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Source: Pat Y – BOX OF CHOCOLATES – 2025-06-12.m4a File: pat-y-box-of-chocolates-2025-06-12.mp3 Duration: 00:52:14
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Welcome to Box of Chocolates. We really appreciate you taking time out of your day and being here. Thank you very much. I'm happy to be here. My name is Pat Yo and I am an alcoholic. I love Alcoholics Anonymous. I love being sober. I think coming to Alcoholics Anonymous is the best thing that's ever happened to me in my life. I didn't think that when I got here. It seemed like the worst thing, but it has turned out to be such an amazing life that I've had. God willing, if I don't drink in 57 days, I'll be sober 50 years. In my wildest imagination, I never thought that would happen. I remember when I was new, I would meet people and I had no social skills. My sponsor told me I had to talk to people. I'd introduce myself and then I would ask them how long they're sober because that's an acceptable little thing in an AA meeting. They would say something like three years, which is ridiculous. Who can stay sober for three years? There was a guy that said 30 days. I watched him for a long time because I remember thinking maybe 30 days. Maybe I could do 30 days. Here I am all this time later. I started drinking when I was 13 because I was at a party and people were drinking. I describe myself as being shy, incredibly shy. In Alcoholics Anonymous, you call things by different names. You call that self-obsession. I kind of prefer shy. Shy implies I can't really help it. I was born that way or something. Self-obsession is what it is. I think about me all the time. How do I look? How do I sound? What are you thinking about me? When I went to that party and somebody handed me a rum and coke, my life changed. All that went away.
I felt comfortable. I felt relaxed. I could talk to people at that party. I said funny things that made people laugh. I don't know if I could dance, but I got up and danced and felt like the best dancer there. It was magic. It really was like magic. I don't know how much I drank that night. I think when you're 13 and you never drank before, it doesn't take much. However much it took, I drank that much and then some. That's how I drank until I came to Alcoholics Anonymous.
I blacked out that night. I passed out. I woke up the next morning in bed with a marine that I didn't know, which was quite a bit more than I meant to do. None of my 13-year-old girlfriends were behaving this way. They knew where my evening had ended up. I was embarrassed and ashamed. I was terrified I was going to get pregnant. Imagine the bad feelings that a girl might have under those circumstances. I had all those bad feelings, but I drank again at the very next possible opportunity without a second thought. I was evidently willing to pay the price to drink from the gate. I didn't think any of it through. I just drank and did something for me from the very beginning. That first night kind of set the tone for what my drinking was going to look like. As I like to describe it, when I drink, I get friendly. I developed a reputation in high school for being the friendly girl. That's not a reputation. I certainly didn't want that. I don't know any girl who wants that reputation. I knew people were talking about me.
It made me feel bad, but I don't ever remember thinking, gee, maybe if I didn't drink, I'd behave differently and people would quit talking. I don't ever remember that thought crossing my mind. I behaved badly and they talked. For a while, I was a period. I was 13 years old. It's hard to get alcohol when you're 13, but at every opportunity, I was drinking. When I was about 15, I got a phony ID that said I was 35. There was actually a liquor store.
I grew up in Newport Beach in California. There was actually a liquor store that sold to me on that ridiculous ID. From the time I got that ID, I was drinking at every possible opportunity. My parents became quite concerned about me. They sent me off to boarding school for my last couple of years of high school, which it was an all-girls school, very structured environment. It was very difficult to get alcohol there and there were no boys. At least I brought my grades up and graduated successfully. I went off to a local college. I just lived at home with my parents.
I went to this local college and I met a boy. Actually, I met him when I was still in high school. I had come home on a weekend and occasionally would come home on weekends and went to the Rendezvous Ballroom, which was at the time a place where it was for teenagers only. Surfing music, Dick Dale and the Deltones, surfing music was the big thing then. I've totally dated myself with that. They did not serve alcohol in there. You get your hand stamped and go out in the car and drink and then come back in. Everybody here knows how that goes.
I met him there. My first husband I met there. The music was very loud in the ballroom. Of course,
[00:05:04]
you couldn't really have a conversation. I remember when he asked me to marry him thinking, oh, this is so wonderful. We have so much in common. I don't think we'd ever really had a real conversation. We danced well together. That was nice, but probably not enough as it turns out to base a marriage. Anyway, we got married. We had this huge church wedding. I remember walking down the aisle on my dad's arm thinking, this might be a mistake. I know that's not what you're supposed to be thinking at that moment. It scared me. Of course, I marched right down and said I do.
Six months later, I said I don't. I left him. I believed for years, many years, well into sobriety that I did not owe him any amends, that we were just a young couple who were both too immature to be married. We probably shouldn't have ever had a second date. There was no fault, no blame. We didn't have any big arguments or anything. I just left and got divorced. I was sober a good long while when I came to the realization that the reason I left him was because we were never going to be drinking enough. I didn't know that then.
We would do this thing when we were a young married couple. We didn't have much money. We would get together with two or three other couples at one of our houses to play cards or board games or something. We would buy one bottle of wine, two. I'll get that one bottle of wine for six to eight people. We'd mix it with seven up or something to stretch it. That's what we would drink over the course of an entire evening.
