we stop drinking. And I was stunned because it had never occurred to me that's what we were doing there. I know that they read the chapter, how it works, the beginning of that chapter at every meeting, but I'd never heard it. And I'm beginning to realize later on, after I get sober, how many things I have distorted and heard differently than they really were. That sometimes continues, by the way.
I get an idea and it's distorted. And of course the doctor's opinion says we cannot after a time differentiate the true from the false. And I'm that in spades. I like not to think of it as sheer mental illness, but there's probably some little bit of that in there too. And because I didn't get stuff, I didn't understand it well, and I twisted things. And so he said this, and I went back to think about, I don't wanna be here under false pretenses, for God's sakes.
I want to be here or not be here. And I went home and began to think about it. I did not have a God, I did not have a spiritual path. I have been raised in religion. That was not it. It was that over the last 10 or 15 years or 20 years of disappointment, I had begun to turn away from trusting or relying upon anything than myself. And I was doing such a good job of it too. And here we were in the depths of desperation and me saying, no, thank you, God, I've got this.
I believe there was a God, but that's as far as it went. I've got this, you are trouble. You're gonna hurt me. You're gonna kill my children. I don't want any help from a God. But I went home to say, am I an alcoholic or not? I needed to know. And I didn't understand what alcoholism was. And I didn't understand my own history. I didn't understand the things that had happened that I was running away from.
It was more than just economics and a bad life. I had never been stopped when I was driving a stolen car the wrong way down an expressway. And I had never stopped to think about the many accidents that I had had. And I never stopped to think about the daily drinking that required that every day I went in wanting one drink and every day I left after many hours, only after I was closing up shop. Leaving the kids I loved the most in my whole life.
Knowing that when I was in a marriage and that marriage and he had said, it's either you try being a wife and staying home instead of at the bar, or we're gonna get a divorce. And I said to everyone I knew, who would stay married to somebody like that? The demands. So I chose the route instead of gradual and deepening poverty, a small and fairly dirty little life. My house was dirty. I was a lousy mom.
I had been a lousy wife. Didn't know it was alcoholism. I just knew I had to get out. I had to run and I had to drink. And that's all I knew about how that was. Towards the end, alcohol began to fail me. And it failed me if it had been the fun that I thought it was gonna be, maybe I'd have stayed at the party longer, but it had begun to fail me. And I was getting unexpectedly drunk after one drink or none and losing time and places and all the stuff that happens.
You know about getting drunk, you wouldn't be here. So you don't need all the gory details. But what I do know is that at some point in that thinking after Bob Olson made that challenge was that, oh my God, all of these things have been happening to me. They all are around alcohol. And that was the first awakening that I finally had. I'm very thick headed. And it was the first time I understood that my life had been centered around alcohol and it was going down and I hadn't done anything about it, couldn't do anything about it.
And I was stuck with a plan. So I made my little AA club. My bar was a sober bar, but we had enough dramatics to pretend we were like a bar. We had enough dramatics to pretend we were like a bar and we had enough of us asking
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like alcoholics that it worked pretty well. And so mine's not a story of getting why I was there or wanting why I was there. I didn't want a higher power. I didn't want what you had to share unless you were cute and funny and entertain my life. But it took me another couple of years after I raised my hand and said I'm an alcoholic to even begin to get the sense that I really wasn't what an alcoholic was.
So I want to tell you that at seven years sober, I actually was invited into a big book study having thoroughly avoided everything all that time. I was invited into a big book study by a man we'd met that many of you knew, a guy named Don. And I was invited into a big book study that started at 630 in the morning and an hour from my house. And I said, well, I can't make that. I've got a job to go to now.
I'm sober and I have a job, you know. And I'm the responsible person for these kids. And he said, well, no problem. We'll move it up to six in the morning so that you can be here. And you know, I'll come. And for a year, we trotted out of the house about five o'clock in the morning and there I was learning what Alcoholics Anonymous is by reading the big book of alcoholics, a line by line letter at a time, instruction by instruction.
