I’m John and I’m an alcoholic. I never thought I'd admit that to myself, let alone to others. At my local ALANO Club there's a big guy named Bundy who sits up against the wall who always says, "Get a sobriety date and keep it". Mine is October 1, 2017 and for that I am truly grateful. I was told to get a big book and read it with another alcoholic, which I do with my sponsor who I work my steps with every Tuesday night at 5pm. I show up early to that meeting with my sponsor each week and I don't miss it. I go to a lot of meetings each week embracing the adage that while I may only need a few meetings a week I don’t know in advance which meetings those are going to be. I have a home group, a few actually. I spend a lot of time listening, I should interject, be careful what you say to the newcomer, he might be your sponsor one day (credit to Robin on Saturday mornings), so I spend a lot of time listening - finding my story being told by strangers, sure substitute names, dates and subtle details but it’s my story. The similarities among us far greater than the differences. How many of us found our biography written well before our birth? ..in my case by a bit more than 30 years.
I think I was born an alcoholic 45 years ago, understanding now that Alcoholism is a sober disease. I am restless, irritable and discontent as a sober man. I grew up in a blue-collar household, son to a Korean war vet, machinist and alcoholic and an overcompensating and doting mother, both parents much like those of their generation. I welcomed alcohol as a solution at the age of 17 when I first recall experiencing as a young man meaningful anguish and emotional pain. My parents divorced and life as I knew it was upended. I may not have uttered the words at the time but the sentiment was the same and would follow my drinking for decades – fuck it.
I began drinking alcoholically from the very beginning. This high functioning alcoholic who would go on to be valedictorian of my high school, lettering in 3 varsity sports. Quickly abandoning the Keystone Light that first weekend and within weeks I'd be introduced and then embrace my newfound love affair with whiskey that would remain with me through my last drunk. I spent countless hours in my best friend’s garage that summer. His father would keep a handle of whiskey and a 2-liter bottle of coke in the cupboard above his workbench. We'd go in and out of the kitchen refilling ice and in the top tray of his toolbox was a spoon we used to stir our drinks. In no small amount of irony, this reality would become a metaphor for the tools I’d carry forward for nearly 3 decades.
My drinking career and my professional career progressed in parallel for the next 20 years. I was a high functioning alcoholic… until of course I wasn’t. I rode a rocket ship of PRIDE, fueled by self-will to extraordinary heights, my alcoholism and tolerance matching it stride for stride every step of the way. In 2009 as President and CEO for a Swedish company responsible for the Americas I met failure for the first time in my professional life when a hedge fund out of Boston purchased my employer and began systematically dismantling the business and replacing its human assets (raise hand and point at myself) with its own people. I went home and found little comfort with the stranger and fellow alcoholic I’d been married to for nearly 15 years and realized what an outstanding solvent alcohol truly is – capable of dissolving careers, marriages, families.
I would remain in the grips of failure following again in my father’s footsteps through divorce - anyone who finds themselves equally afflicted with marriage, alcohol is a rather effective cure - and a disintegrating family. What was a treasured, storybook relationship with what was then my teenage daughter disintegrated before my eyes. One would think I could have found my bottom after my son’s second open-heart surgery. He needed me but I found comfort where I always had, on the edge of bar stool with the dear friend.
I describe to you a man gripped in fear and failure not as justifications to drink. I didn’t need any of those. I’m an alcoholic. I was well past the point of having any choice in the matter of drink. I’d lost that. But faced with calamity I reached in to my toolbox and came out with the only tools I had. I was armed with a vacuous soul and a bottle and I faced my fears the only way I could and chased one oblivion after the next. My rocket ship was burning up on re-entry, my shattered pride only fragments of what had once been – I came crashing down to earth in a fiery fashion equal to the spectacle of its assent.
So, I did what alcoholics do - I drank my bank account, destroyed all semblance of credit and began stomping on the feet of my fellows and family, taking advantage of their grace for a place to rest my head at night. Personal relationships were strained. A handful of unsuspecting employers when I was employed, were blinded by my pedigree and welcomed me aboard to under perform in the grips of my alcoholism. Kinda funny the guy I work for now would only figure out how much I really drank after I started showing up sober.
I can’t tell you how many times I wanted to stop. How many times I told myself, convincingly – in my own voice - I’d never touch Maker’s Mark again. Remember, I’d lost the power of choice.