I didn't know that that was setting off a craving in me that was not being fulfilled. I didn't know anything about alcoholism, but it is very clear to me today that that is why I left. I moved up to Los Angeles when I left him, which was like 50 miles up the road from where I grew up. I got a job in an apartment. I guess I was 19 maybe when I moved there. I got a job as a secretary in a trucking company. I got that job because my parents were divorced when I was really young. My father, who I was not very close to, was a vice president of that company. I asked him to give me a job. I had really good secretarial skills, but I'd never actually had a job. It's hard when you're young to get the first job. Very reluctantly, he hired me. I went to work there as a secretary. I behaved there exactly the way I'd behaved in high school, which is to say that pretty soon they were all talking about me. Pretty soon, I knew most of those truck drivers or many of them, let's say, in the biblical sense. Apparently, they were talking about me there because one day my dad called me and tried to talk to me about my behavior. I don't know about you, but when I come to in the morning, I can't really think too long and hard about what I did last night. I can't really look at that. I certainly cannot discuss it with my father. I said some terrible things to him on the phone that day just so he would hang up and stop trying to talk to me about this, which he did. I quit the job because that's who I am. I'm a runner. I basically never spoke to my father again until I got sober in Alcoholics Anonymous. I think I was 19. I got sober when I was 30. In that time, I think I saw him twice. Once at a wedding, once at a funeral.
I said hello, and that was pretty much it. When I got sober, I was able to make amends to him. As a result of that, I've had a good relationship with him until he passed away a number of years ago now. Alcoholics Anonymous totally gave me back my father. I know that I would never have talked to him again had I not gotten sober and learned how to do these amends. It was such a gift. Anyway, I moved on to the next job. I'm a very good secretary, so I never have any trouble getting a job. I get the job. When you're new on a job, you're kind of nervous. You want to make a good impression, so I would keep my drinking out of the workplace at first. A month or two would go by, and they're happy with me because I'm good at what I do. Then I relax. This is not good.
Now, I'm drinking at lunchtime. Now, I'm drinking after work with the boss, the clients, the co-workers, and sleeping with everybody or your spouse. It doesn't matter to me. Obviously, I create rather an ugly mess at this job, and I must move on. I never held a job longer than a year until after I got sober. That was just about how much time it took for me to create such a mess. I never got fired from a job, but I quit every job I had because of something that had happened behind drinking. I've quit more than one job after office Christmas parties without going back to clean out my desk because I can't face you Monday morning after what happened there on Friday night. I can't do it. Here's how I drank. I went out with my boss and my co-workers one night. We were bar hopping around downtown Los Angeles, and I believe
[00:10:02]
everybody was kind of drunk, but evidently not quite as drunk as I was. When we wound up in the strip club, I was the only one who auditioned for a job. This is not my fault. It could have happened to any of you. It might have, in fact. We're in the club, and there's a stage. We were sitting at a table directly in front of the stage. I was dressed in a nice dress that I'd worn to work that day. I had excused myself. I was quite drunk. I excused myself from the table to go to the ladies room, which was down the hall behind the stage. I bumped into the owner of the bar in the hallway and made some derogatory remarks about the caliber of his entertainment. He said something along the lines of, hey, if you think you're such hot stuff, have at it. Apparently, I thought, in fact, that I was that kind of hot stuff. Picture it now. A moment ago, I was sitting at the table with my boss and my co-workers, dressed in a nice dress. Moments later, I appear on the stage essentially dressed in nothing. I mean, there was a little tiny something, but not much. I happened to be looking at my boss at the instant that he recognized who that was up there.
This happened 60 years ago. Honestly, I can see the look on his face at this moment like it just happened. It is such a clear memory. That's another job I quit without going back to clean up my desk. I know I cannot face these people tomorrow in the light of day. I can't. When I came to the next day, I was horrified, actually, that I'm in a strip club. This is so tacky. I can't believe I did that, but it gave me ideas. This is when go-go dancing was kind of a thing. I don't know if it was ever really a thing, but it was in my crowd. I actually got a paid job as a go-go dancer.
Now, just to be clear, I just realized this a few years ago. I've told this story so many times. Somebody said, oh, yeah, I can picture you in the white boots. I didn't work in that nice of a club. There were no white boots. I worked in some pretty divey restaurants or clubs. The first job I had as a dancer paid was in a club on Whittier Boulevard in East Los Angeles. I never met anybody there who spoke English. I have no idea how I got that job or even what I was doing there, but I was working there and getting a paycheck. I don't know how long I worked there, but I left and I moved uptown. I say uptown because they spoke English in the next place. This seems like a career move. The next place was on the outskirts of Chinatown in downtown LA, which is another way of saying it was on the outskirts of Skid Row because they come kind of close together there. I met the man who ultimately became my second husband there at this fine establishment where I was working. He was a customer of the club and possibly the most inappropriate man in the state of California for me. Of course, we moved right in together and eventually did get married. We went to Las Vegas and got married by a judge who was wearing his bedroom slippers. It was just so romantic. Now I'm married again, but I'm a full-blown alcoholic in case you had any doubts before this. I know it. I quit show business and I went back to working as a secretary. I'm calling my husband at four in the afternoon every day and saying, hey, I'm going to go out with the girls after work for a drink. I'll be a little half hour late. I know and I knew then, but I convinced myself different every time I made that call.