And when we ended that after a year, I was finally, I knew why I was here. I knew I was an alcoholic. I knew why I was an alcoholic. I knew what I had that qualified me to be here. And my sobriety journey really began. And today, I would tell you that I thought I was a hard drinker or I thought I was a heavy drinker, whatever name you want to put on that. But there was a reserve in my heart that I can see in many of our people for a long period of time that are kind of like me, that don't understand what alcoholism is, as a really frighteningly progressive illness that will kill you if not now, later on, but it will kill you before and when you don't expect it to and when you don't want it to.
Alcoholics Anonymous is a is an ugly disease causing pain and suffering to everybody that I had in my circle. My kids are pretty much forgiven me, but they still have scars. Their dad is is not now alive. He too was an alcoholic and we just lived an alcoholic life. But my journey began. I was still sober and I want to tell you the insanity of living an insane life while sober is is not a pretty thing to see, but I didn't know it and I was living.
I've made a lot of mistakes in AA and that's part of what I really want to talk about. Probably many of you are here for a long period of time. Maybe somebody here is new. I don't know, but I want to tell you that my sobriety journey has been full of mistakes, partly because that's who I am. I'm not a person who sees things clearly with wisdom when coming close to it. I'm a person who is resistant to every new idea that ever came along, whether it was a good idea or a bad idea.
I'm a person who doesn't necessarily see things that clearly at first glance or second or third. The qualifier for being in this big book study was that we had to give it away if we participated. So from that point to now, I have been giving away workshops and involvement in Alcoholics Anonymous as I committed to do at that time. And with each one, I learned a heck of a lot. I don't know about anybody else, but Judy learns.
And I can't quote you any big book stuff. I just know that when I need it, there's words in there that remind me of my life and the life I'm trying to live and the God I'm trying to get closer to that I fought for so long. So in the interest of not boring you terribly, I'd like to tell you a little bit about what has happened after Alcoholics Anonymous really began, because that's where the fun of it is.
That's also where many of us have our disappointments.
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I've never been bored in Alcoholics Anonymous. I hope you haven't either. This is a game everybody can play and there's room for everybody, no matter what your insanity or what your skills, there's room for everybody to be a part of Alcoholics Anonymous in one way or another. And there's so many places where we can give the very thing that is only ours, that personality, the connection, the relationship with the God of our understanding.
In some cases, I think some of us are so different just because there needs to be a whole lot of different uses in the world. Each one of us is its own little piece of God's divinity and we're here together as brothers and sisters under something very precious. I can see that now, I could not see that before. So I had gotten married about the time that I started in this workshop and the reason I was invited was that I had been unable to stop crying.
Like for two months, I got married to another member of Alcoholics Anonymous, remarried and we're still married, which is really an amazing thing. I'll tell you a little bit about that. And we're trudging around Mr. and Mrs. AA and we're doing our meetings and we're trying to be of service. We helped start this family, got a whole restart and we moved together and made room for every one of our between us six kids and not one of them would come to live with us, but we made room and we began this journey in hope and in faith, knowing that we would put the AA program first because that was what would safeguard our marriage, if anything.
And both of us were involved in service because my sponsor was involved in service. My sponsor had been a trustee at one point and I got to, I was never told I had to be of service, but because I admired him so much, I wanted some of what he had, that's the way we are here. So I stayed in service, I stayed doing this or that, small things. I'm not one to take on more, I don't like to make public failure.
So I never volunteered for much, you'd have to ask me because I'm not going to volunteer and then muck it up. So Lou and I got married in high hopes and I start crying. We did a workshop, changed my life. We both start showing up differently in Alcoholics Anonymous in Boulder, Colorado, where we lived and we were part of life. We were part of so many things and our kids grew and everything was wonderful and we were the perfect AA couple until we weren't.
And by that, I mean, we somehow picked up really disliking each other. It was slow, it was gradual and we were not being intimate, we were not speaking, we were not communicating in any way, we're rattling around in this house, going to meetings and pretending to be a couple in AA, but the truth was we weren't doing much of it in terms of how it showed up in our life. So at one point I was gossiping about my marriage to two or three people who were out of town, telling them my sad tale of, whoa, every day, after another day, after another day.
