HERE’S TO YOUR HEALTH

This week’s HTYH is the beginning of Judy P’s story: It’s good to be upright and anywhere at all today. I’m from Elijay, North GA and if you’ve never been there it’s a beautiful little town in the Mountains. I am grateful for the 12 Steps and 12 Traditions of Alcoholics Anonymous and no matter how many times I hear the words to “How it Works,” it warms my heart. My sobriety date is December 18, 1972. And, if I’ve been sober longer than you’ve been alive; keep it to yourself; I don’t want to hear about it. I never in my wildest dreams ever believed that I could stay sober this long.

At my first meeting of Alcoholics Anonymous a guy got a 90-day sobriety token and I wondered to myself how any real alcoholic could ever go that long without a drink of alcohol, but the A.A.’s said he did it one-day-at-a-time. They told me I could do the same thing he did and so I picked up a white poker chip with December 18, 1972 marked on it and I have not had a drink of alcohol since that date. I’m not saying that to brag, but I want new people to know that you don’t have to go back out there and improve on your story, relapses are not necessary if we become willing to surrender to A.A.’s simple program of action. The reason I bring this up every time I talk is because if you do go back out, you may not come back, people die out there.

There used to be a saying in A.A., “You can always come back,” but that’s not always true because the ugly truth is that you might die before you ever get back.

One guy went out drinking and was on his way back to an A.A. meeting when he wrapped his car around a tree and died. There was another guy named Chuck who got drunk, hit his head on a concrete swimming pool and died; he’s never coming back people so don’t kid yourself about the deadly disease of alcoholism, it’s frequently fatal. You know what you’re doing when you go back to alcohol; you know what’s going to happen because for chronic alcoholics it’s the same sad story repeated over and over again, only the names change. You knew it was a snake when you picked it up so why do you act surprised when it bites you? We come to A.A. to stay sober and I don’t know about your home group but mine wasn’t at all lovey-dovey, they scared me straight.

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I need to tell you how it was for me and what I brought to the tables of Alcoholics Anonymous. It still amazes me whenever I tell my story because mentally it takes me right back to the woman I was when I got here. I do not use the same kind of language I used then; I’ve cleaned up my language, but not my story. And, I hope that you don’t clean up your story when you tell it because new people need to understand exactly who and what we were when we first got here. We need to remember from whence we came not for us but for the new people in A.A.

I came from an alcoholic home and in my home violence was normal, people got beat up and children got thrown up against the wall. There were many days that I woke up with cuts and bruises from my stepfather because I wasn’t good at keeping my mouth shut. Along with the physical and mental abuse there was also sexual abuse that started when I was 9 years old and continued until I was 15 years old. But by the time I was 15, I had had enough from my step dad and I took an 8-inch butcher knife and warned him that I would gut him if he ever touched me again. I could’ve blown his brains out, laid down the gun and walked away without remorse, I hated the ground he walked on and believed the air he breathed was a waste of perfectly good air, and so, there was a lot for me to recover from besides alcohol. I started drinking alcohol at the age of ten and I loved it; I loved how it made me feel. I never had to teach myself to drink and I never worried about flavor all that I knew was that it made me feel good and it was instant relief. Alcohol took me where I wanted to go and that was out; I wanted to drop out and check out.

I was a child of the 1960s and if you were not there, I’m sorry you missed it because it was a crazy time in this country with a lot of booze, drugs, sex and an uninhibited lifestyle. Drugs are not part of my story because I never took them. Once I was hung over and a friend gave me a couple of pills, I waited 15 minutes and nothing happened, alcohol worked for me the instant I drank it; it did everything for me that I needed it to do and it was legal. I must confess that if alcohol didn’t work for me like that I would’ve snorted, injected, inhaled or done whatever it took to make me feel good, but nothing worked for me like alcohol.  To be continued.