I can't drink one drink and stop. I can't. I've turned down drinks if I've known there's only going to be one drink and then I'm stuck somewhere. I believed it when I called and then, of course, you know how that goes. Sometimes I wouldn't make it home at all. Sometimes I would make it home. I might be missing an article tour of clothing and sometimes I made it home at a decent time dressed completely. I never knew how it was going to go. As you might guess, it was not a particularly happy marriage. He was a drinker. I met him at a bar after all, but he was not an alcoholic. My behavior behind drinking got to be this big topic of conversation in our house.
I started getting arrested and I cannot believe this is happening to me. I am a nice girl from Newport Beach. Well, I was from Newport Beach. I hadn't been a nice girl in a long time, but I, you know, in my head, I was still this nice girl from Newport Beach. My first arrest was on a Thanksgiving night. I had been to Thanksgiving dinner at my parents' home in Newport. My husband wasn't invited. I think I forgot to mention my family was quite unhappy about this marriage to the point that they had to leave the house.
Unhappy about this marriage to the point that they actually never met him. They really felt strongly about it.
[00:15:03]
So he was not invited to Thanksgiving dinner. He was a chef at a, my husband was a chef at a restaurant in Beverly Hills, a big restaurant, and the, excuse me, the owner of the restaurant had a Thanksgiving party for all of his employees at his house. So my husband went to that. I went to my parents house. I got very drunk at their house over Thanksgiving dinner, and I was driving home. I needed cigarettes, and where else would you stop for cigarettes except a bar?
And so I stopped at this bar on Main Street in downtown LA, which is the heart of Skid Row. I cannot tell you why I picked that place to buy my cigarettes, but there I was, and of course I didn't just go in and buy cigarettes. I had a couple more drinks, and I came out, and I got arrested for come and drunk on Main Street in downtown LA. They took me to Civil Brand, which was then the woman's institution, and that's a scary place, by the way. I was young and scared. I mean, there's some scary women in there.
They told me I could make a phone call, and I remembered where my husband was, so I called the boss's house. The boss's wife answered. I identified myself and told her that I was in jail. Could she have my husband come bail me out? It did not for a second occur to me that it would have been kinder to ask to speak directly to him to deliver that news. It just never dawned on me, and yet when I got to Alcoholics Anonymous years later and heard you talking about making amends, I remember thinking early on, hmm, no, I don't think I can think of anybody I would need to make amends to.
No, I don't think I've hurt anybody. Oh my god, if I knew you 10 minutes, I'd probably hurt you because I am totally selfish and self-centered, but I couldn't see it for the longest time. Anyway, you get the idea. It just gets worse. I spent, I don't know how long, maybe the last couple of years drinking pretty much in a rocking chair in my living room in a purple flannel bathrobe. I did have a job to go to, but it was a little tiny job now.
I peaked in my career when I was about 23. At that age, I was working as a legal secretary making really, really good money for somebody that age. Obviously had a good future there. My last job when I got sober, I was working as a clerk in a YMCA, and I was barely hanging on to that job. The most important part of that job was if you were a member of the Y and you came in to pay your dues, I'm the person who wrote you the receipt, and I could barely do that job.
I was always hungover. People were often telling me that I smelled like alcohol and I wasn't drinking most mornings, and so that was a little concerning. I often went out at lunchtime and drank. My life was a mess. I'd come home from work and just put on that purple flannel bathrobe and drink until I passed out. My husband was a gambler, so he was gone a lot at night, wherever gamblers go, and that was actually just fine with me.
When he was there, I felt like I needed to make the drinking look different than what it was. I'd go in the kitchen. Scotch is my drink of choice, but I'll drink anything and pretty much have, but let's say we have scotch. I'd go in the kitchen. There's the glass, some ice, some scotch, some water. Now, you take this drink out to the living room, and there's a reasonable period of time a cocktail should last. I'm not really familiar with what that amount of time is, but I know that there is such a time, and it just seemed very stressful.
If he was having a drink, but now we both have drinks the same size, you know what I'm saying, and so I'd take a sip of mine, and he'd take a sip of his, and then put it down, and then I would think, is he ever going to pick it up again? You know, it was just a when he was gone, it was just so much easier. I would just take that bottle of scotch and put it on the table by where I sat. I used a glass.
I mean, I'm not like some common drunk, but you know, it just was easier. I was one of those people who made phone calls, drunken phone calls. If you were a phone caller, you know that the idea never happens at 730 in the evening. It's usually two or three in the morning and completely inappropriate people. My personal favorite was a boyfriend I had when I was 12. Of course, I have no idea where this poor guy is living now, so I wake up a number of other people in my quest to find him, and I found him.
Certainly, he and his wife were just thrilled to hear from me. My life was a mess, just an absolute mess. I remember one hot summer day sitting in my apartment. We lived in a second-floor apartment. I could see from where I sat, I could see into the neighbor's backyard. They were a young couple about my age, and they had two small children. The kids were playing in the sprinklers on the lawn. The mom and the dad were sitting on the porch steps watching their kids play and laughing and talking.
I was drunk up there in my apartment watching them, and I cried because that's how I meant to be living my life. I don't know how this happened to me. I never ever meant to be living this terrible way that I am living. I knew that day that it was never going to change because by then, I had been trying to stop drinking on my own. I'm not entirely stupid.