It was like I was waking up at night feeling like my hair was on fire. I didn't know what I was going to do. I had to get out of this marriage. I was, and some of you know, I was looking on the computer for how long it takes to smother somebody because I didn't want to get another divorce. I didn't want to embarrass my kids and be divorced twice. So I thought if I could just get away with it without going to jail, I could still look good.
And so I was smothering how to, I was looking at how to smother him and he didn't know that at the time, but he's kind of a big guy. And gradually I realized it wasn't going to work. There's no way I could hold a pillow down and he wouldn't fight and win. He's much stronger than I am.
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So it left me with very few decisions. And I had to call the sponsors one more time and call the friends. And on the same day, they all said, why don't you try working the steps and being a wife? Being a wife. And I had no idea what that meant. I didn't know until then. I didn't know what a wife was, what a wife did, how a wife behaved. My dad died when I was 13. It was a complete unknown to me. What does a wife do?
I'd been acting a part all of this time. Like I acted the part of an alcoholic before I understood what an alcoholic was. And I find that I've done that a lot in my life. I act the part of something that I don't know how to do. So I started with the traditions, believe it or not. For some reason, I began to understand something had happened to me. And what had happened was that I had lost my way. We got together as two independent people who had learned from our lessons with hope for the future.
What had happened was he had gradually become my higher power. And I didn't know that. It snuck in day by day. I was looking at him to see how I felt. I was looking at his moods to see how my mood was. My husband's a bit of a depressive anyway, and I'm not. And so I would look at him to decide I was depressed. Little by little, I know it sounds kind of Al-Anon-ish, but what I want to say is that it is the traditions that began to show me how it is that one can be in a group, our little family group.
And believe it or not, it worked. We have the first tradition talks about unity. It had never occurred to me that unity was something I could work for. Whether in AA, in a group, or in my family in a group, or in my work in a group where I'm the first one to cause chaos if I get a chance. I didn't realize that unity was something that one could work toward by not doing some other things. Just like the traditions, it starts out saying what the intention is, and then you've got 10 or 12 things that follow that tell you where we get off track.
I don't know if that makes sense to anybody but me, but it makes sense to me and that's enough. And so when I tried to say, how are we going to live this life with a common welfare? My marriage began to look really different. When I look at my group and I say, do we have anything here that is common welfare? Sure we do. Then my behavior begins to get different. When I can apply that at work, my work begins to get different because there's new priorities.
So for my group purpose, there's one ultimate authority, a loving God. Had I given my marriage to God? Well, yeah, actually, sort of. But I was hoping that God was going to take this marriage and fix it. I didn't know that I was going to have to do that. One more time, I didn't know I was going to have to do the work of the program. And I did. I want to tell you in the interest of time that there's a couple of traditions that really worked for me regarding family and marriage and work.
And one of those might most likely be the seventh tradition. We often talk about, and four, by the way, that's a mind your own business tradition. And do I have a primary purpose? Four is mind your own business and pay attention to your own purpose. We get to six and it tells us what's my purpose in this marriage. Oh, it was back to try being a wife, like try being a mother, like try being part of the family.
What is my purpose in this group? And then I get to seven and I found that, oh, Judy had failed completely. If I am self-supporting in all ways in my life, that includes mentally. Am I self-supporting mentally? Am I self-supporting physically? Am I self-supporting emotionally? Ooh, that was a tough one. I'd leaned on other people to provide all those things for a lot of time, thinking myself not the person who was getting it.