The book says if you’re not sure you’re one of us, go out and try some controlled drinking. I realize we have a variety of proven methods with which to prove that we are real alcoholics. It would be much less troublesome to simply look in a mirror and drop any denial that is an alcoholic looking back at you. Ask yourself if you’ve ever had a drink when you told yourself you wouldn’t. Did you stop by the grocery store to buy a bottle or go to the bar for a drink when you swore to yourself you wouldn’t drink that day? Did you take a second drink when you told yourself you’d have only one? If you answer yes to any of these I contend you too have lost the power of choice. Eventually I turned to binge drinking, quitting every other week and resolving either to have just one drink or giving myself permission to enter oblivion with that now well-worn phrase – fuck it. Regardless, oblivion I would find with one spree after the next, each progressively worse than the one before it and I would continue this pattern for several years, each brief recovery, followed always by a still worse relapse.
The last 5 to 7 years (I say that because I'm not sure) go something like this: I'd come to in the morning and finish off the three or four fingers of whisky in the water glass on my bedside table. I would clean up, or not, and meet Mark at the local bar. He opening up at 6 am daily. I'd finish off 9 to 12 drinks by 8:30 am before I'd wander off to under perform at whatever the day had in store for me. Alcohol, that next drink, was never outside my reach. The day would find me again occupying one bar stool after the next until alcohol would black out my existence. There are years of my life I frankly cannot give you a proper accounting of my life but the pattern I laid out just now was pretty much the same.
IN THE MIDST OF WHAT WOULD BE MY LAST PRODIGIOUS BENDER I’LL SHARE WHAT HAPPENED... I’d been spending time with my Medi-Cal funded psychiatrist, all too happy to fill me with pharmacological solutions in addition to the one I drank. He talked me in to joining him for a 9-week course in mindfulness and guided meditation. (I DIDN’T HAVE TIME FOR GOD BACK THEN, BUT YOU SEE HE STILL HAD TIME FOR ME. I CONSIDER THIS MY AA PREREQUISITE COURSEWORK ) – at least that’s how I choose to interpret it. Through hours of guided meditation, I was gifted a few glimpses at serenity. Anxiety of the future set aside, the depression connected with the past forgotten - I had moments of peace in the present. Except for the birth of my children I couldn’t tell you precisely the last time I had been completely and only in the present.
On the evening of the 9th week I received another gift. The very first page in the big book I could recall by page number is page 417, and I experienced acceptance that night. The kind of acceptance that comes fully, replete with the relief that comes with a great weight lifted off our shoulders. As many of us do here, mindful of my thoughts I contemplated the inevitability of my death and accepted it would be by alcohol. And I was at peace with it as I drifted to sleep in that Thursday night’s oblivion.
My restless, irritable, dissatisfaction with the prior nights revelation was in no small part troublesome on my ride to work the next morning. I got a second DUI earlier that year and I had banished myself from driving as obviously the combination with drinking was problematic. So driving had to go and I had been riding my mountain bike throughout the spring and summer and now in to the fall. Fully committed to under-perform this particular day, I tempered any chance of actually feeling with sips of alcohol throughout the day. My ride home that day started out as usual and as I crossed a very busy intersection about 5pm on a Friday afternoon. At the height of evening traffic I made my typical eye contact with the driver of the car that would be crossing the bike lane exiting Bel-Air and turning on to main northbound road. By my recollection I made eye contact and we both acknowledged each other’s existence yet just as I crossed in front of that car he hit the gas and drove right through me. I hit the hood of the car hard and crashed down to the pavement with equal force. A bit more than dazed the driver waved $40 out the window before fleeing the scene and I was left standing there alone; at the height of rush hour; on a Friday afternoon; at a very busy intersection no one stopped to ask if I was okay; no one in the parking lot or otherwise offered assistance. I dragged my crumpled transportation to the curb at the base of a tree in the parking lot and sat to collect myself. I would later reflect that the most obvious lesson I was to learn that day was that in fact I was not alone. (Note: I learn almost all of my most important lessons on reflection.) Now physically assaulted I once again found ease and comfort that evening with the only tool I had.
The next day, now Saturday, after draining what liquid resources I had left I begged and bartered enough to get a new rim to replace the crumpled one on the front of my bike so I could replace it and take my turn holding down the bar stool down the street. But you see I was in too much of a fog to realize the rear rim had been damaged as well and I made it about 20 yards or so before it literally collapsed on itself. Not to be deterred I had some parts from some other bikes on the property and decided I’d find a way to make a 24” rim work just fine where a 26” rim was intended. While tightening it in place the axle literally broke off in my hands as it was so old and rusted. One more undersized rim available to me, I set it in place, tightened it up, and spun it freely. About 30 yards or so on my journey, headed towards my shift on the stool, the painful sound of grinding metal on metal grated as the bearings began to fail. Peddling became labored and it was clear I wasn’t going to make it. Are you sensing a pattern of obstacles placed one after another before me? Upon reflection that’s how I choose to interpret it.