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I mean, it was clear even to me that my life was falling apart, and drinking was the reason, or at least part of it as I could see. I had been trying to stop, but I couldn't. I could not stop. I don't know how long it was from that day until the day I called Alcoholics Anonymous. I had blackouts so much. I have very hazy time frame references, you know. Sometime between three months and three years after that day I just told you about, I called Alcoholics Anonymous. I was drunk when I called.
A real nice man answered the phone at central office, and I found myself the next night in my first meeting of Alcoholics Anonymous. The guy on the phone said don't drink, so I didn't drink that day. I drink every day. It was an 830 meeting. Sometimes by 830, I'm already passed out, so when I got to that meeting at 828, I was not feeling very well. I needed a drink really bad. There was a man standing at the door when I got to the meeting who put out his hand and said hello, my name is Clint. Welcome to Alcoholics Anonymous. It made me feel welcome.
I think it's the most important thing anybody does in a meeting. I went in the room, now it's 829, and so people are milling around getting their seats, and somebody found me a seat in the back of the room and got me a big book, whatever that is, and the meeting started. It was a speaker meeting, and the speaker that night was a man by the name of Norm Alpey, and I heard him. I identified with him. I believe that he drank the way I drank.
I believe that he was sober, and I believe that he was a happy, joyous man. I could feel that way in the back of the room. I think what I felt that night is, you kept saying, do what we do. I have no idea what that is, but maybe if I do what you do, I can stay sober, but I'll never feel the way that man feels. You can't get from there here to there. It's impossible, but of course what I got that night, I didn't know it, but what I got that night was a little bit of hope.
I drank a couple more times that week, and I went to the meeting Saturday night again, and I raised my hand for being under a week of sobriety again, and I got some phone numbers. I got phone numbers the first night, but I didn't call you. I don't know you. What in the world would I say to you? One of these ladies sat down and chatted with me for a while, and so I drank a couple more times that weekend, and then I called her.
I was drunk when I called her, and she said, you might want to get a sponsor. You don't seem to be doing well on your own, and most of us think sponsors are pretty important. I said, I don't know what that is or how to get one, and she said, I'll be your sponsor. She said, do you have a big book? I said, yes, and she said, bring it with you tomorrow night and come early before the meeting, and we'll meet and talk about it, and so I did that.
The first thing she did is she took my big book and opened it to the front cover and told me to write that day's date in there. I wrote that day in there. She said, that's your sobriety date. I remember thinking, yeah, we probably shouldn't have done this in ink. You know, very happy report. That is my sobriety date, August 28, 1975. The next thing she did is she got the meeting directory, and she started circling meetings for every night of the week. I said, excuse me, I can't do that. I'm a married woman. My husband's not very happy that I'm here tonight.
I definitely can't go to meetings every night, and she said something like, well, maybe you can do it with less, but not with me as your sponsor. She said something along the lines of, if you want me to be your sponsor, I assume it's because you want what I have, and if you want what I have, I only know one way to get it, and that's to do what I do, and this is what I do. I believe, for me, the miracle happened in that conversation, because I heard myself agreeing to what she was asking me to do.
It's important for me to mention I wasn't agreeing happily, and I didn't do it happily for a long time, but I did it, and that's why I'm still here, you know. And let me just say also, I do not think it's a coincidence that my sobriety date coincides with the day that I got a sponsor. I believe, in the broadest sense of the word, I had just taken the first three steps, you know. I didn't know that, of course.
I didn't know anything about the steps then, but anyway, I started coming to meetings every night, and I was right. My husband didn't like it. He thought that I was coming here to meet men. Now, I had noticed there were men here, and I was not opposed to getting better acquainted with some of you handsome gentlemen. Let me just say I've been cheating on him all the years we've been married, so it was, you know, I kind of assumed the life would continue.
None of the men in AA seemed to be interested in me, which hurt my feelings, and it really made me mad that my husband was accusing me of something that I was not actually doing right at that minute. I was very indignant about it, and so we argued every night, every night before I left for a meeting. We'd have dinner. We'd have this big argument. I'd get in the car. My sponsor told me to get to every meeting an hour early, not 55 minutes, one hour early.
I'd have early commitments like chairs or cookies or coffee or something.
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I was to get to the meeting and do my commitment and then circulate throughout the room as other people arrived and introduce myself, ask them how they are as though I care, and get three phone numbers of women that I don't already have, and then tomorrow after the meeting, call her and then call these three women whose numbers I got last night. It was a lot. It was just a lot to remember. So my husband and I would have dinner. We'd have the fight. I'd get in the car.
I would be sobbing hysterically from the fight. I would drive to the meeting, and I would think it's not worth it. If this is sobriety, you can have it. My life is terrible. I'm here. I'm sober, and my life is awful. I'll go to your stupid meeting tonight because I'm already out of the house tonight, but this is the last one I'm going to. I can't do this anymore, and I'd get to the meeting, and I'd slam the cookies around in the kitchen or whatever my little job was, and then I'd work the room. I'd be like, hi, Fred. How are you? And Fred would say something like, I'm fine, Pat.
How are you? And I'd tell him how I was with great, wrenching, dramatic sobs, you know, until his eyes would blaze over, and then I'd move on to the next person. Hi, Mary. How are you? And that's what I did for an hour. It was painful for everybody in the room, I'm sure, but I kept coming back. I don't ever remember crying on the way home from a meeting, ever. Interesting. Anyway, I think I learned the most important thing I've learned right up to this minute when I was about three or four months sober.