So. the person who was getting it. So mentally, physically, emotionally, spiritually, was I
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relying on somebody else to do my spiritual heavy lifting? Or am I going to do my own? And what does that look like? Sexually, I had to do my own work around all of those things to say, am I self supporting in all those areas of my life? And in my behavior began to change. One more time. I mean, we're married 15 years when we hit this kind of a bottom. And all I could think of was we have to divorce or he has to die. And instead, it turns out traditions actually applied to me one more time. So voluntarily, I have to be in this wholeheartedly. And using God as a spiritual guide. Now I'm telling you about all the mistakes, because I know that lots of folks tell you how has been on an uphill spiritual cloud since they got sober. But I'm not one of those people. I'm not. I have it has been steadily better. But it has been better despite the hard things that have come along. Along the way, when we got our little house in Boulder, it wasn't a little house, it was a big house in Boulder. And when we got it enough to house all six kids and a dog and a cat and all that kind of thing. I loved my house. I'm a house person. I'm a family person. And I love my house. And I knew that with our economics, two alcoholics who had faced real bankruptcy and lost houses and lost credibility and all that kind of thing, that the fact that we had this, this wonderful house was a gift from God. And I knew going into it, that when we had this house that one day, I would have to leave it and give it back. And I said, when the day comes, I'm going to give this house back to God. And I will give this house back to God with joy in my heart, because we've had this wonderful gift. And the day came when he lost his job, and I lost my job. And it was time to let the house go and move into something more manageable and more financially manageable. And I cried for six months. And then I'm grieved for two years. And I found the house that was God's house was in fact Judy's house one more time. It was not like, you know, Polly Pistol always talks about having made some major changes, and she does it with such grace.
I do nothing with much grace. I cried and held on and sobbed, leaving and took pictures of everything and I still call it my house. It was my, my heart and home. And it was time to leave it. It wasn't any more gods than anything else was in my, in my head. And when I lost my job, when I got that job, I said, you know, I'm probably not qualified for this job. But I really need to support my family and support my children and show them what you can do with getting an education and, and, and trying to show up and do the best you can. And as a demonstration, I'm going to get this job. And I had that job for 18 years before we cut back and I was one of the the folks slotted to leave. And I found one more time that I knew that this was a spiritual thing and that I had trusted God when I got that job, really sure that when life changed, I would be able to, to let it go gracefully. And in fact, it was one more time of bitterness and anger and a sense of failure and a lot of hard work to get back on track. So are those failures? Are they growth opportunities? I don't know what to call them. I can tell you that for me, I always think I've got it handled. And then I find that one more time, I've owned something that maybe I get to let go of.
And I don't want to let go. Whether it's a person or a place or a thing, or a position or a title or anything else, my defects have not gone away, they have lessened. My behavior is better. I know to get to a meeting. I know to participate. I know how to be of service. But my defects have really gone very slowly, as I have grown very slowly. It's just the way for me. And we did move, and we did move. And we did do the best that we could. And our marriage got better.
I've just spent three months with that man, 24 hours a day being together, and we have not yet had a crossword. And how is that even likely? We're headed into meetings, he does his and I do
[00:35:05]
mine, and we're kind of independent and very different characters. But the fact is that we've been able to do that. We both have the sense of being of service. I am, in fact, a past delegate from Colorado, Area 10, Panel 59. And my husband is chair of a couple of technology committees, because that's his favorite thing. And that's where he, as an introvert, finds his place in Alcoholics Anonymous. And we'll be working at a technology hospitality suite at the International, in fact, greeting people that might want to talk about that. So we'll be there, Tali, you can find us. And he does what he does. And I do what I do. And when I was a delegate, this was the man who said his delegate's position, his service position for two years, was to haul Judy's butt around the state of Colorado. And that's what he did, with never a complaint. He was there, having heard all of that how many times, you know, before you get totally bored. And there he was, every time, being supportive and showing up. So, you know, something wonderful has been made of the two of us over a period of time. And both of us, as different as we are, people who know us know how very different we are in character and in type. But something magical had happened that's in God's will, not Judy's, in order to make that happen. We have six kids, one of whom is having heart surgery tomorrow. Any prayers are appreciated. He's having a double bypass.
