My favorite thing about Alcoholics Anonymous is the genuineness. People are honest and they care. I have earned trust. I have learned to trust and to love. I am the secretary of my home group. Every so often, I speak about alcoholism and AA in high schools. I finally finished twelfth grade.
All my life I searched for a purpose, and now I’ve found it. I need to carry the message of Alcoholics Anonymous to others so they will have the same chance at life that I did. My son now has a chance at life, too, and I am forever indebted to AA for that.
ROSIE B.
NANAIMO, BRITISH COLUMBIA
Teen Nightmare
October 2011
I was already emotionally unstable before I started my career as an alcoholic. Both of my parents were born in Mexico. My parents split when I was about 13. I was happy as a child, but I just went wild. My dad had left the state with his new girlfriend. Now it was just my mom, my sister, and me. I was a freshman when I started drinking, and that same year I started cutting myself.
The following years were nothing but parties, cruising in stranger’s cars, fights with the family and a lot of self-destructive behavior. At 16, I became bulimic. I made myself throw up because I felt ugly. Within a year, I was hospitalized at a mental hospital for the third time because of suicide attempts. I have been in and out of AA since I was 16. I worked with a drug counselor, a therapist, and a psychiatrist and they diagnosed me as a bipolar manic-depressive. I was prescribed a variety of meds to help keep me stabilized. The only pills I felt OK with were the mood stabilizers because they helped with my intense emotions and anxiety.
After a relapse when I was 17, I drank with all of my medications. I was heavily drunk when I decided to gulp them. This happened a night before my mom’s birthday. I thought my life was over. I was just so tired of waking up and seeing my world dark and clouded. I couldn’t bear to look in the mirror. I was numb. I felt as if my life was an endless movie of self-destruction, rejection and abuse—something unreal. It became so unbearable that I finally just gave up. I stayed sober for 13 months and relapsed a few weeks before my 19th birthday. I stayed out for two months and realized that even if I didn't feel like killing myself, even if I had all the things I wanted and was fit and healthy, alcohol and drugs were not going to clean up the mess I created. I was throwing my life away. Maybe, just maybe, I don’t know so much about living life.
Today I am in service every single day—from the moment I wake up to the hour I go to bed. Today I try to be honest with myself so that I know what my real intentions are.
At first being thoroughly honest was hard. I didn’t like admitting to humans, God and myself the exact nature of my defects. I still don’t like admitting that I’m powerless over everything and everyone. I still don’t accept that my life is unmanageable on a daily basis. But all of this is becoming easier for me to do by practicing it and following suggestions from my sponsor. Whenever things get hard, or I don’t want to follow through with a suggestion, I simply humble myself to my Higher Power and say, “Just for today.” That helps me live in the moment, and accept that—just for today—AA is my reality. I didn’t need meds to stay sober, just a Higher Power, a spiritual path and someone to hold my hand through it all. AA has given that to me.
EDUARDO C.
SAN JOSÉ, CALIFORNIA
Wiped Out
June 1997
My drinking career may seem short to some. It lasted about twelve years, starting when I was fourteen. I could buy anything, anywhere because I was six feet four inches tall and weighed 200 pounds. I was every father’s nightmare of his daughter’s date.
I can’t tell you what I was like at the end. I have no memory of it. A year of my life has been completely wiped out. I can only tell you what it did to me. When I came out of intensive care, I weighed only 130 pounds. I was in a wheelchair. It wasn’t a car accident that put me there; I had crawled into a bottle and almost killed myself. From what I’ve been able to find out, the doctors think I drank for about two months, day and night.
The alcohol level in my body was toxic enough to cause me to quit breathing four or five times. My internal organs (liver, etc.) had shut down. My body wasn’t functioning. That and the alcohol poisoning are what put me in the wheelchair. My vocal cords were paralyzed, my voice only a whisper. My memory was shot to hell.
After a year in the wheelchair, I was able to start using forearm crutches. I used them for four months before I could walk on my own. My voice is back and I’m able to shout with the best of them. The memory is still bad but I deal with it. I have used the stubbornness that kept me drinking to aid in my recovery. I have a lot of tangible things that I can look at and say, “Things are better.”
I’m not going to say that it is all better. Even with everything I’ve been through, it will cross my mind to drink again. I’m not sure that this desire will ever leave me. I call it a gut reaction. The old-timers that I’ve met at the meetings are split over whether it will ever go away. Right now I work on realizing that what I can control is my reaction to that thought. I also look at meetings as getting together with friends; that way it isn’t a chore. It is something that I want to do. I don’t know if I can risk a relapse; I came very close to death with my last drink. Now there are people around me who will help me, and maybe I’ve helped them.
Bad things will still happen; that is life. But I get to live it. That’s something I took for granted at one time and almost lost. In November I had my two-year anniversary. It doesn’t sound like much but at the beginning I didn’t think it was possible. I did it a day at a time as it was suggested. It has worked so far so I don’t plan on changing it.
RICK A.
EL PASO, TEXAS
Preamble to Recovery
May 1975
We put the AA Preamble in the Labor News, a once-a-week paper. Last week, a man who left AA twenty years ago happened to read it. Even though he was drunk, he got hold of another AA member and went to his first meeting again. And last night at a meeting, a friend told me he was still sober. I guess that makes it all worthwhile.
When I came around the first time at age sixteen, I just couldn’t identify with anyone. AA wasn’t out in the open as much. Then I came back at twenty-five, in January 1970, after living two years on Clark Street in Chicago. There still weren’t any real young people in AA. The youngest were in their thirties. But I made up my mind to stay anyway. I’ve only had one slip since then, at the end of two years, simply because I didn’t work the Steps. I was lucky it only lasted six days.
After my slip, I started working all Twelve Steps in order, and I lost my compulsion to drink, even when I went through a lot emotionally. My wife came down with Guillain-Barré syndrome. It’s a form of polio. She was completely paralyzed for eight months and out of work for a year. I had only been sober about four months when she became ill, and you know, I didn’t even think of a drink, even when she was in intensive care and they didn’t know whether she would live or not. If it hadn’t been for AA, I wouldn’t have made it.
Last September, my wife had our first child—a boy. So, you see, I’m really thankful for AA, because it gave me my wife and son. I met my wife, who is a nurse, while