I was working the room, as I just described to you, and I went up to this guy, Larry, and he asked me how I was, and I started to tell him, and he cut me off in mid-sentence. He said, I don't want to listen to that. Why don't you go find a newcomer to talk to? Perhaps you'd feel better, and he pointed to a girl in the back of the room. He said, that girl in the red dress is at her very first meeting. Why don't you just march over and say hello?
I remember thinking this exact thought. I don't care if the girl in the red dress lives or dies. I wish Larry would die and mind his own business, but I knew if I didn't do it, he would tell my sponsor. It shouldn't take but a minute to go say hello, so I go over, I put my hand out to introduce myself to this girl, and the girl who had 12-stepped her, who I knew, said, Oh Pat, I'm so happy to see you. I've been waiting for you.
This is this girl's first meeting, and she had this big fight with her husband about coming to Alcoholics Anonymous, and I knew you were the exact right person to talk to her, and I'm thinking, no, no, I'm possibly the worst person in the room. I fight with my husband every night. I got nothing here. I was sober. That was something I kind of overlooked that in my mind, but I'm thinking that. These are like split-second thoughts, you know what I mean?
And the next thought in my mind was, I'm standing in front of a girl at her first meeting. I should try to be positive here, and I opened up my mouth, and I heard myself say, Keep coming back. It gets better a day at a time. Now, I've just lied to a newcomer because I'm not feeling this at all, but I had a spiritual experience that night. I turned and walked away from that girl. I know I didn't talk to her more than 20 or 30 seconds.
I wouldn't have, you know. I was walking down this big center aisle in the meeting, and I had this moment. It's like God reached down and hit me on the head. I don't know how to describe this. I literally stopped dead in my tracks in the middle aisle of this room, and I realized it was the first time in that three or four months since I was sober that I was at the meeting in that period of time before the meeting starts, and I wasn't crying.
The reason I wasn't crying is for this brief little moment. I thought about somebody besides myself. It turns out when I'm thinking about you, I'm not thinking about me, and whenever I'm not thinking about me, I'm having a better day, and probably so is everybody around me. I would love to tell you from that moment to this, I've happily worked with others, but that would not be true. You know, I started taking these steps. My peers were starting in sobriety. We were starting to sponsor people, and nobody was asking me, and I remember saying to somebody, God, doesn't anybody want what I have?
Well, would you ask the girl who cried through the whole meeting to sponsor you? Probably not, you know. Anyway, I kept coming back. I was taking these steps and bungling my way through them, and it occurred to me after I'd been sober some months that the problems in this marriage must now be his fault because I'm working this spiritual program now, so it can't be my fault anymore. I was not exactly working a spiritual program at home quite yet, but anyway, I had that attitude, and with an attitude like that, it was kind of inevitable that I would meet a man in a meeting who looked good.
Actually, I'd met several, but one who looked bad. I was ten months sober. The gentleman in question was about ten minutes sober. I saw him when he came in the room the first night. He had a Fu Manchu mustache and a shaved head. Oh, my heart started to pound. I literally leapt across a row of chairs, pushed a chair into the aisle so I could get close to him to introduce myself to him. My sponsor noticed all of this and did that little thing that sponsors.
My sponsor noticed all of this and did that little thing that sponsors do. So I go over to my sponsor, and she said, Pat, let's not forget you're a married woman.
[00:30:01]
I said, yeah, but I'm so unhappy. And she said, nonetheless, you are married, and as long as you're married, I expect you to act married. I said, actually, I don't see this as a problem. I'll get divorced. And she said, no, we in Alcoholics Anonymous don't think it's a good idea to make major moves in our first year of sobriety. Just stay married and act married. I was obsessed with this man. Why would God get him sober in my home group if he did not mean for us to be together?
It was so clear to me. I don't know why she couldn't see that. His sponsor didn't see it either. But it's a little complicated to get together. I'm a married woman. Obviously, we're not going to my place. He's a newcomer. He doesn't even have a place. But we are very resourceful people. I was at the time working at a record company in Hollywood. He was working right down the street in Hollywood at a porn bookstore.
He didn't have a car either. I arranged a long lunch hour at work one day for somebody to cover for me. I picked him up at the bookstore. We went to a motel, and I'll just say that we got to know each other better. And I dropped him off at the bookstore later that afternoon. I was driving back to my office, and it occurred to me in the car that I was 10 months sober, living exactly the way I had always lived.
And I knew I was in a lot of trouble. I was terrified to tell my sponsor what I'd done because she had been quite clear in her direction. But I am terrified that I'm going to drink. And so I told her that night what I had done. And she said, you know, Pep, I don't think you're a woman who can cheat on her husband and stay sober. You don't have to live that way anymore if you don't want to. I've never wanted to live that way, drunk or sober.
I've never wanted to live that way. Wanting, in my experience, has never changed anything. My experience in Alcoholics Anonymous is this. If I want something to change, I need to ask God for help and then behave as though he's already given me that help. That's how I change. My sponsor told me, stay away from that guy a day at a time. I said, okay, I will. I'll explain to him tonight. She said, no, no.