And we've had grandchildren. We now have 10 grandchildren that never have seen either one of us drink. And, you know, there's scars there. And little by little, our job has been for 40 years now, to show up and help make that life for them consistent, to be the same safe place for every one of those people that's in our group, that we can be. To show them how we can make it safe for them to be who they are and appreciate who they are as they are every day, every chance we get. And we've been trying to do that as a way of making amends to the family for what we put their parents through. Those things tend to be generational, don't they? Some things that we do, we may have gotten, who knows whose great grandparent passed something, you know? But as we show up in our lives, those kids don't know the alcoholics that both of us were separately.
And so each time we've had a chance to take one of those grandchildren on a trip, we do it. And we tell them about Alcoholics Anonymous. And we tell them about who we are. And we tell them up front about maybe you have a friend who might someday have a problem with alcohol, and we want you to know about us. Because you've never seen us be any different than we are now. But we want you to know about this. And so that's what we've done. We've shown up as best we can with each one of those kids. Their parents are all very, very different from each other, in fact. So I want to talk a little bit about service. And the reason I wanted to talk about traditions is that I'm pretty convinced that it is traditions that are useful in our lives, in all the areas of our lives, in helping me find a way that I can be with other people more successfully than my alcoholic nature wanted to be. Some of you know, I've said for a long time that we are afflicted when we get here with a bunch of A-words. We all want attention, appreciation. God, there's seven or eight of the things that I can think of. Appreciation is one of them. We all want lots of attention. We're a bunch of tabletop dancers looking for an opportunity to shine in the light, right? Even the most introverted among us wants their moment to shine.
Acceptance, we all want acceptance. We all want to be somebody. The problem with us is we're kind of neon brilliant with our needs. We not only want to be somebody, we want to be somebody. And we carry it to a place where we alienate the people we'd like to be with. We do a lot of that. So over a period of time,
[00:40:02]
we're told in the big book of Alcoholics Anonymous that we begin to seek humility as its own thing. Whoever wanted to seek humility deliberately? But in fact, the production of being or the work of trying to learn to be just another bozo on the bus, as they say, is a really valid and beautiful thing. It was pretty heavy going when I was responsible for the universe. It's hard work. And now I don't even get to be responsible for me half the time. I let God be responsible for this talk. I get God to be responsible for whether or not I get home when we fly home.
You know, I had breast cancer. I had no fear. Lou had a tumor and lost one of his kidneys a few months ago. And we have the usual, you know, we want things to go well. But underlying that, underlying the immediate concern about things, I'm not saying we don't have a thought. Underlying it is the sense that all is well. Underlying that is the belief that all is well, no matter how it goes. And because of that, we can show up for today's vicissitudes, today's high points and low points a little better than we could most of the rest of our life. Are we good at that?
Hmm. Hmm. We're better. Are we perfect at that? Mm-mm. So since the time that I lost my job, I went back and I started doing some writing, something I'd always liked to do. I wanted to write in my boss and kill her off in a book. And it was the only way I could figure out to get vengeance. And instead, what it did was it brought me into writing three books that have nothing to do with my boss. But I don't yet have even a, I don't have a printed copy. I have the first two are at an editor's right now. It's taken all this time. And I want to tell you about the personal failings of that real quick, because I always wanted to write.
Maybe some of you write or wanted to write or wanted to do something else. Maybe you can identify with this. I wanted to write. I wanted to do some other things, but I was picturing myself with the criticism that comes when people condemn what you do and tell you what a lousy job you did. And in my head, if it couldn't be something like, if I couldn't write like Shakespeare, you know, like right out of the box, I've got to be able to do Shakespeare.
I studied piano for 15 years. I played on the radio, but if I couldn't compose a symphony, I probably wasn't going to be okay. I no longer play the piano. I write, but it was a coming to grips with my imperfections, coming to grips with my mistakes and my flaws that have allowed me to be more comfortable in service, in AA, and in my family and in my home. Because now I can say to myself that, and to you, that I'm a person who makes those kinds of mistakes.