In a state of pitiful incomprehensible demoralization, I collapsed on my bed as the sun was setting and out of the corner of my eye I caught the key to the dusty, unregistered vehicle in my driveway that I had sworn off to myself, in my own voice, with a truthfulness and certainly that would have passed the most sensitive of lie detectors. I found my way to one of my spots that night having scraped enough together to keep me numb. Sat next to an old-timer and my best recollection we discussed the global implications of NFL players taking a knee during the pre-game. Upon returning home was met by a very angry and frightened friend who had been out looking for me. She knew most all of my watering holes, but of course there’s one tucked securely off the beaten path I had kept just to myself for such occasions as I didn’t want to be discovered and her efforts were in vain. Apparently, we had talked every night that week during this particular spree and she was very worried about me. To this day I don’t recall that any of those conversations took place and with equal certainty I can tell you there is no reason on earth why I should be able to recall anything about the conversation we had that Saturday night nor recall the look of fear mixed with pity and anger that filled her eyes - but I do.
Late the next day I again begged, borrowed and bartered enough to properly replace the rear wheel on my mountain bike. For no explicable reason at the time the mental block that had excluded AA from prior consideration had been lifted; having accepted my death by alcohol, in physical and emotional pain; I peddled my way to Living Hope to give this A and A thing a try. Welcomed by Jacob and Dan I was introduced to the sincerest and kindest group of men I’d ever met in my entire life and at the end of my drinking career I asked these men for help. I walked in to Alcoholics Anonymous with the gift of desperation, truly hopeless.
And that’s what the members of Alcoholics Anonymous have done for me. I keep coming back, enjoying the effects of Alcoholics Anonymous increasingly more than I ever enjoyed the effects of alcohol. You taught me what the disease of Alcoholism truly is. I’d known I was an alcoholic for years. I sat on bar stools, listened to old sailors tell their sea stories and joke that the only difference between me and you was you went to those meetings, but it wasn’t until I’d spent time in the rooms and in the book that I learned about my ailment. The physical allergy manifesting itself in the phenomenon of craving. The obsession of the mind and of course that God sized hole in my chest – my spiritual malady. Alcohol wasn’t my problem. I had been using it as my solution.
I admitted I was powerless over alcohol - an understanding which was true on the surface and I now know at a much deeper level as alcohol was my master. I had clearly surrendered to it. How else could alcohol tell me when I was permitted to wake up each day; what time to go to work; whether I’d go at all and if I did how hard I’d perform; which bill to pay, and without question what time I'd black out that night. I knew how to stop drinking in a moment, but it was here that I would begin to build a defense against the next first drink.
After 45 years of ignoring a God in my life – I was on my rocket ship, pride, full of self-will, “I got this”, God was for other people. The only place I knew He was, was in a white building, pointy thing on top and described in this book called the Bible. That was the only pathway to God and one I intellectually and wholeheartedly had rejected. I’ve got 164 pages whose purpose is to help me find a higher power and I expressed my willingness to believe that a higher power could help this insane alcoholic. On any given day you may have asked me and I could have been an atheist in reply, an agnostic, a non-practicing Christian, a Protestant (I don’t know what that is), spiritual – whatever. I didn’t really give the question any serious thought, but in truth I could at no point deny the obvious intelligence to the universe.
I could no longer postpone or evade the question and had to face the proposition that what I choose to call God (because everyone understands how that relates to a Higher Power and it’s only one syllable to say) – that God either is everything or He is nothing. I had two choices to consider, either God is, or He isn’t. I made my decision – based in no small part on the certainty that God had entered my heart and I was willing to believe that HE could accomplish those things for me that I could not do for myself.
I had already exhausted ALL HUMAN POWER. Trust, I've been nagged by the best. as it pertains to my alcoholism, sick and tired of being sick and tired, chalked full of willingness, I took a step towards a higher power I call God today and today will even write about him without using only lower case “g’s” in my journal.
If I could surrender my will and my life over to the care of alcohol I could certainly make a decision to turn my will and my life over to the care of God. How could he possibly do a worse job of it than I did. On reflection how many of you would hire yourself to run your own lives all over again? I didn’t think so. I’ve resisted the temptation to take other people inventories and started taking my own, not surprisingly revealing an unhealthy dose of selfishness and self-centeredness were at the root of my troubles, troubles truly of my own making. I am an extreme example of self-will run riot and I admitted as much to myself, to God, and to another human being, my sponsor.
I’ve grown to love Alcoholics Anonymous and the friendship and support the fellowship offers. The solution is here in the big book and in working the steps and I know that to be true because I see it in my sponsor’s eyes, I hear it in the voices of those who share nightly, and I witness it in the walk of those who have come before me and live a sober life in the solution today.
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