I said, stay away. No explanation's necessary. Just stay away. And I did. I heard her. And I heard also, probably for the first time, really for me, that line that is read in almost every meeting I've been to all these years, half measures of illness, nothing. And I knew, for me, this was gonna be the big cliff that I was gonna live or die on. I knew it. And so I stayed away from him completely. The obsession, of course, passed because obsessions always pass.
But the good news is I don't live that way anymore. And I did not expect that to happen. If you've figured out that I'm 80 years old, you're probably thinking, of course you don't live that way anymore. For God's sake, you're old. So just to be clear, I have not lived that way since I was 31. And I never imagined that that could happen. My first sponsor drank. And when I was about a year and a half sober, I got a new sponsor right away.
And she said, you know, I've watched you whine and complain about your husband and how everything's his fault. And she said, you owe a lot of amends to that guy. And the big book is very clear that we can't make direct amends when to do so might injure that person or others. She said, I don't think you can go home and confess infidelities he doesn't know about. That is not making amends. Making amends is about making things right.
She said, I would suggest to you that you start acting like a kind and loving wife. This was not an appealing idea, but I wanted to stay sober. And so I remember the first thing she told me was every day when he came home from work, I was to ask him how his day went and look at him and listen while he told me. And my direction was to listen for a minimum of 10 minutes. So the next day he came home from work, I checked my watch and I said, so how was your day?
And he looked kind of surprised that I was asking, but he told me something that had happened to him at the restaurant where he was working. And when the 10 minutes were up, I left the room. When I was driving to the meeting, we had the same fight we always had before I went to the meeting that night. But when I was driving to the meeting, I wasn't crying. And I remember thinking, why am I not crying?
Nothing's changed, but one thing had changed. I had finally taken my focus off of the problem and I was active in the solution. When I get busy in the solution, I always feel better regardless of what the status of the problem still is. As time went by, it got to be a real conversation. I didn't check my watch anymore and then I was asking him, so whatever happened with Fred's little sick baby or whatever it was he told me yesterday and we're having real conversations.
And one night I'm on my knees, I don't know how long it was, I really don't, but I'm on my knees one night and I realized that I was comfortable in that house with that husband and I don't know how that happened. I remember thanking God that night for this new feeling and I said something like, God, I believe if you mean for me to stay married to this man, I could do that
[00:35:02]
and stay sober and have a happy life, thank you so much. Not long after that, we found out that he had cancer. My first thought was, God, I wish this would have happened when I hated him. I'm so grateful it did not happen when I hated him, so grateful. He was sick for a year and a half and he did die. I used to say it was the hardest year and a half of my life, that's no longer true, but it was at that point.
I was so grateful that I had stayed when all of my best judgment said that I should leave. I was glad that I was there and believable, you know what I'm saying? He knew I wasn't just there because he was sick and needed help. He knew that I was there because I loved him, because I had consistently been there in a loving manner leading up to that. When he passed away, I went to this little chapel and made some funeral arrangements and a couple of hundred people from Alcoholics Anonymous took the afternoon off from their jobs to be there.
They didn't know him, they knew me and I realized that day that what my sponsor had promised had happened. I obviously felt sad that day, but I also knew 100% that day that I had made my amends to him. And it was so, God, I'm getting emotional here, so grateful that I stayed. I remember thinking that's the payoff for doing the work, you know, but here's the thing, it's not even close to the payoff.
After he passed away, I started dating a sober member of Alcoholics Anonymous, a man that I'd known from pretty much the day I got sober, who was the guy in the meeting, you know, a friend. And we fell in love and got married and we had almost 30 really good years together before he passed away. And I know beyond a shadow of a doubt that would not have been possible for me had I not learned the tools there with my former husband.
I think God always has a vision bigger than anything I can see, you know, at any time. And he certainly had a bigger vision for me than I could have imagined back then. When Vince passed away, my third and final husband, as I like to say, I felt so sad. I couldn't believe that a person could feel that sad and still function. I wanna say this in case I forget, never once did the thought of picking up a drink cross my mind, never once, not even flip through my mind.
But I just felt sad all the time. But I kept doing, you know, I was sober, I think 33 years when he died. And so I just kept doing what I was doing. Going to lots of meetings and sponsoring people and, you know, applying these principles to my life to the best of my ability. And I got through it, it took a couple of years, but I got through it, you know. I think the value of a home group really came clear to me during that time because my home group surrounded me.
You know, I didn't always feel like going to a meeting. And somebody just calls, hey, I'm gonna pick you up on my way to the meeting, you know, and they just made sure, they elected me secretary of the group that year, they were not gonna let me slip through the cracks, you know. And I got through it. One thing did happen during that time, three or four months after he died, I realized one day that I had stopped praying.
And when I realized it, I thought, oh, that's not good. I need to pray. And I couldn't, I couldn't, I just couldn't muster up a prayer. And it scared me. And so I was going that very day that, and it didn't, I hadn't just stopped that day, I couldn't remember the last time I prayed, you know what I'm saying? And so that day, the day that that realization came, I was going to a women's meeting and I got to the meeting and I raised my hand to, it was like a problem solution meeting.
And so I raised my hand and said, I've stopped praying, I don't know how to start. And I cried when I shared, ugly cried, you know what I mean? And sobbed in this meeting. And a woman in the meeting said, do you think that you could make a commitment to us, to this meeting, that you would read like the daily reflections or the 24 hour or something every day? And I said, well, yeah, I could do that.