And I'm never, I don't have enough time left in my life to become a good writer now. I postponed it for so long that I ran out of time. But I'm going to put those three books out there because they're my product, because God gave me the idea and the energy and the strength to do them to the best of my ability. And at some point, I'm going to put them out there. At some point, hopefully this year, if I can get that out and figure out how you go about publishing something and give up the, I have to be a famous author and say, maybe what I am is just somebody that wrote three books and they could have been better if I'd started when I was 20, like good authors probably should start, or 30 even. But I didn't. I started them at a time when my mind is losing words, not gaining them. And here I am doing the best I can. But I have come to peace with that.
And I guess that's the only message I have is that I've lost brothers and sisters, but I'd always made my amends. And because of that, I'm at peace with them. Don't leave any amends on the table. If you're new here, do not leave your amends on the table, but do them with a sponsor. the sense separates you from every other one of God's other kids. And when I did service,
[00:45:04]
it was very imperfect. I went into each little thing you asked me to do with fear. I never volunteered because I was afraid that if I volunteered, you'd think I knew how to do it. You'd expect me to do better. And instead, I come in as my flawed person, do the best I can, put a lot of energy behind it, and learn concepts and learn traditions and try to be able to carry a message that is depth and weight and care about Alcoholics Anonymous as it is, as it was meant to be. I'm kind of old fashioned about that. I want Alcoholics Anonymous, the one that Bill Wilson talked about, the one that was this gathering of like minded friends that would sustain all of us in a journey towards something more wonderful than we had had before.
And I want to be a part of that. It's a wonderful part of my life. So along the way, I've had the opportunity to grow by having different commitments. And each commitment was something I started with the sense of I don't even want to do this. Oh my God, I hate doing that. You know, in all those people, they're not nice, and they're critical. And Judy doesn't want to have anybody criticize her poor Judy. And along the way, over the next two years of doing whatever that was, I developed a little bit of strength, I developed a little bit of thicker skin, I developed a little bit of willingness to just jump in and do the best I can.
I've had that happen at every step along the way. And accepting my flaws in my past, by accepting all of the journey that got me to who I am today, I can say I'm okay with Judy today. What a gift. But I had to accept all of that to get here today to be with you. And to be where I am today, whatever that is. So I really intended at some level to share with you my failings and my flaws and my mistakes.
Because those are the things I've learned more from and those are the things that I've, anyone I've ever sponsored has gained more from that than anything I ever did perfectly well. So everything I am today has been the result of that journey. And has been the result of you guys have a program bigger than myself that I am committed to and hope to remain in for the rest of my life. That's the power of that. The power of this is that I get up every morning as I did today and say my third step prayer and turn my life over to God. And when I go to bed, I try to review it and ask God to forgive what I have missed and allow me one more day of peace and serenity with you. Thank you so much for my life.
Thank you so much, Judy. That was great. Thank you so much for joining us tonight, where you never know what you're going to get. You'll have to keep coming back and we surely hope to see you here next Thursday when we will be hearing from Jimmy W. from Chattanooga, Tennessee and he is a sitting delegate. So that's a whole different perspective because all of these people we've heard have said, I'm done, I'm out of here. So Jimmy is in the middle of it right now. I'm amazed that he agreed to share. If you like this meeting, please do as Bill Wilson always says, pass it on. You can help others right from your phone or your computer and tell them about this amazing meeting. Everyone is invited to hang out on the back porch with us, but I think I want to go where Judy is to hang out on the back porch. I want to go there in Italy. Okay, Judy, do you have any closing comments and would you take us out with the prayer of your choice?
You're muted, baby. I've talked so long, I don't have anything I need to say, except thank you so much for the privilege of being here. It's always a privilege to be able to be anywhere in Alcoholics Anonymous, even at midnight in Italy and I appreciate that. Thank you so much for allowing me to share your meeting. Could we all join together with a prayer I've come to love, and that's the responsibility statement. It's not a prayer, it's a responsibility statement.
And it goes like this, I am responsible.
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I am responsible. Thank you. Thank you so much. Thank you, Judy. That was awesome.