And she said, why don't you just try doing that? Okay, I brought up a problem in a meeting and I've been given a solution, I'm going to do it. I'm sober long enough to know that. So I went home and I started, you know, reading something every day and it eventually led me back to prayer. I tell that story because, I've thought about it often over the years. I'm so glad that I didn't say to myself, oh, I can't bring this up in a meeting.
What are the newcomers going to think? I hope what the newcomers thought is that you're never sober too long to ask for help. And I hope that I never forget it. You know, like I said, I'm almost 50 years sober. I still need help sometimes. You know, I talked to my sponsor earlier today. Obviously I don't have quite the same problems that I had that I was bringing to a sponsor back then. But I run my ideas by her.
You know, sometimes my ideas are not that great. They seem good in my head, but then I hear myself say them out loud to her and maybe we tweak them a little bit, you know.
[00:40:02]
It's good to have somebody that I'm accountable to and I'm grateful for that. Checking the time here. I have always prayed except for that period of time, but I never meditated. I always envisioned meditation as being, you know, sitting cross-legged with saying Om or something. I mean, talk about contempt prior to investigation. So I just didn't meditate. And I heard my sponsor say, oh, so you don't take the 11th step.
Like, oh, well, I pray. And she said, yeah, but it says prayer and meditation. Like, oh God, yeah, it sure does. So now I, I mean, I was sober many more years than I care to admit when we had this conversation. Over 30, okay? And so I started trying to meditate. The first thing I did is I went to an AA meditation meeting. I thought, well, there's a good place to start. So I went to the meeting and at that meeting, the chairs are in a circle and there's somebody in the center with the, I don't know the terminology here, but the bowls, you know, where they make the sound and they dim the lights.
And we had, I don't know, I think 15 minutes of quiet before the actual sharing began. And so everybody is sitting totally still in this room with their eyes closed during this 15 minutes. I, on the other hand, was twitching and itching and adjusting my glasses and scratching my, I could not sit still. I was so embarrassed that I never went back to the meeting. Now I tell everybody that I sponsor, if you go to a new meeting and you don't like it, give it at least three times before you say, this is not a meeting for me.
Did I do that? To this day, I have never gone back to that meeting. So then I thought, okay, that didn't work. I'll try YouTube. Somebody said, try YouTube guided meditation. So I tried that, did not speak to me at all. You know, tried a friend, I had a friend who did some very meditative kind of yoga. That didn't, not my thing. And so, but I'm trying, you know, I'm out there trying. My friend Luther, who is actually my sponsor's husband, who's in the program, has a friend in the program who is the assistant to the Dalai Lama.
He happened to be in town. His mother lived near us. And so I think his mother was ill. So he'd come to town to see his mother and Luther had him over for dinner and had me there as well and another woman. And during dinner, Luther said to him, you know, some of us struggle with meditation. Would you mind talking to us about it? He said, sure, I'd be happy to. So he talked about meditation. He led us through a couple of, you know, short guided meditations and recommended a book and suggested how to go home the next day and what to do.
And I thought, wow, this is great. I mean, you know, you can't get much higher for meditation advice than the assistant to the Dalai Lama. You know, so this is great. So I go home the next day and I set my timer for two minutes, which is what he said to do. And I, you know, try to meditate the way he said. And it seemed like a long time, two minutes, but after about a week, it didn't seem long at all.
So then I upped it to five minutes. And again, the first few days, that five minutes seemed pretty long, but then after a while, the five minutes went by pretty fast. So then I upped it to 30 minutes and then I never did it again because that's who I am. I want the immediate results. I don't want to do five and then seven and then 10. I want, you know, so I think I'm a failure at meditation. I'm a hiker.
Mostly I hike alone. And I realized one day, I meditate all the time when I'm hiking. Almost all the time. I say little mantra things in my head. I often, when I go out to hike, there might be something that's on my mind or, you know, I hate the word problem, but a situation or something that I'm trying to figure out. And it's not that I'm even thinking about it when I'm out there hiking, but somehow when I'm back, the solution is there, you know.
And so I just calmed down about meditation. And now actually I meditate all the time. It's so amazing if I just open up my mind to do it, you know, I'm just, I resist everything. You know, I just not the first person to jump into anything. Since we're talking about meditation, I'll just tell a couple of stories. You know, what do I get from meditation? What I get is this conscious contact with God that I never imagined was possible.
I have always believed in God. I believed in God when I got here, but it was sort of just a generic abstract kind of, yeah, there's a God. No connection to me at all. If I thought about it at all, it was that I kind of felt God had abandoned me. I, of course, was the one who walked away, but you know, I just no connection. But when I was new, my sponsor. my sponsor told me to pray, so I prayed. Dear God, please help me stay sober today, amen.
At night, dear God, thank you, amen.
[00:45:00]
And eventually, I started to expand on those prayers, and then I would fast forward to meditation. Anyway, you know, I believe that the way that I find God is in the seeking. And I believe that because I have been seeking most of my sobriety, I get these wonderful moments where I absolutely, 100% know that God is there. I feel it with every fiber of my being. I'll tell you, I think I have time to tell you maybe two of them.
A few years ago, a woman I sponsored who was maybe 30 years sober had gone to a convention, and she wound up at a banquet table with people that she didn't know. They all knew each other, and she was the only one who, you know, was an outsider, so to speak. They were all from a reservation. They were all Native Americans from a reservation somewhere near Las Vegas, I think. And so they got to talking, and she was, like I said, she was 30 years sober, and they said to her, gosh, we don't have anybody sober that long, certainly not women sober that long.
If you ever find yourself in our neighborhood, please, please, please come to our meeting. We could use, you know, some long-term sobriety, especially women, at our meeting. And so she came home from this convention and said to me, we should just take a road trip out there and go. I said, don't you think that'd be fun? Actually, it did not sound fun to me, but I've learned to say yes. And so I said, yeah, let's do that.
So we drove and drove and drove and drove, and we got out there, and the meeting was in a, literally, an abandoned house on the reservation. There were 11 people in that meeting, nine of them, two of us. We had a meeting, and about 10 minutes into that meeting, I felt the presence, I can hardly talk about this, I felt the presence of God so strong in that room, and I felt it for the whole rest of the meeting.
It was overpowering. Those moments, and I seriously could talk all night just on those kind of moments. They are what keep me going, you know, on the days when I'm struggling, on the days when I feel like, has God forgotten? I've had a lot of health problems this past year. You know, sometimes I get a little discouraged, like, jeez, is this what it's like to be my age? I think it is, actually, but whatever.
But those moments, you know, keep me going. Here's another one. My husband and I, at one time, lived in Pasadena, and to get to my job at the time, I had to go down the Pasadena Freeway, past Dodger Stadium, through downtown LA, and circle around to my office. And it's Los Angeles traffic, it's terrible, of course, every morning. And so, a little ways before Dodger Stadium, every day, the traffic would slow, almost to a complete stop, and then it would just creep like two miles an hour until it got through downtown, every day.
Now, I could have left earlier, of course, but that thought never crossed my mind. So every day I'm in the car, excuse me, I get to that part, and I'm insane. I'm clutching the steering wheel, I'm cursing God, every other car on the road, and then I'm in this lane, and I think, oh, that lane looks better. So I'm over there, and like, nope, I think it was that one, and I'm back. I'm an insane person.
By the time I get to work, I'm completely out of my mind. I did that every day for at least a year, until one day, I get to that part on the freeway, and the traffic slows, and I'm all kind of tensed up, ready to go into my rant, and I happen to glance over to the right, and down the embankment of the freeway is Figueroa, and across Figueroa is a bar that I worked in as a dancer. I just came from a really nice house in Pasadena, where the mortgage is current, and there's a husband there who loves and respects me.
I'm going to a secretarial job where they think I'm great. When I get off work, I'm gonna go to an AA meeting, I'm gonna see my sponsor, and see a few women that I sponsor. I'm gonna enjoy a good AA meeting. I'm gonna go home with my own husband after that meeting. I am not the same woman who did the things that I did in that bar, and in the parking lot behind that bar. You can't get from down there to up here in this car, and yet here I am.
I couldn't believe it. I was so overwhelmed with gratitude. I can't believe I'm getting all mushy here. The gratitude was so strong. It was the last time I cursed that traffic. I really kind of looked forward to getting to that spot where I could kind of look over and have my little moment. I love how God shows up like that. I love those moments. I'm just gonna tell one little short one more, and I promise I'll stop talking.
I live now near the beach, and I guess it's now two years ago. I had gone down to the beach. It was in the winter, and so I had a jacket on. I had my beach chair. I just took my chair down near the water, and put my chair down, and sat there, and was meditating, and there was only one other person on the beach, one guy a little ways away from me, and he was doing Tai Chi. Tai Chi's a cool thing to watch if you're meditating.
[00:50:01]
It's very kind of meditative, and so I'm watching him, and I'm feeling all groovy, and I can't believe I just used that word, but anyway, when he finished his Tai Chi, he held his hands up to the sky, and in the sweetest voice, he sang the Lord's Prayer. I had my phone in my hand, and I started to record, and then I thought, no, I don't think so. This is not a record moment. This is a spiritual thing happening here.
I know if I had recorded that, I would have watched it once, wouldn't have felt anything from it, and forgotten it, but that memory is in my heart forever. I love that God shows up for me like that. I love being sober. I thank you for inviting me to speak at your meeting. Thank you, thank you. Woo, that was awesome. Thank you so much for joining us tonight. Well, you never know what you're gonna get.
You'll just have to keep coming back. We surely hope to see you here next Thursday. Our special guest is Patty H. I believe she's on here. Wait, Patty. There she is right there. Y'all see her? Nippy Square, that's Patty. Anyway, she's gonna be here next Thursday. If you like this meeting, please do as Bill Wilson always said, pass it on. You can help others right from your phone or computer, and tell them about this special meeting.
Everyone is invited to hang out with us afterwards, in the meeting after the meeting, the porch. Pat, do you have any closing comments, and would you please close this out with a prayer or reading of your choice? You should never ask me for closing comments, because I could go on for another hour. So I'll just head straight to the prayer here. Let's do the Lord's Prayer. Our Father, who art in heaven, hallowed be thy name.
Thy kingdom come, thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven. Give us this day our daily bread. Forgive us our trespasses as we forgive those who trespass against us. Lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from evil. For thine is the kingdom, the power, and the glory forever. Amen. All right. Great talk, Pat. Thank you very much. Thank you. Always a pleasure. Thank you, Pat. I saw this on the…